The 16 books I'm going to read to inspire my creativity in 2016

I just read Danielle Duell's post on Linkedin in which she listed the 16 books she plans to read in 2016, and I thought it was a terrific idea. So here are the 16 books I have selected to read next, books that I think will especially stimulate my creativity throughout the year.

1. Walden by Henry David Thoreau - I've never read this classic of American literature, and I feel it's time.

2. One Day My Soul Just Opened Up by Iyanla Vanzant - I read this back in 2010 when I was travelling around Cambodia, and it had a profound effect on me. I feel it's time to re-visit it.

3. Fear Not by Carol Tice - I think it was recommended in a blog post or on a podcast, but I just feel like this might do me some good. My confidence waxes and wanes.

4. The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod - I don't actually need much convincing that early rising is a great productive habit. I do need to discipline myself more, though.

5. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill - I have actually read this one a couple of times before, but not in a few years, so it's time to see what I might be able to get out if it right now.

6. The Achievement Habit by Bernard Roth - You can tell I am having anxiety issues about productivity.

7. All of P.G. Wodehouse - OK, this is a bit of a big ask, but at some stage in 2016 I want to teach a course on the English comic novel, and this just has to be done.

8. All of Ian Rankin - Another mammoth project. I am working on a crime novel of my own, and everyone says that Rankin is the one to study.

9. Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke - Never done it, and it is a glaring gap in anyone's library of creativity. Plus I'll be able to look my friend Stephanie Dowrick in the eye, as she wrote the book on the subject.

10. The Cruise of the Snark by Jack London - I loved Jack London novels as a boy, and I still think he is an absolute master. This is a book of his I haven't read, and hadn't even heard of it till I saw Susannah Fullerton give a lecture on the Mills & Boon company, who originally published this.

11. The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

12. The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr - Because I am a memoirist, and because I teach memoir writing and love the form.

13. The Art of War by Sun Tzu - I've never been able to finish it. But I'm meant to know a lot about Chinese culture, so it's kind of embarrassing.

14. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield - I love it, and this will be my third time. I always get inspired by this book.

15. The Art of Work by Jeff Goins - Because he's a nice guy and one of the thought leaders I've decided to follow closely this year.

16. Bleak House by Charles Dickens - I adore Dickens, and I am a member of the NSW Dickens Society, but I have never read this one. More gap-filling.

Monday Blogcrawl

I wish I could stick to a schedule, I really do. I am brilliant at planning schedules, writing them down, organising them to the last minute, and then completely disregarding them. So, instead of sticking to my last plan, here are some self-helpish things from the past week:

• Louise Hay shows us her apple tree
• The Science of Mind Creed
• Spirit Voyage Blog explains the Throat Chakra. And here's a kooky Crown Chakra activation meditation on Youtube
• Doreen Virtue continues to take us through our Angel Detox during the month of September. Kevin Hunter gives us a nice roundup of the month-so-far here. And here's her video oracle card reading for the week. And here she is explaining the enigmatic Indigo and Crystal children
• Lakshmi Chaudhry writes in Firstpost about why Indians feel attracted to Western prosperity cults
• Someone is reading subliminal advertising messages in The Secret 
• Dr. Wayne Dyer underlines the basic New Thought message: we are what we think. And here's a review of his most recent book, Wishes Fulfilled. There's also a new movie inspired by him 

Monday Blogcrawl

When I worked at a New Age bookstore, one of the big sellers every year was Louise L. Hay's page-a-day inspirational calendar. Last year, at the Hay House I Can Do It! Conference I bought one for myself and one for my mum. It was the first time I'd ever owned one, and I did enjoy reading a new positive affirmation every day. My mother, too, loved it, and this year the first thing we did when we arrived at the 2012 conference was get our copy of next year's calendar. During the conference, Cheryl Richardson said she buys 100 copies every year to give away to friends, so it seems that plenty of people love this little calendar. Today's says "There is a new spring in my step," so let's spring into the internet to see what's been happening in the world of self-help:

• Self-help powerhouse Dr. Joe Vitale talks about the power of the Mirror Technique, and the influence of Claude Bristol
• Oprah favourite Mark Nepo has a new book (at least, I wasn't aware of it till now) called Seven Thousand Ways to Listen. Here is a video of him talking about it
• Co-inside presents 10 books that will change your life
• A new study says that public affirmations of positivity will help you deal with chronic pain
• Louise Hay becomes an increasingly legendary figure, and A Celebration of Women gives us a very nice overview of her career and work
• Who's the bigger neanderthal - Tim Ferriss or Tucker Max? I don't know if this is serious or not, but it's fun - from Koanic Soul
• This month Doreen Virtue launches her Angel Detox. And Heal Your Life has Doreen advising us how the Archangel Raphael can help us to heal
• Maitri Bhavana is cultivation of the mind, a Buddhist concept, and The Times of India has a nice article on how we can cultivate unconditional love

Stop Saying You're Fine by Mel Robbins

I first encountered Mel Robbins when I heard an interview with her on the CD that accompanies Success Magazine, and I resolved then and there to buy her book.

Of course, that resolve quickly faded, but when I was strolling through Kinokuniya at the Suria mall in Kuala Lumpur I saw a big pile of the book and I grabbed a copy. I then spent the next few days absolutely enthralled. I couldn't put the book down, and spent 4 days at a beach resort in Langkawi poring over its pages and taking copious notes. I am still working with the book, and though it has managed to make me feel enormously guilty (I will never look at the "Snooze" button in the same way again!), it has also caused me to assess some of my goals and life situations much more realistically.

The premise of the book is really a very old fashioned kind of tough-love - stop telling yourself that everything is hunky-dory. Your life is crap and the sooner you come to terms with the fact, the better suituated you will be to improve things. I must admit that it was a message I probably needed to hear just about now, when I have a whole pile of obligations but have been taking a very cavalier attitude towards them.

Robbins asks her readers to assess the excuses they use to stop themselves doing things. She is also expressing an idea I am beginning to encounter more and more in the newer self-help literature - don't trust your feelings. In fact, an almost guaranteed recipe for success is to act contrary to your feelings, because for must of us our feelings will always want us to give up and stop doing unpleasant things. Robbins says that his is exactly the point at which we should snap into action - the moment we don't want to do it should be the very moment we start. Only that way will we get done the things in life that need getting done to make sure we are successful.

Mel Robbins is in some ways negating the standard arguents of New Thought that permeate most self-help, making this book somewhat counter-cultural. She says that unless we are being completely realistic about our faults, shortcomings and failures, we are doomed to keep repeating them. Positive thinking and hoping for the best do not get things done - the only people who ever succeed in changing their lives for the better are those who frankly examine the areas in which they are failing and set about doing something about them.

Part of the charm - and the wisdom - of the book is that it's not about being perfect. Instead it is about being brave enough to have a go and resilient enough to deal with mistakes, messes and unexpected defeats. She gives the example of yoga clases - kids love them because the poses make them fall over and flop sideways and just generally lose their decorum. Adults fear them for precisely the same reasons, and approach the exercises with a grim-faced quest for perfection. If we are to truly enjoy ur lives and stretch ourselves (metaphorically) as much as we possibly can, then we need to be prepared to look like idiots in the name of experimentation.

Just as we are trapped by material conditions, we are perhaps even more trapped by the mental conditions that have emerged over a lifetime. We are caught in habits and routines which, while sometimes helpful and soothing, can also be destructive and suffocating. Robbins' ultimate call is for us to break free of the shackles of familiarity and try to live differently and see just what exactly we might become:

"Breaking out of a routine creates a "butterfly effect" in your life. You change one little thing about your day and it can set off an entire chain reaction. Every new element that you introduce into your life becomes a clue to help you create a new direction. Every new direction is a pivot poin in your life and a lever against inertia. Breaking out of a routine is not a brute-force exercise. You just need to wake up and notice."

The Magic of Believing

One of my claims about the self-help genre is that, broadly speaking, it attracts the same breadth of writing skill as any other genre.
That is to say, there are some badly written books and there are some well-written books and a great deal of books that fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. And while haters of self-help would like to believe that it is the last refuge of the talentless, in fact many self-help writers (including many of the most famous) are quite accomplished craftspeople capable of expressing their ideas clearly and concisely and possessed of a talent for anecdote and clear expression of metaphorical meaning. Many self-help writers succeed where some novelists fail - they are capable of writing about lofty subjects without appearing pretentious, preachy or moralistic.
One of the books that I rate highly for literary merit is Claude M. Bristol's classic The Magic of Believing. It is such a charming book  that I defy anyone to read it and not be a little convinced by his theories, or at least taken in by the wonderful stories and examples he gives in support o of his thesis.

And what is his thesis? That anything which we truly believe is capable of being achieved. It is not willpower, talent, luck or any other external condition that is essential to success. It is a firm belief in the achievement of our goals that ultimately leads us straight to them.
Originally published in 1948, The Magic of Believing was written by an old-school journalist who had served in World War Two but who had for many years harboured a secret interest in Theosophy and New Thought. He condensed his ideas down into this wonderfully readable little book which details how he came to his belief in the efficacy of mind power, and also the other people he has encountered in his life who have used the power of belief to create a life they love.
He peppers the book with hints as to how we can remain resolute in our belief in our success. He advocates, for example, the doodling of dollar signs in idle moments, in staring at yourself in the mirror and asserting your authority and power, and in writing down your goals and dreams on cards and putting them all about the house so that you can read over and reflect on them at any tiome. These self-same techniques are still taught today in self-help books, though people rarely acknowledge Bristol as the originator.
And in truth he probably wasn't the originator of most of the self-help techniques he espouses in The Magic of Believing. Right from the beginning he acknowledges that everything he presents has been learned somewhere else. The card technque, for example, dates back to the advice of Benjamin Franklin and the use of affirmations in front of the mirror has its roots in the techniques of French psychologist Emile Coue.
Bristols's great talent was in making many of these quite hoary old ideas seem fresh and accessible. He also imbues his writing with a pally and often funny masculine swagger, making some of his more implausible claims seem like commonsense.
He is a great one for employing the tropes of science, as was popular among all witers of his day. He is very impressed, too, with what was then the fledgling science of psychology, and claims that all of his assertions have a sound grounding in psychological study.He also posits hinself as something of a skeptic and a sophisticate. His world-weary tone was probably cultivated during his years as a police reporter, and he brings the same hard-boiled language to the ideas of New Thought and self-help, making The Magic of Believing quite a unique sounding book.
Donald Meyer, in his 1965 book The Positive Thinkers, described Bristol's book as  having:

"...mixed Eddington, Freud, psychosomatics, electroencephalography, telepathy, Emerson and a host of other sources into his explanation of all events whatsoever as "mind stuff," hypnotism and suggestion." 

The book was also a favourite of Phyllis Diller, as you can see in this clip:

Andrew Jackson Davis

One of the grandfathers of self-help writing is Andrew Jackson Davis.


Known as the "Poughkeepsie Seer," Davis is seen by many as the father of spiritualism and at the height of his career he was a prominent figure throughout America. His long and rambling books (one of which I've read at the University of Sydney's Fisher Library) were exceedingly popular. Davis helped popularise in the new world ideas of mesmerism and animal magnetism.

He was a student of the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and could quote passages from Swedenborg's Arcana Coelestia by heart, complete with page references. Such was the learning style of the day. Davis set about copying Swedenborg's methods of spiritual contemplation, entering into altered states of consciousness where he said secrets of the universe were revealed to him by divine entities.

Interestingly, Davis was later to deny his own study, claiming that he was functionally illiterate and that his wisdom came direct from the heavens. But those who knew Swedenborg's work (and in the mid-nineteenth cntury Swedenborg's writings had quite a following in America) saw too much of it in Davis' philosophies to believe his claim of ignorance.

The Daily Word

Probably the most influential work of the New Thought church The Unity School of Christianity is its monthly prayer guide and day-book The Daily Word. This little square journal has been in print since 1924, and its influence has been credited by people as diverse as Will Smith and Toni Morrison! Rosemary Fillmore Rhea tells a great story in her autobiography about meeting Robert Wagner's mother at a Beverly Hills hotel and discovering that not only was she a long-time subscriber, but had given gift subscriptions to all of the hotel staff.
The Daily Word is a pocket-sized monthly magazine (which has recently become bi-monthly, and is also available on-line) which provides a daily inspirational quote and a relevant section of scripture.



The page-a-day format makes it pretty much a modern-day version of the antique format of the almanac.
Its longevity has afforded it a special place in American popular religious culture, and by all accounts it has fans across the Christian spectrum, despite its central theology being decidedly unorthodox. Each issue starts out with a couple of stories by devoted readers who credit the miraculous effect of The Daily Word during specific periods of struggle or hardship in their lives. The little journal seems to hold for some a talismanic power, an I have read stories of people giving away its pages to those they perceive to be in need.
The magazine also serves a function within the structure of the Unity church itself. It is the focal point of prayer and meditation for all members, and it is freely available to newcomers and visitors to the church.
The vast amount of text that must have been produced in creating the magazine over the years has been put to good use in recent times with the compilation of book-length guides on specialist topics, a la Chicken Soup for the Soul. Daily Word for Weight Loss and The Daily Word for Women are two examples.

Salinger and Christian Science

In this week's Spectator, Christopher Hitchens tells the following fascinating story about J. D. Salinger:

My friend Roger Lathbury, a literary publisher working across the river in Virginia, wrote to J.D. Salinger in 1988 asking if he could reprint his last published story, ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’, in book form. Eight years later Salinger wrote back to agree. He even proposed coming down to Washington, where the two had a meager snack at the National Gallery of Art. Over lunch he asked Roger if he, too, was fond of the Christian Science classics of Mary Baker Eddy. Two things arise from this trashy recommendation. It undermines the frequent comparison of Salinger to Twain, who wrote a hilarious demolition of Mrs Eddy. And it rather suggests that we won’t find much of value in any undiscovered manuscript.

It's interesting how so many critics and commentators have such a difficult time dealing with Salnger's interest in religion and mysticism. Like Hitchens, they use it as a means to belittle him, to imply that he couldn't have been all that great because of his crazy interest in matters metaphysical. Like those other literary lightweights Yeats and Blake, Dante and Milton, Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Apparently Salinger's interest in Christian Science was longstanding, with his daughter accusing him of neglect because his beliefs meant he never took her to a doctor when she was ill. The fact that he was born Jewish leads me to compare him interestingly to that other great Jewish Christian Scientist Joel Goldsmith.

Helping Me Help Myself

Most books about self-help books tend to be hyper-critical, relying on time-worn old platitudes about the culture of selfishness and the lameness of most self-help writing. I thought that Helping Me Help Myself would be more of the same, though I was duty-bound to read it.

Instead I discover that Beth Lisick, a very funny and accomplished writer, has instead approached the subject with something of an open mind.
Deciding to spend a year being guided by different self-help gurus, Ms. Lisick details the standard domestic traumas of any 12 month period (incipient poverty, a car accident, a regular job dressing up as a banana) and how her new interest in the philosophies of self-help may be changing her usual reactions. And perhaps re-shaping her state of mind.
She reads Jack Canfield (even ends up spending a Thanksgiving weekend with him!), Julia Cameron and Stephen Covey. She goes on a cruise with Richard Simmons and has an epiphany during a Sylvia Browne live show.
Interestingly, the only person for whom she bristles with suspicion is John Gray, who during his seminar seems most intent on shifting his suspect range of health supplements.
Lisick manages to identify the genuine need which people possess as they seek out some meaning in life, and attempt to gain some control of their futures. Though many of our efforts can appear pathetic to the more cynical, the fact is that in one way or another the human creature will always, as Ms. Lisick says, "take stabs at being better or happier people." Those who poke fun at this impulse seem to forget that it remains the driving force behind all efforts at art, culture, spirituality - all forms of transcendence.
This book represents a genuine, and often touching, struggle to understand why regular people turn to mass-produced literature and information in an attempt to improve their lives and their sense of self.