Impactful Books

Note that not all of these necessarily relate to my "path" as a Jedi/Whatever, but they've all lead me, in one way or another, to where I am now. Oh, and these are in no particular order, just the order in which I think of them.

1. The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff

2. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (even though I have a strong dislike of the author, I have to admit the book affected me a lot)

3. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

4. Theogony by Hesiod

5. The Odyssey by Homer (hated reading it in high school but I plan to re-read it soon)

6. The Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan (and all the subsequent books he's written set in the same fictionalized world)

7. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling (sounds silly maybe, but this had a profound impact on me in ways I don't think I fully grasp even now)

8. Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield

9. Zhuangzi/Zhuang Zhou's book (don't believe it really has a title)

10. The Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, and the Silmarilion by J.R.R. Tolkien

Okay, there are more, but I think that's plenty for now.

You're right of course. And I didn't mean to imply I thought the books were silly, I just meant it might sound silly coming from an adult, haha.

Looking back at the Harry Potter series through a lense of being an "adult" (whatever the heck that means ) I can see even more depth to the characters and story arcs than ever before. Snape is definitely an interesting character on many levels. In the first couple of books he seems like the kind of jerkish character everyone can agree we love to hate, but later in the series he starts becoming a much more...not quite sympathetic (to me at least), but at least understandable character. Actually, the first character that really pops to my mind as a rather heinous individual is Albus Dumbledore. If you really look at the things he does he isn't some grand, heroic figure. He's portrayed, I think, as this wise old man who is arguably the most powerful wizard to exist in the era of the books, but really he does some horribly awful and foolish things. Which, of course, only creates layers and mysteries surrounding his character.

But, anyway, I didn't mean to turn this into an analysis of the HP series, haha.

ElfQuest.

Technically it's a comic series, but they were bundled into graphic novels and two novels we're written based on the graphic novels, so like... That counts, right?

ElfQuest taught me about being present, about love in all it's forms, about courage and stubbornness and and flexibility. It taught me to love diversity and to embrace new cultures and foods and environments. And it taught me to find myself and stay grounded there.

Man's Search for Meaning written by Viktor Frankl. Frankl is a psychologist and Holocaust survivor who believes that man can overcome anything if one had strong enough reason to. He paraphrases Nietszche, and founded a field of Psychotherapy referred to as Logotherapy - therapy to help clients find meaning.


"He who has a why to live can suffer almost any how."