A shelf that changed me: the books I keep coming back to
From Writing Down the Bones to The Artist’s Way and Pema Chodron, the books coach Aparna Kher returns to for healing, writing and coming home to yourself.
8 May 2026 · 3 min read · Aparna Kher
Which book found you at exactly the right moment? Not the one you were told to read, but the one that arrived, almost by accident, and quietly rearranged you. I have a shelf of those, dog-eared and underlined and lent out so often that some never came home. Let me introduce you to a few, in case one of them is looking for you.
I have to begin with Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. On the surface it is a book about writing. Underneath, it is a book about paying attention, and it treats writing as a form of Zen practice: show up, keep your hand moving, tell the truth, do not judge what comes. I return to it whenever I am stuck, in words or in life, because its real lesson is how to meet your own mind without flinching. “Trust yourself”, she writes, and somehow, on the page, you begin to.
Its natural companion is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. If you take only one thing from it, take the morning pages: three sides of longhand, written first thing, before the inner critic wakes up. I resisted this for years, certain I had nothing to say at dawn. That was rather the point. The pages are not for producing anything. They are for clearing the channel, and they pair beautifully with the morning practice I keep banging on about.
For the heart of the work I do, two books sit side by side. Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg will change how you speak to the people you love, if you let it. And anything by Pema Chödrön, though I would start with When Things Fall Apart, will change how you speak to yourself. She is the one who taught me the word maitri (loving-kindness), and she writes about falling apart not as a catastrophe but as a doorway. On a hard day, she is the friend I reach for.
If the body is where you feel your struggles, and it usually is, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk explains, with great humanity, why talking alone is not always enough and how healing has to include the body. Alongside it I would put Self-Compassion by Dr Kristin Neff, which offers the research and the practices to back up everything I believe about meeting yourself with kindness rather than judgement.
For presence, Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness makes the whole thing feel possible, even while doing the washing up. For meaning, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning remains one of the most important books ever written about choosing your response to what you cannot control. And for the courage to make a life that is truly yours, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic is a small, brave, joyful thing.
Here is what I would gently say about all of these. Do not read them to finish them. Read them to be changed by them. One paragraph, felt fully, is worth more than a whole book skimmed. Keep a pencil in your hand. Argue in the margins. Let a single sentence stop you for a week.
Choose one from this shelf, whichever tugs at you as you read this. Order it, borrow it, or find it dusty on your own shelf where it has been waiting. Then read slowly, the way you would sip something warm. The right book, at the right time, does not just inform you. It keeps you company on the way home.
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Reading is one thing. Being accompanied is another.
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