Books That Read Me

Books are some of my best mentors and dearest friends. They inform my decisions, guide me in how to think about complex issues and entertain me as well. My best books leave me with the experience that I have been read.

I like to “read” books when I am driving, walking the seawall, sitting on the beach, riding the bus… obviously, audio books. These are the more recent ones for me and the ones I recommend to you.

1. Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think by Greenberger and Padesky. This manual is mostly for depression, anxiety and mood disorders. I recommend it also in “brain training” or figuring out how to think. I recommend couples get a copy or 2 and use the structure to figure out their communication. Make sure you write in the manual all the way through it.
2. The Four Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman is a bit hyperbolic! But Tim Ferris has good things to say about how we live as embodied people. I am sure he has a few diagnoses to make him perform as he does, but his thinking is provocative and informative.
3. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Jonathan Haidt) is a recent discovery for me and I am on to my second reading. I have also read two others of his tomes which have been equally informative. I recommend this a lot because I like the challenge of his thinking. I often think, “I wish ____ ____ would read this.” And I am glad that I am reading it.

These ones are classics to me and I recommend frequently.

1. Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward wrote Born to Win: Transactional Analysis with Gestalt Experiments a long time ago (1978). It is a spectacular understanding of the multiplicity of personalities and how we interact with ourselves and others.
2. Ron Richardson is a Bowenian Family Systems therapist and a friend. His book Family Ties that Bind is terrific to understand your current life in the context of your growing up life. He has written lots and it is hard to do poorly with any of his books.
3. Edwin Friedman’s Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue and A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix were both on my reading lists when I taught in grad schools. I have a hard time finding more masterly texts on FOO (family of origin). Wonderfully informative and challenging.

By the way, I am in the process of giving away my books. I have too many and I would like to recycle them to people who wish them. If you visit with me, take a browse through my library and take what looks interesting to you. The only condition is that I don’t want them back.

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