What I’ve been reading and books that have inspired me… Favorites are noted with an asterix*.

Reading something you think I might like? Send me an e-mail: asharah [at] asharah [dot] com

Artist’s and Dancer’s Tools

• * The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp
• Sanford Meisner on Acting by Sanford Meisner, Dennis Longwell, and Sydney Pollack
• The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron
• The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
• Psychology of Dance by Jim Taylor and Ceci Taylor

Business and Creative Thinking

• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
• Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur by Pamela Slim
• The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm by Tom Kelley, Jonathan Littman, Tom Peters, and Tom Peters
• Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love by Jonathan Fields
• My So-Called Freelance Life: How to Survive and Thrive as a Creative Professional for Hire by Michelle Goodman

Inspiration

• * Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon MacKenzie
• Rules of the Red Rubber Ball: Find and Sustain Your Life’s Work by Kevin Carroll

Science

• * The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee
• * This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin
• * The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes by Dean H. Hamer
• Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson
• Various issues of SEED magazine.

Fiction

• ** Demian by Hermann Hesse (This one gets two ** because it’s my favorite book of all time.)
• * The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
• Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
• Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
• The Stranger by Albert Camus

History

• * The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
• “A Trade like Any Other”: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt by Karin van Nieuwkerk
• The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
• The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped Our History by Molly Caldwell Crosby

More…

• * Traveling Music: The Soundtrack to My Life and Times by Neil Peart
• * Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig
• The Portable Jung (Viking Portable Library) by Carl G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, and R. F. C. Hull
• Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates
• The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan
• Roadshow: Landscape With Drums, A Concert Tour by Motorcycle by Neil Peart