Suggested Reading

                                                
 

Blink is about the first two seconds of looking–the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of “thin slices” of behavior. The key is to rely on our “adaptive unconscious”–a 24/7 mental valet–that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.

http://www.gladwell.com/blink/index.html

Sophie’s World is a long, dense novel, a bestseller in the author’s native Norway, offers a summary history of philosophy embedded in a philosophical mystery disguised as a children’s book-but only sophisticated young adults would be remotely interested. Sophie Amundsen is about to turn 15 when she receives a letter from one Alberto Knox, a philosopher who undertakes to educate her in his craft. Sections in which we read the text of Knox’s lessons to Sophie about the pre-Socratics, Plato and St. Augustine alternate with those in which we find out about Sophie’s life with her well-meaning mother. Soon, though, Sophie begins receiving other, stranger missives addressed to one Hilde Moller Knag from her absent father, Albert. As Alberto Knox’s lessons approach this century, he and Sophie come to suspect that they are merely characters in a novel written by Albert for his daughter. Teacher and pupil hatch a plot to understand and possibly escape from their situation; and from there, matters get only weirder. Norwegian philosophy professor Gaarder’s notion of making a history of philosophy accessible is a good one.

The Zahir. This book, whose title means “the present” or “unable to go unnoticed” in Arabic, has an initial staggered laydown of eight million copies in 83 countries and 42 languages. It centers on the narrator’s search for his missing wife, Esther, a journalist who fled Iraq in the runup to the present war, only to disappear from Paris; the narrator, a writer, is freed from suspicion when his lover, Marie, comes forward with a (true) alibi. He seeks out Mikhail, the man who may be Esther’s most recent lover and with whom she was last seen, who has abandoned his native Kazakhstan for a kind of speaking tour on love. Mikhail introduces the narrator to a global underground “tribe” of spiritual seekers who resist, somewhat vaguely, conventional ways of living. Through the narrator’s journey from Paris to Kazakhstan, Coelho explores various meanings of love and life, but the impact of these lessons is diminished significantly as they are repeated in various forms by various characters. Then again, 65 million readers can’t be wrong; the spare, propulsive style that drove The Alchemist, Eleven Minutes and Coelho’s other books will easily carry fans through myriad iterations of the ways and means of amor.

The Celestine Prophecy is a very philosophical story that explains spiritual theories through a story. A very captivating book that steers the mind in different directions and has the reader question his own beleifs over and over again. This book has nine insights that with thought can improve your own life without actually beleiving in the literal meaning translated from the book.
If you enjoy reading philosophical books that have to do with such things as auras, you will fall in love with this book. The book will give you insights that you wouldn’t have thought of and it’ll have you come up with many ideas of your own.