Here are 100 books that Devotion fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have been enthralled with the idea of “dreams come true” for as long as I can remember. In middle school, I discovered the field of psychology. I made weekly trips to the library and read books on personal development, spirituality, and memoirs. This commitment to learning and growth has never wavered. Those early seeds that I planted and nurtured have bloomed into my long-standing career of professional coaching, facilitation, and leading transformational retreats. My passion is empowering others to believe in their dreams and goals and bring them to life.
International bestseller Paul Coelho wrote this book, and it is a classic and the perfect gift for yourself or others. This book is a vibrant story about a shepherd boy who dares to pursue his dreams. The book holds wisdom on every page.
One of my favorite quotes from the book: "Why do we have to listen to our hearts?" the boy asked. Because when you listen to your heart, that is where you will find your treasure." I like to revisit this little book for a dose of sweet inspiration and motivation. Our inner wisdom is always nudging us in the direction of our dreams; it's up to us if we heed the call!
A global phenomenon, The Alchemist has been read and loved by over 62 million readers, topping bestseller lists in 74 countries worldwide. Now this magical fable is beautifully repackaged in an edition that lovers of Paulo Coelho will want to treasure forever.
Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. This is such a book - a beautiful parable about learning to listen to your heart, read the omens strewn along life's path and, above all, follow your dreams.
Santiago, a young shepherd living in the hills of Andalucia, feels that there is…
I was brought up spiritually, believing our souls are here for a limited time and for a specific purpose before being reincarnated. But my “knowing” about spirituality was tested when my best friend found her 12-year-old son hanging. As I tried to make sense of this heartbreaking tragedy, I began journaling. Not long after, I began to hear her son’s voice. He explained that my writing was a jumping-off point for a novel. I listened and Winter of the Wolf was born. Researching and writing this novel helped me realign with my beliefs and grow in new and profound ways and it will do the same for readers.
As you open this book, prepare to go on a sacred, experiential journey unlike anything you’ve ever imagined. It’s truly that powerful and life changing. Rasha began a profound conversation with the universal presence, “Oneness” – the Divinity we all share. These teachings empower the reader to take a quantum leap into their own inner depths to harmonize with the powerful energy around us so that our wildest dreams can be realized. If you’re someone who often wonders what life is all about and what our purpose here is, take this journey with Rasha.
Every now and then a book comes along that is so powerful that words cannot describe the experience people start having when they read it. These rare, life-changing books always seem to show up at the perfect moment in time, exactly when we all need it the most. Oneness is such a book--one that will change your life.
In February 1998, Rasha began a profound dialogue with the universal Presence, "Oneness"--the Divinity we all share. Word for word, she transcribed the principles for a new understanding of the mystery we call "life." These teachings empower us to take a quantum…
Fascinated with consciousness, spirituality, and the power of mind, I started reading books by Thich Nhat Hahn, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, and Alan Watts as early as 5th grade. But I was also infatuated with math and logic, which led to a degree in mathematics at UC Berkeley. Knowing there was more to understanding truth beyond logic, I balanced out my worldview with an M.A. in transpersonal psychology. For more than twenty years, I have passionately devoted myself to the study and practice of transformation. As a certified coach using expertise in interpersonal neurobiology, design thinking, and Conversational Intelligence®, I have provided thousands of transformative experiences for individuals, executives, teams, and organizations.
Singer made distinct all the imperceptible knowings I’ve felt throughout my existence about the power of the mind, beliefs, and all the habits we have that hold us back. He made the invisible visible and with that came more choices and possibilities. I felt invigorated, at peace and also empowered while I read this book. I honestly couldn’t put it down!
I reveled in not just the content but the style with which he presents truths about our existence. (And it was just so enjoyable to read!) The last part about death changed me in a profound way and offered me the gift of presence in a way I’ve never been able to achieve through other means.
Who are you? When you start to explore this question, you find out how elusive it really is. Are you a physical body? A collection of experiences and memories? A partner to relationships? Each time you consider aspects of yourself, you realize that there is much more to you than any of these can define. In this book, spiritual teacher Michael Singer explores the question of who we are and arrives at the conclusion that our identity is to be found in our consciousness, the fact of our ability to observe ourselves and the world around us. By tapping into…
In 2010, Sandra A. Miller began hunting for a chest of gold coins buried in New York City soil. In her late forties at the time, she was mired in the process of helping her ailing mother to die, her teenage children to fly, and her writing career to survive the beating it had taken in the Great Recession and beyond. Soon enough, Sandra realized she was not just hunting for a treasure chest full of gold, but rather a different kind of riches. She had lost herself and needed to find a spiritual path that would lead her back home.
The comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell is probably best known for A Hero with a Thousand Faces, but it’s another book—Pathways to Bliss—that I turn to like a travel guide to my own spiritual journey. In prompting readers to explore archetypes to help them create their personal mythology, Campbell believes that life should be a journey to finding our bliss. This is a book about personal growth for people who want to self-discovery in a larger—mythical—context.
Joseph Campbell famously defined myth as “other people's religion.” But he also said that one of the basic functions of myth is to help each individual through the journey of life, providing a sort of travel guide or map to reach fulfillment — or, as he called it, bliss. For Campbell, many of the world's most powerful myths support the individual's heroic path toward bliss.
In Pathways to Bliss, Campbell examines this personal, psychological side of myth. Like his classic best-selling books Myths to Live By and The Power of Myth, Pathways to Bliss draws from Campbell's popular lectures and…
For my first 18 years, I slept in the same room (opposite my parents) in the same house (116 Monticello Avenue) in the same city (Piedmont) in the same state (CA) in the same country (USA), but soon after leaving for college in Evanston, IL, I pined for elsewhere and ended up peripatetic. That peripateticness plagued me, as a woman/wife/mother. While growing our family, my French husband and I moved: Israel to France to California to New York to Israel to New York to Israel. Finally, in my early fifties, I understood home is more about who you are than where you live.
The Part That Burns is not a linear narrative but a memoir in fragments. Each essay or chapter is different, interesting, engaging like scattered pieces of a puzzle that the writer—and reader—are trying to put together.
It's about a childhood wrought with abuse and rejection, about trauma and epigenetics, home and roots. It's about a girl who grows up to become a teenager who becomes a young woman who becomes a wife and a mother and every step of the way, she yearns for what we all yearn for: acceptance and love.
My memoir is as slim and sparse as Ouellette’s and some might consider my chronological story as fragmented because of its tiny chapters and missing connective tissue from one chapter to the next.
"I love this book and am grateful it is in the world." —Dorothy Allison, New York Times best-selling author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller "Simply beautiful. Precisely imagined, poetically structured, compelling, and vivid." —Joyce Carol Oates "A textured remembrance of a traumatic childhood that also offers affecting moments of beauty." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
In her fiercely beautiful memoir, Jeannine Ouellette recollects fragments of her life and arranges them elliptically to witness each piece as torn and whole, as something more than itself. Caught between the dramatic landscapes of Lake Superior and Casper Mountain, between her stepfather’s groping…
For my first 18 years, I slept in the same room (opposite my parents) in the same house (116 Monticello Avenue) in the same city (Piedmont) in the same state (CA) in the same country (USA), but soon after leaving for college in Evanston, IL, I pined for elsewhere and ended up peripatetic. That peripateticness plagued me, as a woman/wife/mother. While growing our family, my French husband and I moved: Israel to France to California to New York to Israel to New York to Israel. Finally, in my early fifties, I understood home is more about who you are than where you live.
This book combines compressed prose with nonfiction truth-telling but it isn’t linear or a complete story as much as a snapshot of Fennelly’s childhood, home life, and keen observations.
This book showed me that the quality of writing trumps the quantity of words. Short and sparse, when well written, can find a place on a bookshelf and shine.
The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of non-fiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Beth Ann Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer and deeply original observer of life's challenges and joys.
Some pieces are wistful, some wry and many reveal the humour buried in our everyday interactions. Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs shapes a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments and awakens us to…
I’m an author and elementary librarian living in Northern California. My mind is a busy neighborhood: there are all sorts of thoughts and feelings running around up there like hordes of naughty unsupervised children. I need books to ground me, to encourage me to slow down, to help me feel and release those emotions. As an elementary librarian, I’m a voracious reader, but I only choose to return to the most necessary, beautiful books. These authors comfort me through their words, pulling forth laughter, tears, and the knowledge that I’m not so crazy after all. Or, if I am, I’m not the only one.
Maggie Smith is a poet, and this book about the end of her marriage is exquisite.
I loved her careful prose, her honesty, and the book’s format (with its varying chapter lengths and her perfect word choice, it often reads like poetry). I love being married to my husband of 20+ years, but this book reminds me that, in the end, I belong to me. It’s healthy and necessary to search out my own joy.
"[Smith]...reminds you that you can...survive deep loss, sink into life's deep beauty, and constantly, constantly make yourself new." -Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author
The bestselling poet and author of the "powerful" (People) and "luminous" (Newsweek) Keep Moving offers a lush and heartrending memoir exploring coming of age in your middle age.
"Life, like a poem, is a series of choices."
In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins…
For my first 18 years, I slept in the same room (opposite my parents) in the same house (116 Monticello Avenue) in the same city (Piedmont) in the same state (CA) in the same country (USA), but soon after leaving for college in Evanston, IL, I pined for elsewhere and ended up peripatetic. That peripateticness plagued me, as a woman/wife/mother. While growing our family, my French husband and I moved: Israel to France to California to New York to Israel to New York to Israel. Finally, in my early fifties, I understood home is more about who you are than where you live.
A difficult-to-categorize story (illustrated memoir, graphic memoir, is it even memoir?), Belonging is about a young girl growing up in Karlsruhe, Germany, where she notices something strange in their backyard. But when she asks her mother, she doesn't get a clear answer.
Decades later, after leaving home in search of something unnamable, she returns to confront her family, their past, her country of birth, its past, and to own it. Throughout the colorful, inventive pages, Krug incorporated her illustrations, photos, archival research, German products, family tree, and more as she tells the story of Heimat—what it means to belong.
After hearing her speak and reading her book, I knew words did not suffice to tell my own story.
* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators *
* Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, andLibrary Journal
This“ingenious reckoning with the past” (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany.
Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city…
I’ve been fascinated with the subjects of forgiveness and reconciliation most of my life. I’ve spent years researching people of the Old Testament, and as I read their stories, I see their need for these things in their relationships. It is a universal need of humans. Because I write about people who actually lived, I read books that deal with the things we all face. Truth is, time may change, but the human heart does not. I’m an amateur theologian and avid reader of books that will help me grow as a person and allow me to understand these ancient people who walked before us.
It’s far too tempting when we go through rough patches in our lives to want to give up. When we long for something and pray for years and still wait, quitting sounds like the best option. I nearly quit writing after twenty years of trying to break into publishing because I didn’t think I could take any more rejection.
In this book, Idleman points out that some people come to Jesus expecting Him to make life easier. But life is hard. Idleman says, “One way we know we’re running the race marked out for us is the presence of regular, unexpected challenges.”
Joseph could relate to that all his life. I can too.
The parent with the wayward child. The couple whose marriage is in jeopardy. The man who is out of work. The woman stuck in crushing debt. The patient with a bad diagnosis. The student who can't get a fair shake. People hanging by a thread, losing faith and short on strength. What do they all need to hear?
Don't give up.
Our lives are minefields of challenges that take their toll on our courage, our conviction, and even our faith. But God whispers to the weary, Don't give up. Drawing from inspiring biblical stories and first-person testimonies of perseverance, bestselling…
Books have been an important part of my faith journey. I set aside time each morning to read scripture, and devotional material, to meditate and pray. As I read about the experiences of others my faith increases and I know God better. As a writer I express my own faith through words and invite others to know God better by experiencing Him with time set aside in the mornings. More Love is part of a series of small books that I have created to give readers experiences to connect with God and to know His love.
Mark Batterson writes, “If you press into God’s presence like never before, you will experience God like never before.” This small book has led me back to a richer prayer life again and again. I’ve prayed through it many times and have given away countless copies to others. Each day Batterson invites a new way to look at prayer and a practical way to start a morning devotion time all grounded in scripture. As a writer I love the focus on creativity and honoring ideas. He writes, “I don’t type on a keyboard, I pray on one.”
Your 40-day guide to experiencing more passionate, persistent, intimate communication with God.
Do you pray as often and as bravely as you want to? Are you looking to strengthen your relationship with God and experience a deeper, more intentional prayer life? Mark Batterson, New York Times bestselling author of The Circle Maker, is here to teach you all about a new, life-changing way to pray.
After the release of The Circle Maker, thousands of readers quickly became many tens of thousands, and soon enough, true stories of miraculous and inspiring answers to prayer began to pour in. Draw the Circle…
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