Books That Have Made a Difference

As I mentioned in a previous post (http://gordonfeil.blogspot.ca/2016/11/giving-until-it-hurts-or-hurting-until.html) I want to mention books that I think have significantly affected me.

The paramount one has been the Bible, and perhaps tomorrow I’ll relate why to me it is a most remarkable book. Suffice it to say for now, that in it I have found unparalleled wisdom, sweet comfort, resolution of problems, and basic life information.

Another has to have been Les Matins des magiciens, translated into the English The Dawn of Magic and the North American The Morning of the Magicians, by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. This was an epic discussion of what the authors call “fantastic realism”, and taught me as a young man to think way beyond my conventional thoughts.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, aside from being entertaining for its wit, left me in long contemplation of issues raised therein. Oscar Wilde had that ability to help people see life in a somewhat different way.

I recall reading a book entitled The Jesuit and I do not know who wrote it, nor do I see it in a Google search, but it was a novel that I found remarkable for how sad and hollow it left me feeling.

Herbert Armstrong’s The Seven Laws of Success and his autobiography stirred in me a desire to do something in life…..to keep moving forward. In the end, I am convinced that his “seven” laws may be boiled down into two: desire and vision.

Ken Keyes, Jnr. wrote a number of influential books, but the one that most amended my life is How To Enjoy Life In Spite of It All, a step by step explanation and guide to the philosophy of Living Love. Perhaps the book can be summed up by something I heard Ken Keyes say: “Now being in this wheelchair would be a problem for me…….IF I wanted to walk.”

Napoleon Hill wrote several useful books. His seminal work was Think and Grow Rich. This is not a book of about acquiring, but about achieving. “Whatever a man can conceive and believe, he can achieve.” But the book of his that most engaged my attention and affected how I do things was Success Through Persuasion. I was reading it during a ferry crossing decades ago when what then seemed like a really old guy seated nearby said to me that it was a really good book, and then he told me that he had known Napoleon Hill and had worked with the man.  

There are other books that have affected the course I have travelled, but these are the ones that have come immediately to mind.