By Ethan Maurice | May 31, 2021
Books did not just change my life, they saved it. Not in an “I would have died without them” way, but in a way even more important to a temporary, living, breathing being: I can honestly say I have lived because of books.
Before we dive into which and why, I feel compelled to say that for a long time I thought reading was a waste of time. I didn’t see enough value in books to read on my own time until I was eighteen years old. That all changed my freshman year of college when this cool snowboarder dude sat down to eat lunch with me at the campus cafeteria and convinced me to try reading the first book on this list. Until I read that book, I simply did not understand what books were, what they truly offered, or how they change us. Now I do, and as long as I live, will likely never stop reading them.
Books broaden our universe, deepen our experience, and give us a better understanding of everything. Give a book your attention and the book will give you the closest thing you can get to the actual experience of anything. This matters, because we are largely the sum of our experiences. Books allow us to choose the experiences and understandings we would like to ingest, digest, and ultimately become.
Books allow us direct conference with emperors, sages, and many of history’s greats. We can experience different realities and see from perspectives we could never even imagine. All for a few bucks for a used copy through online sellers like Thriftbooks and Amazon — a tremendous miracle so trite that I have never even thought to feel gratitude for it until writing this paragraph.
Below are the fifteen books that have most changed my life thus far. They are listed in the order of when I read them because, in my experience, reading is akin to waking up. These books were stepping stones on my way to doing so. Looking over the list, I realize every one of them was not just a profound read, but helped to solve a problem or question I was wrestling with at the time. In a way, they plot my growth and direction across time, which says much about their power, effect, and influence.
15 Books That Changed My Life:
Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis
Reading Scar Tissue blew my mind open to a tremendously wider scope of possibility. As the eldest child, I had less guidance and more to figure out on my own. I didn’t realize how safe I was playing life until I read about Anthony as a wild child running about LA stealing, smoking dope, and just doing the craziest, rollicking shit. He lived this craziest roller coaster of a life, and followed his heart into making incredible music with his brothers dripping with funkadelic cosmic religiousness. To ingest a few hundred pages of this while fretting about whether or not I could make A’s for four years straight to get into medical school was stark contrast.
Scar Tissue made it blatantly obvious that I could have way more fun, take more risks, and stop worrying so much about the future. Life could be done bigger, bolder, and with a hell of a lot more excitement and heart. My college years, and life, might not have been half as fun without this book.
The Game by Neil Strauss
The Game is a non-fiction account of a journalist’s transformation from nerd to world’s best pickup artist. It’s about his experience joining a group of men who go around and pickup women and get so good at it that they become gurus to clueless guys like I was who are shy and don’t know how to be themselves around the opposite sex.
Following the same theme as Scar Tissue, I was a heady, conscientious kid who didn’t know what to do or say (read: didn’t have the confidence to be himself) around girls. Neil’s story from zero to hero, interspersed with tips and tricks for appearing confident and acting with high self-worth led to experiences that became foundational to those initial castles in the sky.
The vital thing I learned from The Game, though, was that books can really teach you things. If you’re struggling with anything, there is likely a book that if given attention and serious application, will help you out. The Game helped me get from struggling in one of the most exciting departments of college to feeling confident and whole. It also led to some great nights.
Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
Born to Run is the legendary story of Christopher McDougall’s venture into Mexico’s deepest canyons to encounter the world’s most elusive, best long-distance runners. It is the barefoot runner’s bible — a riveting story and assertion that sticking large chunks of plush foam onto our heels to run might not actually be a good idea.
I bought a pair of Vibram FiveFingers after reading the book. I was still skeptical, but after they utterly saved my half marathon training from intense knee and shin pain in 2012, I switched over never went back. I ran for eight years straight after that half marathon without a single injury. Runners get hurt all the time so this says something. I strive to be barefoot (or at least as soleless as possible) at all times now.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
I did not know works of such high, yet unpretentious and practical philosophy existed until I receiving Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a graduation gift. Fresh off pedaling a bicycle across the United States the previous summer, Pirsig’s motorcycle tour rolled across many of the same stretches of asphalt my brother and I did. The book starts a bit dry, but Pirsig’s alternating weave of philosophical discourse and story increasingly held me enrapt. Fifty pages from the end, I knew I was holding in my hands the best book I had ever read.
This book opened me up to serious inquiry. It was a large part of the reason I spent five years wandering all about the world. I had my own questions to answer and ideas to reconcile in that free-floating philosophical format. More than any other words, I think this quote was my largest spur:
“Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there's no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.”
The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
To read The 4-Hour Workweek is to be overcome with possibility. I had begun my travels when a copy finally ended up in my hands and as I read I kept going, “Yes. Exactly! Goddammit this is so genius and true.”
The book clarified and (with the authority of a mega-best-selling book) supported all these life leveraging notions I was beginning to tap myself. Notions like: excitement is a better life goal than inactivity, life in places outside of the United States often costs a fraction of living in it, and that, for each of us, the value of money depends on the time we have to spend with it.
Story by Robert McKee
Humans run on story. Our stories lie deep below the surface of our lives informing us of who we are, where to go, and what to do. While logic and reason appear to guide our lives, when you get down to it you realize they’re just tools to build our stories with and justify our gut decisions after the fact.
I hadn’t even tapped the surface of this understanding until reading Story, a thick, deep dive into the art of screenwriting. Rarely does a book written for a small subgroup apply to the whole of humanity so well.
While I will never look at plot twists the same, what is more important is that Story opened my awareness to the stories I tell myself and we tell ourselves as a culture. As my life changes, I now often smile at myself as I rewrite my story to fit the changes. The stories we tell as a culture control our collective awareness: not just who or what, but also when, where, why, and how. It’s hard to overstate the power of our collective stories, which is why everyone — from governments and non-profits to artists and news stations — will forever seek to influence and control the story.
The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca
Looking back, I am just now realizing how foundational Seneca’s letters are to my own values and philosophy. The crazy thing is that he wrote these letters two thousand years ago, and they ring with the same truth today.
The beauty of Seneca’s philosophy is anti-fragility. We are to be grateful for struggle and adversity for they are conditions in which virtue is exercised and character is built. We strive for inner riches over outer riches, because outer riches are not truly of someone, but on them, and easily removable. We avoid luxury because it strips us of gratitude, costs us significantly more than what will totally suffice, and weakens our ability to handle less than luxurious situations.
In my mind, Seneca solidified true wealth as time and inner riches over money and outer riches. The implications continue to cascade throughout my life.
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert
The world can be a frustrating place for creatives. For a vast majority of us, thousands of hours of bleeding your heart and soul into the creative act usually result in less monetary reward than a tiny fraction of that time spent scrubbing toilets at Walmart. Over time, this situation can wear on us. Big Magic helps us fall in love with the creative act all over again.
Elizabeth Gilbert reminded me of the universal thread of all great acts: that the reward is the act itself. We work for reward, but the creative act of art is simply a reward in itself. Art is different, infinitely more mysterious, and connects us with something bigger than ourselves. Elizabeth’s TED Talk (one of my all-time favorites that I’ve included in my Needlestack) gives a great taste for the book if you’re curious.
Lila: An Inquiry into Morals by Robert Pirsig
That’s right! There are two books by Robert Pirsig on this list. While Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance enjoyed massive commercial success, its follow up, Lila, did not. For years, I falsely assumed Lila wasn’t worth the read.
Curiosity eventually prevailed and I picked a copy of Lila up to read on a road trip up the west coast of the USA. Utterly enrapt, I read the last one hundred pages straight at a Burger King in Oregon.
Perhaps an overzealous claim from a Pirsig fan, I found Lila nothing short of revolutionary: a reality-quaking contribution to human understanding that was filtered out by the very cultural immune system it defines.
Lila contains a variety of insights, but what hit me and stuck was Pirsig’s “Metaphysics of Quality,” this Inorganic vs. Biological vs. Societal vs. Intellectual battle and movement toward greater complexity in the universe. The way he describes human “cultural immune systems” with Dynamic and Static Quality, had me jumping up and down inside going, ”This is it! This is it!” I am currently working on a book of tethering some culturally separate ideas into a cohesive whole, and this is one of those ideas.
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Hurari
History helps us understand who we are. Sapiens is the history of our species. However, it differs from the usual, boring history book that focuses on dates and names of historical events and figures. Instead, Sapiens explores our history through the ideas and happenings that changed humanity. It ends with the present day and frames now in a way I will not spoil, but will just say that I will never be able to unsee. A few years have passed since I finished the book, but it continues to shake me.
Sapiens made (and continues to make) me question my largest values and efforts. It also convinced me to try a silent, ten-day Vipassana meditation course, which is not woo-woo, but a simple attempt to strip consciousness down to its most basic experience and see what is. And holy wow, that was something.
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
The Power of Now is a simple, brilliant introduction to what westerners refer to as “eastern philosophy.” After reading the book, I thought of it more like “a set of basic tenants for living a good life that nobody ever told the lot of us westerners about.” If you've never encountered the concepts of Buddhism, Taoism, or found them too intertwined and cloaked with woo-woo dogma, The Power of Now is a great place — free of that — to start.
I read the first third of this book before attending that ten-day silent Vipassana meditation course and the rest in the wake of its one hundred hours of meditation. Collectively, it was one of the most challenging, incredible experiences of my life. I think anyone would be hard-pressed to suggest a more reliably, simultaneously life-shaking and grounding two weeks.
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
The Snow Leopard is a daily account of Peter Mattiesien’s trip deep into the Dolpa region of Nepal, (an extremely remote section of the Himalayas). It is easily the best daily account of anything I’ve ever read, weaving Peter’s spiritually searching past with his inquiry into enlightenment in the birthplace of the Buddha and mountain refuge of many Buddhist monks fleeing Tibet.
I felt a striking kinship with Peter and found his words so wise and journey so moving that I’d cite The Snow Leopard as the main reason I made my own trip to Nepal soon after. The simple movement each day punctuated with ample downtime to just be among the world’s tallest, most spiritual mountains. For me, it was a trip of great inner easing, of basking in daily wonders, of letting go of ambition and honest floating for a time.
The Snow Leopard deepened my awe for life, stoked my love of wandering through wilderness for both the external and internal experience, and reinforced my often forgotten understanding of how little I need to be utterly content.
Falling Upward by Richard Rhor
A great fan of The On Being Podcast, I listened to Richard’s 2017 episode “Growing Up Men,” in which I sensed him particularly wise and oddly unbound by the blinders often imposed by organized religion. Rooted in Catholicism, yet open to the examination of the world at large, I remained open to him and ordered his book. The title, Falling Upward intrigued me, as I’m so aware one of my greatest falls—a life-threatening bout of meningoencephalitis—paradoxically became one of the most important, eye-opening events of my own life.
Falling Upward now holds the record for the most index cards I’ve gleaned from a book for my Commonplace Book. Perhaps excessively, I transcribed almost one-hundred forty passages from the book’s one-hundred sixty pages. Richard illuminates a path to and a place of wisdom well beyond the reach of our current cultural roadmap—beyond the common goal of thriving at surviving few seem to look beyond today.
Collected Poems by Jack Gilbert
Jack Gilbert was an ascetic, a poet who attempted to live poetry. He found immediate fame in his first work. Rather than relish in it, he headed for Europe and obscurity. Living a simple life in near poverty among common folk, twenty years would pass before he published a second book of poems, again to great acclaim. He chose to spend his life in authentic, direct contact with the world — the personification of Henry David Thoreau’s line: “I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.”
Jack’s Collected Poems helped me find roaring awe in the raw material of life. I keep my copy within arm’s length of the toilet. Each encounter serves as an antidote to the wants of consumerism and comfort and the “good life we could have if we just had a little bit more.” Jack Gilbert reminds of the basic and the real. Rather than buy that new car, he’ll make you want to sell the one you already have and wander. Or throw it all on love and have your heart shattered. Or walk through the poor part of town at high noon in the summer and sweat and sunburn and smile because the novelty brings you there. His work is a testament to the unrelenting joy hidden in the plain sight of the everyday.
The Philosophy of Albert Einstein
Thus far, across the arc of my life, I have increasingly come to see myself less and less separate from everything else, and more and more intertwined, of, and perhaps even literally one with it all.
I am currently building a real estate photography business with a friend and had a gig shooting the house of a man who had recently passed away. He lived alone and appeared to be quite poor, but kept a fantastic bookshelf. As everything was being packed up to be donated, I thought he would be quite pleased if someone who appreciated his bookshelf took a book that might shape him. The Philosophy of Albert Einstein, with that cover covered in space, beckoned. I stuck it in my camera bag and brought it home.
Along with transcendent photographs of spiraling galaxies, nebulas in bloom, and other incredulous captures of space, a few of Einstein’s quotes, in particular, shook me. Especially this one:
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Lately, I’ve been casting my mind to space daily — an attempt to intellectually hug the whole of the universe, that we are all from, entirely composed of, and will most certainly return to. Einstein called this sort of thing “Cosmic Religion.” I have found it a humbling, aligning, easing thing.
Well, there you have it! The fifteen books that have most changed my life thus far.
If something sparks your curiosity, totally grab a copy.
With the comments section below, we can also make this an interactive list. Is there a book that changed your life you’d like to share? If so, please do share the title and how it changed you below.
