The Books in My Life

Best-selling author Colin Wilson grew up in a working-class family and had little opportunity for formal education. But even as a child, he turned to the printed word for answers to life's innumerable questions. Today his personal library includes more than 20,000 volumes, including more than eighty titles of his own - among them The Outsider, which made his reputation at age 24, The Occult, and From Atlantis to The Sphinx - each of which expanded his reputation into new areas.

Wilson's lifework is a search for higher states of awareness. His insight and never-ending inquiry into consciousness, literature, and philosophy have illuminated many minds. In The Books In My Life, he revisits the books that challenged him to grow and helped to shape his life and perspectives, beginning with the pulp novels he read avidly in his youth, through Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle, and on to Nietzsche, Joyce, Sarte, and Shaw. Looking over Wilson's shoulder, we watch as he is drawn to works that affirm man's ability to consciously alter one's life aswell as the world. tracing his growth into adulthood and his development as a writer, Wilson pinpoints the books that he read at important steps along the way and divulges the essence of their magic.

The Books In My Life is an amazingly insightful look at how a life of reading shapes our thoughts and beliefs, our hearts and our souls. we are fortunate that Colin wilson has welcomed us into his private world in this masterpiece of literary reflection and remembrance.