Posted 2018-12-10 09:27:23 by: Millie Rogers
Bookseller One Grand Books has asked celebrities to name the ten titles they’d bring with them to a desert island, and they’ve shared the results with Vulture. Below is wellness author and speaker Deepak Chopra’s list.
Kim, by Rudyard Kipling
An example of masterful storytelling that fascinated me growing up. I identified with Kim, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, because we were both children of the army; my father was an army doctor who had served under Lord Mountbatten. On rereading, the setting of the Afghan Wars in the late Victorian era has chilling implications for today. The book is also a reminder that Kipling’s colonialist perspective didn’t blind him to the teeming human drama of India.
Lost Horizon, by James Hilton
Another ripping yarn, from 1933, turning on the fantasy of a perfect world in Shangri-La. The British hero, Hugh Conway, was the first seeker I encountered in fiction, so that element must have struck a chord in a teenage boy’s heart. The book is all fantasy, mystery, and the smoke-and-mirrors of the exotic East. I don’t care and still love it.
The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham
The existential side of inner seeking, which appealed to another part of me as an adolescent. The war-traumatized pilot Larry Darrell was my first encounter with a character who walks away from conventional social life to find inner meaning. I suppose you could say that Maugham waves a sparkler at the start of the spiritual journey. Materialism and money-grubbing get a bashing, which is worth thinking about today.
Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore
If all the other books on my list were taken away, the one that would accompany me to the desert island would be this small book of inspired poetry by the great Bengali man of letters, Tagore. When translated into English, it won him the Nobel Prize in 1913 and made him an international celebrity. ...
Deepak Chopra »
