Three Books That Changed My Life

Since childhood, I have been listening to BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Each week, a well-known personality is interviewed, and the story of their life is told through the lens of eight soundtracks that helped shape them. The premise is they pick the eight tracks they would bring to a desert island if they were castaways. If you haven’t listened to it, I highly recommend it.

Along that vein, I often look at my life through the lens of what pivotal books I have read – books that helped change the course of my life. Here are three standout ones.

I read Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking when I was 31, living in New York. My brother (older and, he would maintain, wiser) rang me to say he was sending it to me – to which I promptly replied that I didn’t want to stop smoking. He told me to read it anyway. The book arrived on a Wednesday, and being a dutiful kid sister, I read it. Three days later, on Saturday May 1, 1999, I put out my last cigarette and have been a non-smoker ever since. I’ll share more details about that another time, but you can see why it makes my list here.

Around this time, I had started practicing yoga. I loved it, and I quickly became drawn to the meditation aspect of the practice. I asked my teacher if she had a book to recommend to get me started. She suggested Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are. What I love about this book is that it demystifies meditation and shows how accessible it is, and how anyone can do it. It’s one of those books that you can dip in and out of, every page containing some delicious nugget of wisdom. It’s the book that started me off in my meditation practice, which continues today, and has had a hugely positive impact in my life.

My next pick is Courage: The Art of Living Dangerously by Osho. At the time – early 2009 – I was still living in New York. I went to Barnes & Noble on 6th Avenue during a lunch break. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, and I played that game where you scan the shelves, allowing books to pop out at you. That’s how I picked up this one from Osho. After reading it, I took the leap of faith and left New York to live in Seattle. I had been wanting to leave for around a year, but I was filled with doubt and fear. The day after I finished reading it, I told my boss I was leaving. (As it turned out, the company worked it out so I could continue working for them remotely, which was less common then than it is now.) I know I would have left New York eventually, but this book gave me what I needed to take the risk at that time. And even though Seattle didn’t turn out to be my place, it was my route to California, and I am forever grateful for that.

As I write this, and look at these three choices, I realize that in each case I took an action as a result of what I had read in the books. There are a gazillion self-help books out there, but my experience is that they will only help you effect change if you actually put what you are learning into practice.

I don’t know how much help these books would be to me on a desert island, but in moving me through the chapters of my life, they have been invaluable.