Books I have loved

I have spent a lot of time with books in my life and overall it was more than worth it.

Books have opened my eyes to a world that I would never have known to have existed if I had not read them. They have enabled me to escape from myself and my problems when they were too heavy to bear. And in escaping from myself I got much needed rest and relief which would enable me to deal with my problems better.

But, a note of caution. Winston Churchill once famously said that one should not read too many books when he or she is very young. That is most certainly true. When you are young you lack the thinking skills and the mature judgment as well as experience of life which would enable you to digest and absorb the information and see how it applies to your situation.

I read a lot of books when I was young and I certainly got many hours of pure entertainment. But I kept getting into trouble as I thought that the world should be in the way that my reading had described them. The world has no obligation to change itself according to your whims and fancies. But I did not understand this when I was young.

Worse still I thought that I should change myself and become the sort of person that I had met with in my reading. Personal growth and change is an enormously slow and difficult process and you cannot change yourself simply by ordering yourself to do so. Again this was something that I did not understand when I was young.

But I am nothing if not obstinate. I kept right on reading. And gradually as I learned to think, gained in judgment and experience of life, all my bookish learning came to help me instead of hindering me. And when it started to help me it more than made up for all that I had gone through before.

Enough about myself. Here are some of the comments about some of the books that I have read. But first a few additional comment about how you can use them to change your life.

First you must enjoy reading. If you don't enjoy reading make an effort to try and see if you can learn to like it. If that does not work out, then give it up. There is more to life than reading and there is no point in forcing yourself beyond a certain limit that you have determined for yourself.

Second a famous quotation from The Essays by Francis Bacon:

"To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar … Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use but that is a without them and above them won by observation."

And yet another – "In books we converse with the wise as in action with fools."

And another still – "Some books are to be tasted, other to be swallowed and some to be chewed and digested."

Choose your books wisely and never make judgment wholly by their rules. You yourself have more specific information as it relates to your situation than the author of any book. Apply your mind and try to understand how what you have read applies to your situation, if at all.

In addition I have attempted – with some degree of success – to change the way I habitually think. I decided about 15 years back that I wanted to learn how to think like 2 authors that I admired. One was Bertrand Russell, the famous English mathematician and philosopher. The other was Dick Francis whose novels I liked. I wanted to think like a Dick Francis hero.

And so I read everything I could get my hands on by these two authors – or almost everything. There is some stuff written by Russell for example that is only meant for professional mathematicians and professional philosophers. But whatever I could get my hands on and understand I read and read repeatedly.

I read until I had some of the passages almost memorized. And this is what you must do. You must make the authors and the books that you like a part of your being. You must read and re-read repeatedly – the same books over and over again. And then imperceptibly your reading will begin to influence your thoughts and the way you look at the world.

The best of the lot – in the English language at least – is very probably Shakespeare. If you have a taste for Shakespeare, then believe me there is nothing better. But you must really have a taste for him. You must enjoy reading him. Otherwise again there is no point in forcing yourself beyond a certain limit.

I hope you enjoyed this article and that it will be useful to you.

Stay tuned for more in this continuing series.

Top of page Books
Back to Home Page Eastern Philosophy and Meditation