Fans pick 69 books like Success Secrets of the Motivational Superstars

I hadn’t read this as a child, but upon reading it the first time, it made me feel like a child. The deep introspection, written with the imagination and voice of a young child, was calming, and I felt as if he knew how I thought as a child and adult.

I was living in France at the time, and the story had a foreign mood but was familiar. The book reached into personal childhood daydreams and fantasies. The prince’s way of thinking and expressing himself was definitely not from the modern day and it inspired me to write “up” to younger audiences. The immediacy and freshness of the illustrations motivated me to think less and feel more when creating.

I would recommend several of McManus’ books in my top five but that would narrow explaining what influences me.

In Uprising, we see the overlap of our need to achieve, our need for meaning, and God’s answers laid out in philosophical terms so we can see how maybe God isn’t so religious but tremendously right on, for our benefit. I underline sentences in books so I can quickly reference them at a later time.

I measure the personal value of a book by how many times I mark my book that way. This book has underlines, stars in the margin, comments above and below, and in different ink colors. It is packed with so many quotable nuggets of wisdom.

I came across this, now out of print, booklet as a 19-year-old who could not believe the majority of the planet would believe something incorrect. This guy was a lone voice against the tide of overpopulation panic. 

The information he provided was easily confirmed with math or encyclopedia references. It is completely a Q&A format. Very strange, at first. It was as if he expected me, the reader, to reach my own conclusions based on the information alone. That was new for me. He did not coax me or summarize his conclusion. This influenced my writing style for life. It respects the reader as having a mind of his own.

The 2nd most impacting part about this was ultimately, that yes, the whole world could literally be wrong. Shocking!

I have stereo-typed Christian influence throughout history as mostly religious and for changing people’s eternal destiny.

My attitude has always been respectful but these historical accounts raised my eyebrows not only about how much one man can lift a nation without being a political leader, but it also made me reconsider what the Bible itself was commanding for “disciple the nations”.

It covers multiple men and multiple countries: India, China, Ireland, South Korea, Switzerland, and more. Uplifting to me, except the part about how much more they did than I ever will. Still incredibly inspiring.

In this book by Jennifer J. Chow, I loved how the differences between Yale Yee, the sleuth, and her cousin, Celine, not only created tension throughout the book but ultimately played on each of their strengths to solve the mystery. 

The two cousins are thrown together when quiet Yale is tapped by her dad to run the family bubble tea stand at L.A.’s night market. Loud and flamboyant Celine, a social media influencer, arrives in L.A. and gets tasked with helping Yale out.

Chow does a great job of showing the two girls' very different personalities and adding in that family tension. On top of that, the L.A. night market is fascinating! I hope this will be a long-running series!  

What can you say about the book that kicked off a whole new genre?

Widely regarded as the first ‘cyberpunk’ novel, reading Virtual Light today is beyond eery. It takes place in the dystopian future year of 2006 (the book was written in 1994) and is set in San Francisco during a time when the middle class has disappeared and the only people left are either disgustingly rich or living on the street. And as I look around at what San Francisco, and many other cities have become, it makes me think that Gibson might be the Cassandra of the modern world. 

I absolutely loved this book. One of the most beautiful stories I’ve ever read, it’s heartfelt and hilarious. After running his own bookshop in Seattle, Andrew Bloomfield moves to Hollywood to become a screenwriter and discovers a colony of feral cats living in his backyard. He was not a cat person. After witnessing one too many raccoon and coyote attacks and hungry, crying kittens, he and his two female housemates intervene and start caring for these wild yet vulnerable cats who transform his life. With his sharp wit and keen eye for detail, Bloomfield is a brilliant storyteller. I got completely caught up in the soap-opera dramas and death-defying moments of these cats, along with the heartaches and triumphs of rescuing them.

Great writing on cities is rarer than it should be. The late Mike Davis, using Los Angeles as his muse, showed me—and so many others—new ways of thinking about cities through his vividly and passionately argued prose. Weaving together strands of architecture, urban history, social justice, and ecology, Davis has inspired me like no other author to examine cities critically, from unexpected perspectives and with a fierce point of view. Underlying his outrage at the injustices of the unravelling metropolis is a mordant sense of humor—making him an unbeatable guide as we all ride shotgun through desperate times. 

Born in Los Angeles and with profound connection to this city’s psyche, Wendy Ortiz delivers a map of Los Angeles transformed into words, a fragmented memoir of hurt, love, loss, and reinvention. What does a young writer (one of thousands) living in this city and trying to make it worry about? Joblessness. Rent. Bills. Riding the metro. Alcohol. And yes, sex and publishing too, of course. This book proves that it’s not always 72 and sunny in Los Angeles.

This list wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t add a superhero comic. But instead of Spiderman or Captain America, I want to introduce you to Runaways. A middle-grade graphic novel comic series about six Los Angeles teenagers who join together after discovering that their supervillain parents are planning on destroying the world. What could be more fun than a bunch of random teenagers banding together to try and save the world while trying to grapple with their place in it? Dinosaurs, aliens, mutant powers, grocery shopping, crushes, and turning eighteen, it’s a lot to handle and is certainly very fun to read – even for a someone who doesn’t like reading. Plus, if a reader makes it to the end, they’re rewarded with unforeseen plot twists.