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Five Most Empowering Self-Help Books

November 30, 2012 by

Sometimes you need a little push to get elevated to the next step of your life. A good self-help book can provide that push, but the market is so full of tomes that promise results that it can be hard to pick the right one. In this list, we’ll share five that deliver results.

The Secret by Rhonda Byrne is one of the most successful self-help books of all time. With an easy to understand message of positive thought accompanied by productive action, it’s great to get motivated to start a new phase.

Tom Rath’s StrengthsFinder is a scientifically organized self-help book that can help you discover your inner power. Through a system of questionnaires and thought experiments, this book isolates your strengths and helps you convert them to purpose-driven results.

Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff by Richard Carlson is an excellent book to have in your self-help library when daily life is getting you down. It’s full of great advice to maintain your focus on the things that really matter.

Think And Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill is an all-time best-seller in the self-help field, offering workable tips in following the power of your inner spirit through positive mental attitudes. Although it was published in 1937, it’s still relevant today.

Eckhart Tolle’s The Power Of Now is probably the best introduction to the many works of the spiritual self-help author. It works as a useful guidebook to the ins and outs of human consciousness.

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Best Illustrated Children’s Books

November 9, 2012 by

When you look at books for kids, you can’t help but be amazed at the artistry that goes into every page. Some incredible talent is working in the field of children’s book illustration. Here is a selection of the most visually stunning illustrated children’s books of all time.

The Polar Express
Made into a major motion picture, the incredibly realistic art in Chris Van Allsburg’s modern holiday classic bewitches the eye, hiding incredible amounts of detail and expression on every page.

Where The Wild Things Are
Maurice Sendak’s classic is drawn in a style that manages to be both expressive and incredibly detailed. Every element of Max’s nighttime wanderings is rendered perfectly. Truly a monumental achievement.

Over and Over
Written by Charlotte Zolotow, it’s the astounding illustrations by storybook master Garth Williams that really sell this simple, charming story of a young girl learning about the passage of the seasons.

Anansi The Spider
Gerald McDermott’s brightly-colored, geometric illustrations are a perfect complement to this West African folktale. They’re deceptively blocky at first, but soon you realize the incredible care that went into creating them.

Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs
This timeless classic by Ron and Judi Barrett is jam-packed with detail and tons of funny sight gags that go perfectly with the surreal story of a town where food falls from the sky.

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Book Buzz: Four Unforgettable Fictional Villains

October 24, 2012 by
What’s a worthy protagonist without a formidable rival? If you love diving into a good book, then chances are you’ve come to appreciate the tension and complexity that a memorable villain can add to a piece of fiction. Here are five of the most unsettling and enduring villains to ever appear between the covers of a book:
 
Long John Silver from Treasure Island
Long John Silver is one of the most fiendish characters ever created by author Robert Louis Stevenson. He is a shrewdly calculating and treacherous one-legged pirate whose duplicitous nature makes him quite a slippery challenge to the story’s hero, Jim Hawkins. Though he starts out as a mentor to Hawkins, his commitment to his own best interest makes him willing to turn on his young mentee without an ounce of regret. 
 
Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist
Bill Sikes is among the most vicious characters ever penned by Charles Dickens. He is a rough, violent, and brutal career criminal, both a robber and an exploiter and abuser of children. He is prone to sudden bouts of terrifying rage and even goes so far as to explode in anger and beat his girlfriend to death, one of the most viscerally terrifying scenes to appear in any of Dickens’s novels. Dickens gives Sikes no redeeming qualities, and this makes him one of the darkest villains in literary history. 
 
Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr. Ripley
Tom Ripley is the brilliant villain in a series of crime novels by Patricia Highsmith. He starts out as a petty criminal getting by on his smarts in the realms of forgery, deception, and impersonation. Eventually, he goes so far as to murder a wealthy young man and assume his identity. Whenever Ripley’s charade is questioned, he is willing to resort to extreme (and often bloody) measures to keep his assumed identity protected. His wicked and ever-scheming ways make him one of the brilliant bad guys ever inked onto paper. 
 
Count Fosco, The Woman in White
This villain from Wilkie Collins’ popular novel became the archetype for many crime-novel antagonists – a corpulent, refined, cultured, self-indulgent but shrewdly intelligent and calculating villain, hiding deviance beneath a well-dressed exterior. Fosco conjures a scheme to deprive Laura Fairlie of her wealth and soundness of mind, and chillingly destroys Laura’s sister without an ounce of regret. 
 
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