Love The Complete Works? Readers share 72 books like The Complete Works...

This book has been extremely influential and helpful to my journey as a creative photographer. This is a short book and covers material that is often not easy because it gets at some of the deep-seated reasons that many of us find it hard to consistently create art.

The underlying issue is “resistance”: a force that is the antithesis of creativity and serves to stymie us all to a greater or lesser degree. I have found the succinct discussion of resistance in the book, along with tools and techniques for overcoming resistance, one of the most valuable discussions I have encountered in my journey as a photographer and artist.

Every couple of years–or whenever I’m feeling very blue–I pick up Dicken’s novel and reacquaint myself with the beguiling Samuel Pickwick, Esq., the only saint whose company I can bear. Samuel is a retired businessman who now wants to enjoy life with a jolly band of dim misfits like himself, and they set off for adventures across Britain.

Mainly, though, his jolly naïveté gets them into scrapes. Pickwick is a true innocent, ignorant of the ways of men and ignorant of himself. And so, in the end, he must be bailed out by the less deceived. Yes, ignorance can be bliss for beautiful souls–but only if someone else is driving.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is recalled as one of the great essayists and speakers of the nineteenth century.

In a time of extraordinary change, Emerson helped forge a universal voice through the prism of the emerging American experience. Emerson ultimately conjured a unique, unmistakable American narrative.

This renders his work timeless. His essays—such as “Self-Reliance”—have been rediscovered by new audiences in the early 21st century.

In another moment of tumult and evolution, Emerson continues to offer actionable inspiration, encouraging everyone to cultivate the courage to experience life and work as a great adventure.

I started flipping through this book in a bookstore, admittedly with a certain amount of skepticism about another trendy tome on how to be more creative, this one by a well-known music producer. To my surprise, I could not put this book down. There is a great deal of wisdom in these pages.

This is a book that teaches one how to be, not specifically how to create art. But being comes before creation, and I found many ideas that have stayed with me as I pursue my passion for creating beautiful imagery.

Charles de Gaulle is a consequential leader of the 20th century.

In an extraordinary turn of events, this little-known colonel emerged as the leader of France in exile during Hitler’s occupation. Following the Second World War he became a dominant political figure.

He can be seen as the founder of modern France, whose shadow reaches into our present moment.

In the 1930s he wrote a brilliant mediation on leadership, The Edge of the Sword. Though distilled from his lived experience in the military, de Gaulle provides insights that apply in many situations.

The book takes on additional significance when one considers the project of self-creation that the author undertook—first on himself, then on the re-creation of France, finally on Europe and the world, in his time and into our own.

The Oedipus myth, which seems so familiar to us, shakes me every time I return to the version written by ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus. The reason is that no one in the story is to blame for the carnage that ensues. At the center of the tragedy is Oedipus, who does and does not want to know the truth about himself: that he unwittingly killed his father and married his mother.

I am struck over and over again by the intricate ruses he uses against himself, and which we are all susceptible to. I put the book down every time, wondering if self-knowledge is always such a good thing and what I might be hiding from myself.

An autobiography like no other. Though written sixteen centuries ago, Saint Augustine’s Confessions are more gripping and surprising than any contemporary memoir I know. Cast in the form of a prayer to God, the book reveals the inner turmoil of someone who, on the surface, at least, seems happy and talented.

But that is only because he keeps his misery from himself. “I have become a question to myself,” he writes. When a painful moment of self-revelation finally arrives, he sees all his inner pain and blemishes and is horrified. And in that same moment, with God’s help, it all disappears. And life begins again.

No work of the great psychologist Sigmund Freud has been more maligned than this book. When the first edition was published in Germany, it was rightly hailed as a literary masterpiece. But Freud kept expanding it over the years, aiming to make it more “scientific,” but only managed to turn it into a turgid object of mockery.

My first attempts to read the final edition all failed. But when, a few decades ago, a fresh and highly accessible English translation of the first edition was published (by Oxford University Press) all my simple minded views about self-knowledge and self-deceit underwent a transformation. It was like growing a new set of eyes.

Augustine's Confessions is an extraordinary book, but it is not always an easy one! Readers looking for help in understanding its brilliant author can do no better than to turn to Peter Brown's biography, first published in 1967. It is a beautifully written, lucid, and illuminating study of Augustine's life and thought, the best possible guide to both the man and his world. In an Epilogue added for the forty-fifth-anniversary edition, Brown discusses what he and other scholars have learned in the decades since he first wrote the book, and how his ideas about Augustine have changed, demonstrating the curiosity and openness that are the hallmarks of a great scholar.

Augustine wrote this account of his life (consisting of 13 books) when he was in his forties (ca. 398AD). It is theologically profound, prayerful and lyrical, emotionally charged, and strangely ‘modern’.

Augustine chronicles his search for identity and meaning and discovers that, paradoxically, he only finds his true self when he loses himself in God. (This explains the shift from the autobiographical to the more objective-theological in the last three books, where Augustine offers profound meditations on time and eternity, for instance).

When I read this book first, as a young man, I was deeply skeptical, if not hostile, to the Christian faith. The book proved quite literally life-changing for me: here was someone who could give an intellectually plausible and existentially appealing account of the Christian faith.