"Veronika decides to die" by Paulo Coelho.

This book is my favourite book, and I reccomend it to anyone who feels like they need a little push along in enjoying life,and spending each day as if it were your last. They say, everyday, you should do something new and different, even if it is as small as walking a different path to work. It helps immensley,keeps things away from becoming a tradition.

Anway, the book is about a girl who decides she has had enough, and decides to overdose on sleeping pills, don't worry, i'm not ruining it at all as this is covered quite early, but she gets admitted to a psych ward and you go through her final days of her life. very powerful. and a brilliant read right through, ending will change your life.

I haven't checked all the posts on this thread, so forgive me if someone previously wrote this, but Kathy Freston has some very good books out. She writes on how to find your soulmate and uses many spiritual techniques that I recently began practicing even before I ever heard of her. She doesn't describe what a soulmate is, more like how to handle your soulmates & relationships. It's interesting for anyone (like me) who uses spirituality (and not religion) and that "sixth sense" type of thing to understand each other. So, I highly recommend at least flipping through her books. You'll get a lot of wisdom from them.

Bible - old and new testaments, Koran, Kabbalah, Book of Morman, any books on Buddism, Hinduism, etc - these are starters regardless of your religious beliefs - the more we know about the religious beliefs of others the better able we are to understand their motivations. strip out the dogma from the religious texts and understand the internal meanings.

It's always a subjective issue and of our own opinion of course, which books to recommend to anyone else.

I have recently been captivated by the work of Karen Armstrong, for anyone who has not heard of her, Karen was a Nun for many years, then over a period of time, she lost her faith in the system or religion, rather than God.
Over many years and studies of Christianity, Islam and Judaism, she has become very well respected as an authority on all three.

Her book,  'Battle for God' was the first of her work that I read, it's a biggie!!! Karen is very adept at taking you back to the origins of many, historically accepted dogma, and letting you make up your own mind on what may have been going on at the time rather than simply accepting todays word from the sermon of a Vicar, Imam or Rabbi.

If you ever questioned and wondered where the similarities in the the Bible, Torhah and Quran came form, treat yourself to this book and open your mind to history, it's great - in my humble opinion anyway.

Hi again,

I absolutely love Richard Bach's - Jonathon Livingston Seagull, as a voyage of self discovery, it's second to none.