By Eric Valentine
In his Eightfold Path To Enlightenment—the Buddhist prescription, if you will, for ending suffering—the Buddha says “Right Mindfulness” is one of the first things that must be achieved. How one defines “mindfulness” can vary, but at the end of the day it has a lot to do with what we choose to fill our mind with.
When writing about the story of the Bellevue Elementary staff who put together “Free Little Libraries”—small book repositories from which toddlers to pre-teen kids can take and keep books—I found myself wondering what books I’d place inside if I were leaving them for teens and young adults. Well, here are my top five:
—Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia
Don’t let the title or the length of this 670-page tome throw you off. It’s captivating reading. Paglia is an Ivy League-educated art and literature historian who has made a career teaching at a humble arts school in Philadelphia. Her book explores human belief systems and male-female behavior by analyzing the art and literature we create, from the dawn of Western civilization to modern day. Her default worldview is that society is mankind’s reaction to nature and that nature remains mankind’s supreme moral problem. Her writing is bold, witty and sometimes mind-blowing.
—Fit for Life by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond
Before fad diets became a dime a dozen, two nutritionists—Harvey and Marilyn Diamond—set out to write a book that focused less on calorie counting and what you can’t eat and more on how and when to eat the things you want to eat. The book has a lot of hacks for substituting the less healthy, processed foods in our diets with healthier, more natural alternatives, but it’s not about rigid, unsustainable health kicks. The main takeaway: Fat = stored nutrients; and by combining the foods we like in the most digestive-friendly way, we give our body time to use those nutrients rather than store them.
—Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendrix
There are a number of theories—and poems—about the nature of love. Hendrix takes a look at some of the leading theories and how they fail to explain a lot, such as why we fall in love with people who are bad for us. Hendrix uncovers how, in so-called traditional couples, the resolved and unresolved relationships between ourselves and our opposite-sex parent are at play.
—Daemon and Freedom Trademarked by Daniel Suarez
OK, this is two books, but they are sequeled. Shortly after The Matrix captivated our imaginations with what could go wrong if artificial intelligence took over humanity, Suarez focused instead on something more likely: what could go wrong when a small set of humans took over artificial intelligence to take over the world. In the novel, the world’s foremost computer programmer has created a “daemon” (a computer program that runs in the background) that scours the Internet for his obituary. Once found, it begins to hack computers and lives in an attempt to establish a new world order. By the time you get through the second book, the story offers up a complete paradigm shift that will make you question the trajectory of current society and culture.
—The True Story Project by yours truly
That’s right, if I get to select a book that will get into the hands of young readers, you bet I’m going to select mine. It’s a simple, self-published collection of about a dozen short stories. All of them are true, all of them are told from the heart, and I’d be honored if you ever gave it a read.