From The Telegraph


50 best cult books

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
Sideways fantasy from the Diogenes of American letters, a comic sage who survived the firebombing of Dresden and various familial tragedies to work out his own unique brand of science-fictional satire. Like much of Vonnegut's stuff, this is savage anger barely masked by urbane anthropological sarcasm. Very much the place to start. TM

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)
The great modern Baroque novel. Made it possible for the middle classes to embrace the Mediterranean. No such Alexandria ever existed, nor did the potboiler thriller plot of space/time exploration, Kaballa, sex, good food and drink (it came out during rationing) or philosophical enquiry. Some beautiful sentences, sure; but lots of them don’t make sense. AMcK

A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
Plotless, morality-free salute to decadence. An individual based on its French author lounges about his luxurious home indulging in pursuits such as embedding gemstones in the shell of a tortoise until, loaded down, it expires. Dripping with Baudelairean ennui (and not a little dull itself), A Rebours was a bible for the Symbolists, Oscar Wilde and alienated creative types everywhere. SD

Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
Childcare experts go in and out of fashion, but Dr Benjamin Spock remains the daddy of them all. From his reassuring first sentence – "You know more than you think you do" – he revolutionised the way parents thought about their children, asserting the right to cuddle, comfort and follow your instincts. He also tells you how to deal with croup. SC

The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
The woman who made feminism sexy by being gorgeous and shaving her legs also taught her readers to eat a hearty meal. This book argues that a cult of thinness has desexualised and disempowered women just when, after the acceptance of free love and the introduction of the contraceptive pill, the opposite should have happened. The most important feminist text of the past 20 years. SD

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
In one of the original misery memoirs, Sylvia Plath delivered an intense, semiautobiographical story of growing up at a time when electroshock therapy was used to treat troubled young women. The narrator is a talented writer who arrives in New York with every opportunity before her, but buckles. The Bell Jar became a rallying call for a better understanding of mental illness, creativity and the impact on women of stifling social conventions. Plath killed herself a month after its publication. CR

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
Bitterly bouncy military farce, responsible for inventing the dilemma to which it gave its name: you're only excused war if you're mad, but wanting an exemption argues that you must be sane. Literary history would be entirely different if Heller had followed his original intention and called it Catch-18: it was changed to avoid confusion with a Leon Uris book. TM

The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
Ur-text of adolescent alienation, beloved of assassins, emos and everyone in between, Gordon Brown included. Complicated teen Holden Caulfield at large in the big city, working out his family and getting drunk. You've probably read it, be honest. TM

The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
Deep in the South American jungle an intrepid explorer is about to stumble on a sequence of ancient prophecies that could change our way of living, even save the world. If only we didn’t have to buy the other novels in that the series to find out what they were! For a similar effect on the cheap, rent an Indiana-Jonesalike film – Tomb Raider, say – and ask a hippy to whisper nonsense in your ear while you're watching it. TM

The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
Blame a burgeoning mistrust of conventional psychiatry for the immediate impact of The Dice Man – a novel whose hero, a disillusioned psychiatrist, vows to make every decision of his life according to the roll of a die. As one might have expected from the times, chance sends him into violence and anarchy, which also explains the book’s enduring appeal. AC

Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968)
Those Easter Island things, they're blokes wearing space suits, aren’t they? Er, no. Hugely influential work of mad-eyed fabricated Arch & Anth, responsible for decades of pub pseudoscience as well as for splendid stuff such as The X-Files. Increasingly common at jumble sales these days, though Von Däniken happily got another 25 books out of the idea. TM

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
Ignatius J Reilly is a fat anti-hero to thwart Promethean selfdramatisation in any reader. With the medieval poetry of Hroswitha swirling in a head jammed into a green hunting cap with earpieces, Reilly eats steadily, despises modernity, seeks solace in canine fantasies and remembers with terror his one experience of leaving New Orleans. CH

Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
In the age of titles such as "No, Please, Daddy, Not There!", the soul-searching autobiography looks about as cutting edge as a Findus Crispy Pancake. But when Rousseau told his story, confessions had never been so confessional. "I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent," he declared, rightly. He added, wrongly: "…and which, once complete, will have no imitator." SL

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
A Calvinist convinced of his indefectible election to salvation is led to acts of murder by Gil-Martin, his devilish doppelganger. More a myth than a religious satire, it vividly survives James Hogg's not entirely satisfactory manner of recounting it. Consider this: there may be a Gil-Martin near you. CH

Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950)
Do you often feel unhappy? Depressed? Ill at ease with others? You will if you read this. Creepy bit of mind-mechanics by the indifferent sci-fi novelist who founded Scientology. TM

The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
The book that launched a thousand trips. William Blake said that if we could cleanse the "doors of perception" we would perceive "the infinite". Huxley thought mescalin was the way to do so. In this essay, he pops a pill, goes on about "not-self" and "suchness", and decides love is the ultimate truth. He also took LSD when dying, but hardly stuffed it down the way his fans did. Jim Morrison was one: he named the Doors after Huxley's book, gobbled mouthfuls of acid and was dead by 27. SD

Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
Sandworms, ornithopters, Atreides, Harkonnen and spice: chop and blend for sci-fi fantasy, strangely like an intergalactic cousin of James Clavell. The first in an increasingly soap-operatic sequence. Equally cultishly adapted for the screen by David Lynch, and the root of many a lifelong passion for complex character names and/or arcane ceremonial weaponry. TM

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)
Forget Asimov or PKD. Douglas Adams was so brilliant a visionary that even in the late 1970s he was able to foresee a time when digital watches would look pretty silly. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy – a radio show before it was a novel, and a film, and a game, and a TV show – was incredibly clever and wildly funny. Thanks to the Guide, an entire generation of Britons was nursed to adulthood with the phrases "Don’t Panic" and "Mostly Harmless", and the number 42. SL

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
New journalism, non-fiction novel – however you define it, Tom Wolfe’s 1968 account of the novelist Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus ride across America with his "Merry Pranksters" established a style of free-associating, hyperbolic writing (count the exclamation marks!!!) that spawned countless imitations. To a generation of readers it fostered a burning envy that they had not been in San Francisco when the Kool-Aid dispensers were being spiked with "Purple Haze". Now a vivid social history of a period that seems as remote as Byzantium. MB

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
More 1970s searching for "authenticity" and "selfhood": a housewife has an affair with a radical psychoanalyst ("Adrian Goodlove", geddit?) and fantasises about sexual liberation. At the end, though, she goes back to her husband. John Updike called it the most "delicious erotic novel a woman everwrote" – but really, what on earth was all the fuss about? DS

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
Women should taste their own menstrual blood to reconcile themselves to their bodies, declared Germaine Greer in the seminal feminist text of the 1970s. Greer told a generation of women that society had turned them into meek, self-hating, castrated clones. The book was an international best-seller which earned Greer a mixed but enduring legacy. CR

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
Bewilderingly popular and extremely silly Nietzschean melodrama, in which Ayn Rand gives her mad arch-capitalist philosophy a run round the block in the person of Howard Roark, a flouncy architect. Loved by the kind of person who tells you selfishness is an evolutionary advantage, before stealing your house/lover/job. TM

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)
About what it means to think, and how that happens, this is written in the spirit of Lewis Carroll. Pattern recognition in the work of geniuses. Loved by maths geeks and anybody with Asperger's syndrome and anyone with sense. But at root a chess textbook. AMcK

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
Europe-hopping comic metanovel of war and power, stuffed with maths, shaggy-dog stories, childish humour and ravishing sentences. And lots of rockets. Genius, though long enough to lie unfinished. TM

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)
Similar territory to The Da Vinci Code but earlier, less balefully stupid and with the nerve to claim factual accuracy (its authors took Dan Brown to court and lost). The usual song and dance about Templars, bloodlines of Christ and global conspiracies, but somehow still chilling for all that. Staple text of the bonkers brigade. TM

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
This heady mix of romance and reality opens with its teenage heroine Cassandra Mortmain writing while sitting in the kitchen sink. It ends with the words "I love you" scribbled in the margins of the imaginary journal that forms the substance of the novel. In between a story unfolds that feeds the fantasies of every lovelorn young girl; but its status owes much to the way that, as in life, things don’t end happily ever after. SC

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
A book composed of the first chapters from other invented books. Either a classic work of literary snakes and ladders or a tiresomely recursive bit of postmodern sterility depending on your interlocutor. Italo Calvino was arguably better elsewhere. TM

Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
For decades, the cowed menfolk of the world ambled about in pinafores, dusting ornaments and saying "yes, dear". Then Robert Bly wrote Iron John, invented mythopoetic masculinity, and the daft creatures all rushed off into the woods together, hugged, bellowed, wept, painted their furry parts blue and felt re-empowered to wee standing up. SL

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)
The book that gave 1970s idealism a bad name, the nauseating story of a seagull who defies his fellows to soar into the heavens. "The only true law," the bird solemnly tells us, "is that which leads to freedom." Richard Nixon's FBI director, L Patrick Gray, ordered all his staff to read it. Later, he resigned for gross corruption, a fitting punishment for his dreadful taste. DS

The Magus by John Fowles (1966)
Posh young teacher goes to idyllic Greek island, there to be exquisitely tormented by young women and a Prospero-like figure. Like most John Fowles, this is solid middlebrow dressed as highbrow, but stunning setdressing, TS Eliot quotations and a twist at the end guaranteed a lifelong place in the hearts of a certain type of bookish male. TM

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
Miniature literary mindwarps from the world's most famous blind librarian, a writer – like Kafka – whose work, once encountered, adds a new adjective to the mental lexicon. Unforgettable stuff, after which mazes and mirrors will never be the same again. Often beloved of the kind of person who agrees with its author that "there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition", and none the worse for that. TM

The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
A thing of beauty, the sole bequest of the last in the line of Sicilian aristocrats on whom the novel is based. An ineradicable elegy for a vanished society, and, despite its risorgimento setting, still the best psychological and botanical guidebook to parts of southern Italy. TM

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
Satan live and in person, a mansized black cat, a magician and his helpmeet, Pontius Pilate… Classic text of dissident magic realism, banned for years under Stalin: now you’ll struggle to find a Russian who hasn't read it. Essential stuff, and with the finest description of a headache yet committed to paper. TM

No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
Few books have caught a political moment better than Naomi Klein’s stylish and impassioned report on the abuses of brands, and the activists who fight them. It was published in 2000, just as "antiglobalisation" crashed into the mainstream, and Klein was adopted as its poster-girl. SL

On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
Supposedly filled in under three caffeine-fuelled weeks, the roll of paper on which Kerouac typed his seminal novel recently sold for more than two million dollars, and has spent the past few years on the road itself, travelling from museum to museum in the US, where it attracts queues of bearded jazz fanatics. It is the result of seven years of road-trips across America during the 1940s. Initially it celebrates the alternative lifestyle, although by the end it is coloured by disappointment. TC

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
Needs little introduction. Bad craziness as the Duke of Gonzo and his helpless attorney blaze a streak of pharmaceutical havoc across 1970s California, all in demented bar-fight prose and fever-dream set-pieces. Now also a core text for ex-public school drug bores, which tends to obscure the anarchic excellence of HST's journalistic talent. TM

The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
Required reading in the coffee bars of the East Midlands in the late 1950s; unbelievably, some people paid good money for this study of the outsider figure in Western literature. The TLS found 285 mistakes in a sample of 249 lines, but in its young author’s eyes, it confirmed him as "the major literary genius of our century". Modesty was not one of his virtues; nor, sadly, was literary ability. DS

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
Pocket-sized set of aphorisms that sound like they were written by a medieval monk but were actually the product of a Lebanese-American alcoholic who died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1931. The Prophet is a beautifully phrased exercise in pointing out the obvious but Sixties hippy kids loved it. SD

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
The Americans had Upton Sinclair, and we had Robert Tressell – the pen-name of painter and decorator Robert Noonan, chosen because it sounded like one of the tools of his trade. Tressell's posthumously published saga of "12 months in hell" with the exploited working classes – their trousers the victims of poverty and their minds the victims of false consciousness – is a totemic text of British socialism. SL

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
This is among the best-selling volumes of poetry of all time, and does all that a translation should: it introduces the idea of an exotic, different culture; and it expresses what its readers feel, but lets them blame it on someone else. Here, in an age of doubt, aesthetics and Darwinism, these mysterious verses, drawn from 11th-century Persian, stand as little examples of how to celebrate life even as it slips away. TP

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
Modern travel writers such as Colin Thubron and Bruce Chatwin were inspired by Robert Byron. Travelling through the Middle East and Asia in the 1930s, Byron provides detailed descriptions of Islamic architecture, with pungent asides: "The Arabs hate the French more than they hate us. Having more reason to do so, they are more polite; in other words, they have learnt not to try it on, when they meet a European. This makes Damascus a pleasant city from the visitor's point of view." SR

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
Hermann Hesse’s allegorical novel sounds a bit Buddhist but is actually saying that experience (including of wealth), rather than contemplation, is the key to enlightenment. It's persuasive, especially if you read it, as many do, chillum in hand, in the Himalayas. Although, thinking about it now, profundities such as "the secret of the river is there is no time" don't make much sense out of context. SD

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
The book that was supposed to have lovelorn young men reaching for their guns. Even if it didn’t inspire as many suicides as people thought, it’s still a vital work. As Werther tromps about the countryside, reading Homer and Ossian and agonising over his host's wife, he shows how much you're allowed to feel in the Romantic age Goethe did so much to invent. Before he smashed the Mamelukes, Napoleon said he wished he’d written it (and surely so did the Mamelukes). TP

Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
Deliberately discomforting, Story of O takes as its subject the objectification of women. O is a beautiful woman who submits to the sadistic whims of various men after she is kidnapped and taken to a chateau to be blindfolded, whipped, branded and pierced. It ends with an odd sense of triumph, O wearing nothing but a mask before a group of strangers. Bewildering, creepy and joyless, it's a guaranteed detumescent. TC

The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
"Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know." The beach, the sun, the Arab, the gunshots, the chaplain: the stuff of millions of adolescents' fevered imaginings. If you don't love this when you're 17, there’s something wrong with you. In the film Talladega Nights, Sacha Baron Cohen's snooty French racing driver reads it on the starting grid. Strange but true: George W Bush read it on holiday two years ago. DS

The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968)
Take an enterprising anthropology student (Castaneda) and a Mexican shaman (Don Juan), mix in liberal quantities of peyote, and you end up with a text rooted in "nonordinary reality". Castaneda's multi-part account of his adventures, which started to appear in 1968, and includes lessons in how to fly and talk to coyotes, has always elicited queries as to its veracity. But when you’ve taken that many drugs, it may not matter. AC

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
A record of a lost generation in the shape of the contemporaries Vera Brittain loved and lost in the First World War, this memoir is also a poignant, passionate and perfectly poised study of a woman trying to find her place in a changing world. A bible to the generation who read it on publication, its influence continues thanks to a Virago reprint. SC

Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85)
Incendiary declamation through a megaphone. If only one knew what he was on about. Put six Nietzscheans in a room and it ought to be a bloodbath; except, since they're all nancies who fancy themselves as Supermen, there wouldn't be one. Nietzsche was brave and mad enough to kill God: but look what happened to him. His acolytes are, largely, less brave. AMcK

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
Economical Deep South drama around perennially hot-button racial questions, further exalted in literary mythology by being the only thing its author ever wrote. Even those who think they haven’t read it often have. TM

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974)
Burnt-out hippy takes son on bike trip. Remembers previous self: lecturer who had nervous breakdown contemplating Eastern and Western philosophy. Very bad course in Ordinary General Philosophy follows. If he’d done Greek at school and knew what "arête" meant, we could have been spared most of the 1970s. AMcK

38 Ways

Count on Yoga: 38 Ways Yoga Keeps You Fit

By Timothy McCall, M.D.

...Western science is starting to provide some concrete clues as to how
yoga works to improve health, heal aches and pains, and keep sickness
at bay. Once you understand them, you'll have even more motivation to
step onto your mat, and you probably won't feel so tongue-tied the next
time someone wants Western proof....

Flex Time

1 Improved flexibility is one of the first and most obvious benefits of yoga. During your first class, you probably won't be able to touch your toes, never mind do a backbend. But if you stick with it, you'll notice a gradual loosening, and eventually, seemingly impossible poses will become possible. You'll also probably notice that aches and pains start to disappear. That's no coincidence. Tight hips can strain the knee joint due to improper alignment of the thigh and shinbones. Tight hamstrings can lead to a flattening of the lumbar spine, which can cause back pain. And inflexibility in muscles and connective tissue, such as fascia and ligaments, can cause poor posture.

Strength Test

2
Strong muscles do more than look good. They also protect us from
conditions like arthritis and back pain, and help prevent falls in
elderly people. And when you build strength through yoga, you balance
it with flexibility. If you just went to the gym and lifted weights,
you might build strength at the expense of flexibility.

Standing Orders

3 Your head is like a bowling ball—big, round, and heavy. When it’s balanced directly over an erect spine, it takes much less work for your neck and back muscles to support it. Move it several inches forward, however, and you start to strain those muscles. Hold up that forward-leaning bowling ball for eight or 12 hours a day and it’s no wonder you’re tired. And fatigue might not be your only problem. Poor posture can cause back, neck, and other muscle and joint problems. As you slump, your body may compensate by flattening the normal inward curves in your neck and lower back. This can cause pain and degenerative arthritis of the spine.

Joint Account

4
Each time you practice yoga, you take your joints through their full
range of motion. This can help prevent degenerative arthritis or
mitigate disability by "squeezing and soaking" areas of cartilage that
normally aren't used. Joint cartilage is like a sponge; it receives
fresh nutrients only when its fluid is squeezed out and a new supply
can be soaked up. Without proper sustenance, neglected areas of
cartilage can eventually wear out, exposing the underlying bone like
worn-out brake pads.

Spinal Rap

5
Spinal disks—the shock absorbers between the vertebrae that can
herniate and compress nerves—crave movement. That's the only way they
get their nutrients. If you've got a well-balanced asana practice with
plenty of backbends, forward bends, and twists, you'll help keep your
disks supple.

Bone Zone

6
It's well documented that weight-bearing exercise strengthens bones and
helps ward off osteoporosis. Many postures in yoga require that you
lift your own weight. And some, like Downward- and Upward-Facing Dog,
help strengthen the arm bones, which are particularly vulnerable to
osteoporotic fractures. In an unpublished study conducted at California
State University, Los Angeles, yoga practice increased bone density in
the vertebrae. Yoga's ability to lower levels of the stress hormone
cortisol (see Number 11) may help keep calcium in the bones.

Flow Chart

7
Yoga gets your blood flowing. More specifically, the relaxation
exercises you learn in yoga can help your circulation, especially in
your hands and feet. Yoga also gets more oxygen to your cells, which
function better as a result. Twisting poses are thought to wring out
venous blood from internal organs and allow oxygenated blood to flow in
once the twist is released. Inverted poses, such as Headstand,
Handstand, and Shoulderstand, encourage venous blood from the legs and
pelvis to flow back to the heart, where it can be pumped to the lungs
to be freshly oxygenated. This can help if you have swelling in your
legs from heart or kidney problems. Yoga also boosts levels of
hemoglobin and red blood cells, which carry oxygen to the tissues. And
it thins the blood by making platelets less sticky and by cutting the
level of clot-promoting proteins in the blood. This can lead to a
decrease in heart attacks and strokes since blood clots are often the
cause of these killers.

Lymph Lesson

8
When you contract and stretch muscles, move organs around, and come in
and out of yoga postures, you increase the drainage of lymph (a viscous
fluid rich in immune cells). This helps the lymphatic system fight
infection, destroy cancerous cells, and dispose of the toxic waste
products of cellular functioning.

Heart Start

9
When you regularly get your heart rate into the aerobic range, you
lower your risk of heart attack and can relieve depression. While not
all yoga is aerobic, if you do it vigorously or take flow or Ashtanga
classes, it can boost your heart rate into the aerobic range. But even
yoga exercises that don't get your heart rate up that high can improve
cardiovascular conditioning. Studies have found that yoga practice
lowers the resting heart rate, increases endurance, and can improve
your maximum uptake of oxygen during exercise—all reflections of
improved aerobic conditioning. One study found that subjects who were
taught only pranayama could do more exercise with less oxygen.

Pressure Drop

10 If
you've got high blood pressure, you might benefit from yoga. Two
studies of people with hypertension, published in the British medical
journal The Lancet, compared the effects of Savasana (Corpse
Pose) with simply lying on a couch. After three months, Savasana was
associated with a 26-point drop in systolic blood pressure (the top
number) and a 15-point drop in diastolic blood pressure (the bottom
number)—and the higher the initial blood pressure, the bigger the drop.

Worry Thwarts

11
Yoga lowers cortisol levels. If that doesn't sound like much, consider
this. Normally, the adrenal glands secrete cortisol in response to an
acute crisis, which temporarily boosts immune function. If your
cortisol levels stay high even after the crisis, they can compromise
the immune system. Temporary boosts of cortisol help with long-term
memory, but chronically high levels undermine memory and may lead to
permanent changes in the brain. Additionally, excessive cortisol has
been linked with major depression, osteoporosis (it extracts calcium
and other minerals from bones and interferes with the laying down of
new bone), high blood pressure, and insulin resistance. In rats, high
cortisol levels lead to what researchers call "food-seeking behavior"
(the kind that drives you to eat when you're upset, angry, or
stressed). The body takes those extra calories and distributes them as
fat in the abdomen, contributing to weight gain and the risk of
diabetes and heart attack.

Happy Hour

12 Feeling sad? Sit in Lotus. Better yet, rise up into a backbend or soar royally into King Dancer Pose. While it’s not as simple as that, one study found that a consistent yoga practice improved depression and led to a significant increase in serotonin levels and a decrease in the levels of monoamine oxidase (an enzyme that breaks down neurotransmitters) and cortisol. At the University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson, Ph.D., found that the left prefrontal cortex showed heightened activity in meditators, a finding that has been correlated with greater levels of happiness and better immune function. More dramatic left-sided activation was found in dedicated, long-term practitioners.

Weighty Matters

13
Move more, eat less—that's the adage of many a dieter. Yoga can help on
both fronts. A regular practice gets you moving and burns calories, and
the spiritual and emotional dimensions of your practice may encourage
you to address any eating and weight problems on a deeper level. Yoga
may also inspire you to become a more conscious eater.

Low Show

14
Yoga lowers blood sugar and LDL ("bad") cholesterol and boosts HDL
("good") cholesterol. In people with diabetes, yoga has been found to
lower blood sugar in several ways: by lowering cortisol and adrenaline
levels, encouraging weight loss, and improving sensitivity to the
effects of insulin. Get your blood sugar levels down, and you decrease
your risk of diabetic complications such as heart attack, kidney
failure, and blindness.

Brain Waves

15 An important component of yoga is focusing on the present. Studies have found that regular yoga practice improves coordination, reaction time, memory, and even IQ scores. People who practice Transcendental Meditation demonstrate the ability to solve problems and acquire and recall information better—probably because they’re less distracted by their thoughts, which can play over and over like an endless tape loop.

Nerve Center

16
Yoga encourages you to relax, slow your breath, and focus on the
present, shifting the balance from the sympathetic nervous system (or
the fight-or-flight response) to the parasympathetic nervous system.
The latter is calming and restorative; it lowers breathing and heart
rates, decreases blood pressure, and increases blood flow to the
intestines and reproductive organs—comprising what Herbert Benson,
M.D., calls the relaxation response.

Space Place

17
Regularly practicing yoga increases proprioception (the ability to feel
what your body is doing and where it is in space) and improves balance.
People with bad posture or dysfunctional movement patterns usually have
poor proprioception, which has been linked to knee problems and back
pain. Better balance could mean fewer falls. For the elderly, this
translates into more independence and delayed admission to a nursing
home or never entering one at all. For the rest of us, postures like
Tree Pose can make us feel less wobbly on and off the mat.

Control Center

18
Some advanced yogis can control their bodies in extraordinary ways,
many of which are mediated by the nervous system. Scientists have
monitored yogis who could induce unusual heart rhythms, generate
specific brain-wave patterns, and, using a meditation technique, raise
the temperature of their hands by 15 degrees Fahrenheit. If they can
use yoga to do that, perhaps you could learn to improve blood flow to
your pelvis if you're trying to get pregnant or induce relaxation when
you're having trouble falling asleep.

Loose Limbs

19 Do
you ever notice yourself holding the telephone or a steering wheel with
a death grip or scrunching your face when staring at a computer screen?
These unconscious habits can lead to chronic tension, muscle fatigue,
and soreness in the wrists, arms, shoulders, neck, and face, which can
increase stress and worsen your mood. As you practice yoga, you begin
to notice where you hold tension: It might be in your tongue, your
eyes, or the muscles of your face and neck. If you simply tune in, you
may be able to release some tension in the tongue and eyes. With bigger
muscles like the quadriceps, trapezius, and buttocks, it may take years
of practice to learn how to relax them.

Chill Pill

20
Stimulation is good, but too much of it taxes the nervous system. Yoga
can provide relief from the hustle and bustle of modern life.
Restorative asana, yoga nidra (a form of guided relaxation), Savasana,
pranayama, and meditation encourage pratyahara, a turning
inward of the senses, which provides downtime for the nervous system.
Another by-product of a regular yoga practice, studies suggest, is
better sleep—which means you'll be less tired and stressed and less
likely to have accidents.

Immune Boon

21
Asana and pranayama probably improve immune function, but, so far,
meditation has the strongest scientific support in this area. It
appears to have a beneficial effect on the functioning of the immune
system, boosting it when needed (for example, raising antibody levels
in response to a vaccine) and lowering it when needed (for instance,
mitigating an inappropriately aggressive immune function in an
autoimmune disease like psoriasis).

Breathing Room

22 Yogis tend to take fewer breaths of greater volume, which is both calming and more efficient. A 1998 study published in The Lancet
taught a yogic technique known as "complete breathing" to people with
lung problems due to congestive heart failure. After one month, their
average respiratory rate decreased from 13.4 breaths per minute to 7.6.
Meanwhile, their exercise capacity increased significantly, as did the
oxygen saturation of their blood. In addition, yoga has been shown to
improve various measures of lung function, including the maximum volume
of the breath and the efficiency of the exhalation. Yoga also promotes
breathing through the nose, which filters the air, warms it (cold, dry
air is more likely to trigger an asthma attack in people who are
sensitive), and humidifies it, removing pollen and dirt and other
things you'd rather not take into your lungs.

Poop Scoop

23
Ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, constipation—all of these can be
exacerbated by stress. So if you stress less, you'll suffer less. Yoga,
like any physical exercise, can ease constipation—and theoretically
lower the risk of colon cancer—because moving the body facilitates more
rapid transport of food and waste products through the bowels. And,
although it has not been studied scientifically, yogis suspect that
twisting poses may be beneficial in getting waste to move through the
system.

Peace of Mind

24
Yoga quells the fluctuations of the mind, according to Patanjali's Yoga
Sutra. In other words, it slows down the mental loops of frustration,
regret, anger, fear, and desire that can cause stress. And since stress
is implicated in so many health problems—from migraines and insomnia to
lupus, MS, eczema, high blood pressure, and heart attacks—if you learn
to quiet your mind, you'll be likely to live longer and healthier.

Divine Sign

25
Many of us suffer from chronic low self-esteem. If you handle this
negatively—take drugs, overeat, work too hard, sleep around—you may pay
the price in poorer health physically, mentally, and spiritually. If
you take a positive approach and practice yoga, you'll sense, initially
in brief glimpses and later in more sustained views, that you're
worthwhile or, as yogic philosophy teaches, that you are a
manifestation of the Divine. If you practice regularly with an
intention of self-examination and betterment—not just as a substitute
for an aerobics class—you can access a different side of yourself.
You'll experience feelings of gratitude, empathy, and forgiveness, as
well as a sense that you're part of something bigger. While better
health is not the goal of spirituality, it's often a by-product, as
documented by repeated scientific studies.

Pain Drain

26
Yoga can ease your pain. According to several studies, asana,
meditation, or a combination of the two, reduced pain in people with
arthritis, back pain, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other
chronic conditions. When you relieve your pain, your mood improves,
you're more inclined to be active, and you don't need as much
medication.

Heat Treatment

27
Yoga can help you make changes in your life. In fact, that might be its
greatest strength. Tapas, the Sanskrit word for "heat," is the fire,
the discipline that fuels yoga practice and that regular practice
builds. The tapas you develop can be extended to the rest of your life
to overcome inertia and change dysfunctional habits. You may find that
without making a particular effort to change things, you start to eat
better, exercise more, or finally quit smoking after years of failed
attempts.

Guru Gifts

28
Good yoga teachers can do wonders for your health. Exceptional ones do
more than guide you through the postures. They can adjust your posture,
gauge when you should go deeper in poses or back off, deliver hard
truths with compassion, help you relax, and enhance and personalize
your practice. A respectful relationship with a teacher goes a long way
toward promoting your health.

Drug Free

29 If
your medicine cabinet looks like a pharmacy, maybe it's time to try
yoga. Studies of people with asthma, high blood pressure, Type II
diabetes (formerly called adult-onset diabetes), and
obsessive-compulsive disorder have shown that yoga helped them lower
their dosage of medications and sometimes get off them entirely. The
benefits of taking fewer drugs? You'll spend less money, and you're
less likely to suffer side effects and risk dangerous drug
interactions.

Hostile Makeover

30
Yoga and meditation build awareness. And the more aware you are, the
easier it is to break free of destructive emotions like anger. Studies
suggest that chronic anger and hostility are as strongly linked to
heart attacks as are smoking, diabetes, and elevated cholesterol. Yoga
appears to reduce anger by increasing feelings of compassion and
interconnection and by calming the nervous system and the mind. It also
increases your ability to step back from the drama of your own life, to
remain steady in the face of bad news or unsettling events. You can
still react quickly when you need to—and there's evidence that yoga
speeds reaction time—but you can take that split second to choose a
more thoughtful approach, reducing suffering for yourself and others.

Good Relations

31
Love may not conquer all, but it certainly can aid in healing.
Cultivating the emotional support of friends, family, and community has
been demonstrated repeatedly to improve health and healing. A regular
yoga practice helps develop friendliness, compassion, and greater
equanimity. Along with yogic philosophy's emphasis on avoiding harm to
others, telling the truth, and taking only what you need, this may
improve many of your relationships.

Sound System

32
The basics of yoga—asana, pranayama, and meditation—all work to improve
your health, but there's more in the yoga toolbox. Consider chanting.
It tends to prolong exhalation, which shifts the balance toward the
parasympathetic nervous system. When done in a group, chanting can be a
particularly powerful physical and emotional experience. A recent study
from Sweden's Karolinska Institute suggests that humming sounds—like
those made while chanting Om—open the sinuses and facilitate drainage.

Vision Quest

33 If
you contemplate an image in your mind's eye, as you do in yoga nidra
and other practices, you can effect change in your body. Several
studies have found that guided imagery reduced postoperative pain,
decreased the frequency of headaches, and improved the quality of life
for people with cancer and HIV.

Clean Machine

34
Kriyas, or cleansing practices, are another element of yoga. They
include everything from rapid breathing exercises to elaborate internal
cleansings of the intestines. Jala neti, which entails a gentle lavage
of the nasal passages with salt water, removes pollen and viruses from
the nose, keeps mucus from building up, and helps drains the sinuses.

Karma Concept

35
Karma yoga (service to others) is integral to yogic philosophy. And
while you may not be inclined to serve others, your health might
improve if you do. A study at the University of Michigan found that
older people who volunteered a little less than an hour per week were
three times as likely to be alive seven years later. Serving others can
give meaning to your life, and your problems may not seem so daunting
when you see what other people are dealing with.

Healing Hope

36 In
much of conventional medicine, most patients are passive recipients of
care. In yoga, it's what you do for yourself that matters. Yoga gives
you the tools to help you change, and you might start to feel better
the first time you try practicing. You may also notice that the more
you commit to practice, the more you benefit. This results in three
things: You get involved in your own care, you discover that your
involvement gives you the power to effect change, and seeing that you
can effect change gives you hope. And hope itself can be healing.

Connective Tissue

37 As
you read all the ways yoga improves your health, you probably noticed a
lot of overlap. That's because they're intensely interwoven. Change
your posture and you change the way you breathe. Change your breathing
and you change your nervous system. This is one of the great lessons of
yoga: Everything is connected—your hipbone to your anklebone, you to
your community, your community to the world. This interconnection is
vital to understanding yoga. This holistic system simultaneously taps
into many mechanisms that have additive and even multiplicative
effects. This synergy may be the most important way of all that yoga
heals.

Placebo Power

38
Just believing you will get better can make you better. Unfortunately,
many conventional scientists believe that if something works by
eliciting the placebo effect, it doesn't count. But most patients just
want to get better, so if chanting a mantra—like you might do at the
beginning or end of yoga class or throughout a meditation or in the
course of your day—facilitates healing, even if it's just a placebo
effect, why not do it?

Taken from http://www.yogajournal.com/health/1634_1.cfm

Greetings! Going straight to to the heart of the matter, I have the following books as of 02 January 2007:

1. Alt, Carol. Eating in the Raw.
2. Avery, Jean. Past Lives, Present Loves.
3. Atkins, Robert C, M.D. Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution.
4. Calbon, Cherie and Calbon, John. The Coconut Diet: The Secret Ingredient That Helps You Lose Weight While You Eat Your Favorite Foods.
5. Critser, Greg. Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World.
6. D'Ambra, Gilles. Measure Your EQ Factor.
7. Dart-Thornton, Cecilia. The Iron Tree: Book One of the Crowthistle Chronicles. (Large-print Edition)
8. DeLillo, Don. The Body Artist.
9. Holthe, Tess Uriza. When The Elephants Dance.
10. Homer, trans. W.H.D. Rouse. The Iliad. (Prose)
11. Kennedy, Douglas. State of the Union.
12. Matthews, Andrew. Follow Your Heart.
13. Miller, Rand with David Wingrove. Myst: The Book of Ti'ana.
14. Morgan, Marlo. Message From Forever.
15. Reyes, Soledad, Ph.D. A Dark Tinge to the World.
16. Sanchez, Bo. Your Past Does Not Define Your Life.
17. Stern, D.A. Blair Witch: The Secret Confession of Rustin Parr.
18. Tan, Ernest L. Gentle Presence: Bringing Back the Warmth of Your Humanity.
19. Timms, Rachel and Hayes, Laurence. Whatever You Want. (A "Choose Your Own Adventure" type of book)
20. Voltaire. Candide. (Barnes&Noble Classics Edition)
21. Waller, Robert James. The Bridges of Madison County.
22*. Lawler, Jennifer. The Self-Defense Deck: 50 Powerful Strategies for Staying Safe.

*Non-book item

I may be contacted through the comment section here, as well as through the Comment Box of this webpage. If interested, we can correspond through SMS, though do email me first at twitha at gmail dot com for privacy purposes! :)

Cheers, and Happy New Year!