We keep hearing that it’s a time to reassess the “normal” we go back to. But equally, it’s a powerful moment to think about our power to create change and build stronger frameworks for how we live, love, and express ourselves.

That can mean using our voices and making what we want to exist in the world. Choosing how we spend our days, how we run businesses, and how we love and support others. Creating our own utopia.

That may be on a small scale, but it’s some of the most important work we can do. Having the personal realisation that things don’t have to stay the same is huge.

I’ve always looked to books to find courage, reassurance, and a nudge to take action. Here are some I’ve been turning to lately for lessons on courage, bravery, and creating change in my own life.

1. Letter To My Daughter by Maya Angelou

“I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters,” writes Maya Angelou. “You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish speaking, Native Americans and Aleut. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all. Here is my offering to you.”

Letter to My Daughter is Maya Angelou’s genre-transcending guidebook, memoir, and gift for all of us to live well and craft a life with meaning.

“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.”

2. Playing Big by Tara Mohr

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of inner work to play bigger and speak up in my life and work. That’s meant looking back to my years of shyness and insecurities, understanding the triggers behind it, and getting clear on what is still hanging around.

Playing Big is one book I read several years ago that helped to break my habit of hiding and keeping myself invisible. Showing both my successes and my weaknesses doesn’t come naturally, but I’ve come to realise this: the more uncomfortable you feel about sharing your voice, the more impactful it will be.

“The costs of women’s self-doubt are enormous. Think of all the ideas unshared, businesses not started, important questions not raised, talents unused. Think of all the fulfillment and joy not experienced because self-doubt keeps us from going for the opportunities that would bring that joy and fulfillment. This is the bad news around women’s self-doubt: how pervasive it is, and how much has been lost because of it.”

3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

As I write this post, I’m thinking of the racial tensions and injustices across the Atlantic that are a mirror for much of the world.

As in many other places, it’s clear that there has never been a true foundation of equality in the U.S. With no better example to roll back to, a new way of doing and being is called for, with more voices rallying together – many of which have never done so before.

This is the classic book about courage and standing up for underrepresented voices.

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”

4. Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

Prodigal Summer quickly joined my list of all-time favourite books. Barbara Kingsolver’s writing is baggy and often ambles leisurely around what is barely a plot, but I adore it.

While Flight Behavior didn’t grab me in quite the same way as Prodigal Summer, it makes a better addition to this list.

Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she became pregnant at seventeen. As we open the novel, we find her on the cusp of ruining the marriage and life she’s found herself in for a younger man she barely knows. But as she hikes up the mountain road to meet him, she finds what looks like a mountain of fire.

With guilt already hanging heavy, she can only understand this as a cautionary miracle. She flees back to the farm, and what follows sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media.

It’s a book about the delicate balance between humankind and nature, but it’s also about using our voices and reassessing how things are done.

“Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It’s kind of all one. You know what Hester told me when we were working the sheep one time? She said it’s no good to complain about your flock, because it’s the put-together of all your past choices.”

5. Anything You Want by Derek Sivers

“Making a company is a great way to improve the world while improving yourself,” writes Derek Sivers. This is my favourite business book, but it’s also informed the philosophy behind how I choose to live: to make beautiful things and share what I know.

When you make a company, you make a utopia. It’s where you design your perfect world.

6. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Man’s Search for Meaning is a tough book to read, but an important one. On the one hand, it teaches us to look head-on at the suffering in the world and the people who cause it, rather than keeping quiet.

But on the other, it also shows us that nothing is ever totally lost – better than any other book I’ve read. Frankl reminds us to look for the sunsets, the glimmers of hope, and the strength and love that remains in the world during the hardest moments.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

7. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

As with the Harry Potter universe and other awe-inspiring fantasy worlds, my love for Tolkien’s writing is two-fold: I love the universe that he created, but I equally adore the work and focus he put into creating that universe.

When creating his mythos, Tolkien first created its languages, starting with what he originally called “Qenya”, the first primitive form of Elvish. What surrounds it is a world detailed enough to guide us across the border from our own reality and hold us deep inside it. What could be more affirming of our power to design, imagine, and create?

“Courage is found in unlikely places.”

8. How to Love by Thich Nhat Hanh

After all, one of the most courageous things we can do is love. That starts with ourselves.

“Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love.”

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As a teenager I worked in my village bookshop; a tiny little shop stacked floor to ceiling with books, its shelves overflowing onto every table and windowsill. I loved working there. I’d track down rare books for customers and process purchases when they came into the shop.

My job was also to recommend books. We all had go-to recommendations: mine leaned towards the classics, while the bookshop owner always recommended Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.

Somehow I never read the book back then. I really should have, though.

“According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did. Still, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession. But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”

Cutting for Stone tells the tale of two identical twins, Shiva and Marion, who are conjoined until birth but remain “ShivaMarion” throughout life, even after bitter betrayal separates them.

Marion is our narrator of Cutting for Stone, who sets the scene in Addis Ababa’s Missing Hospital (a mispronunciation of “Mission Hospital”). He opens the novel with these first lines:

“After eight months spent in the obscurity of our mother’s womb, my brother, Shiva, and I came into the world in the late afternoon of the twentieth of September in the year of grace 1954. We took our first breaths at an elevation of eight thousand feet in the thin air of Addis Ababa, capital city of Ethiopia…”

It’s a big book at 534 pages and in the ground it covers; from beginning to end, it spans lifetimes, including countless personal, national and international upheavals in those years.

I loved reading Cutting for Stone for a few reasons. I loved how it celebrates knowledge, learning, and especially, medicine. I loved it for the non-traditional home that Shiva and Marion grow up in (“Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted.”)

I loved it for how it made me think about my own life and work. If you want to consider switching careers to medicine, read this for a little push. I had a not-insignificant career crisis while reading this book, lamenting how I could be using my brain for more impactful work.

For me, books that bring up feelings like these are among the very best; causing you to question your life and start making real changes, whether it’s pivoting your career, making changes to look after your body better, or improving relationships and leaving negative ones.

I loved getting to know its characters, not because they’re excellent role models – they have many unappealing moments, especially in the second third of the book – but because they’re so flawed. Not one character is perfect or blameless.

Although the book starts off slow, by the halfway point I knew it was going to be one of my all-time favourites. If there’s a formula for a perfect novel, Abraham Verghese nails it with Cutting for Stone.

“God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by–by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.”

The post Cutting for Stone is a book I should have read years ago appeared first on Tolstoy Therapy.