Profound Books For Inspiration And Escape
Enjoy these tasty, easy-reading tomes to beat the boredom.
When you’ve exhausted Netflix and had enough of YouTube, Twitter and the news, it might be time to try a book. The team at ProFound has put together some of our favourite books from novels to self-help to inspire, enlighten, entertain, and transport you.
Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
This best-seller by professor, author, and activist Casandra Brené Brown is, according to her website, “the ultimate playbook for developing brave leaders and courageous cultures.” Putting her many years of training and coaching into one easy-reading guide, Dare to Lead is a modern guide to personal courage and standing up for what’s right.
Great quote:
“I’ve spent twenty years studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy, and I recently completed a seven-year study on brave leadership. The goal of Dare to Lead is to share everything we’ve learned about taking off the armor and showing up as leaders in a skills-based and actionable playbook.”
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Leadership and living your best life is at the heart of the ancient classic Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. In a simple prose style, it’s a book on living correctly that is very of the modern moment, dealing as it does in personal conduct and the ways to conduct oneself in life, with others, and with one’s self. Courtesy, compassion, decency are all contemplated, using anecdotes and lessons passed to the great man from descendants, peers, and contemporaries. The original self-helper.
Great quote:
“If you apply yourself to the task before you, following the right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if you might be bound to give it back immediately; if you hold this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with your present activities according to nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which you utter, you will live happily. And there is no man who is able to prevent this.”
WAR SPEECHES,1940-1945, by Sir Winston Churchill
Maybe a modern equivalent, in some respects, to Marcus Aurelius is Sir Winston Churchill. War Speeches, a collected set of inspiring speeches from the great motivator and orator is a good way to spend part of any Sunday. Some editions of this collection of speeches are rare in book form since date of original printing, but you can find others among his collected works at winstonchurchill.org.
Great quote (given to the British people at the end of the war):
“God bless you all. This is your victory! It is the victory of the cause of freedom in every land. In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this. Everyone, man or woman, has done their best. Everyone has tried. Neither the long years, nor the dangers, nor the fierce attacks of the enemy, have in any way weakened the unbending resolve of the British nation. God bless you all.”
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson
It might have been something Churchill once said, cigar in mouth, but it’s the title of the best-selling second book by blogger and author Mark Manson. In it “Manson argues that life’s struggles give it meaning, and that the mindless positivity of typical self-help books is neither practical nor helpful.”
Great quote:
“If you live your life solely in search of pleasure, you’ll actually end up living a life full of mistakes. Conversely, if you experience the occasional instance of suffering, you’ll be equipped to lead a better, happier life.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice”. So begins the great novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, with its sweep across space and time and into the magic realism and history of Macondo and the Buendía generations: “At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
One of the greatest novels ever written and widely available.
Girl, Wash Your Face is described by The Washington Post as mixing “memoir, motivational tips, Bible quotations and common-sense girl talk.” The prevailing message of her tome is one largely of female self-reliance, best summed up by Hollis in the book as “You, and only you, are ultimately responsible for how happy you are.”
Great quote:
“Have you ever believed that you aren’t good enough? That you’re not thin enough? That you’re unlovable? That you’re a bad mom? Have you ever believed that you deserve to be treated badly? That you’ll never amount to anything? All lies.”
The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
H.G. Wells is about as modern a futurist as they come. In The Invisible Man “A mysterious man arrives at the local inn of the English village of Iping, West Sussex, during a snowstorm. The stranger wears a long-sleeved, thick coat and gloves; his face is hidden entirely by bandages except for a fake pink nose; and he wears a wide-brimmed hat. He demands to be left alone and spends most of his time in his rooms working with a set of chemicals and laboratory apparatus, only venturing out at night.” This, it turns out, is the invisible man of the title, who finds himself in a bind, having turned himself invisible now has no way to turn himself back. He hopes to do this in secret at the inn in Iping. But this is not to be the case, as terror and pandemonium grip the town. An easy-reading, page-turning thriller with humour.
Great quote:
The fact is, I’m all here—head, hands, legs, and all the rest of it, but it happens I’m invisible. It’s a confounded nuisance, but I am. That’s no reason why I should be poked to pieces by every stupid bumpkin in Iping, is it?”
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