My Charitable Reading List

While giving is great, my life-long love has always been reading, and I certainly won't give up reading during my 40 Days of Giving experiment ... but I will focus my reading on books that emphasize the importance of giving, or which seem thematically associated to the project. Here's the pile of books, mostly from my local library, that I have sitting before me:

• How to Be An Everyday Philanthropist by Nicole Bouchard Boles
• Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier by Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D.
• The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin (Here's a link to an interesting radio interview with Jeremy Rifkin ... which is good, because this book is a monstrous tome at 616 pages plus many pages of endnotes, so I may not actually fit it into the 40 days.)
• The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society by Frans de Waal
• The Power of Serving Others by Gary Morsch & Dean Nelson
• The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness edited by Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh, and Jeremy Adam Smith.
• Give It Up!: My Year of Learning to Live Better with Less by Mary Carlomagno (It's not about giving, but a useful book in exploring how to organize your life so that you are able to give)
• 29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life by Cami Walker (This one, since it's sort of similar to what I'm doing, will be put off until the end of the project, since I don't want to be influenced by it too much.)
• The Year of Living Like Jesus: My Journey of Discovering What Jesus Would Really Do by Rev. Ed Dobson (This is a sort of "sequel" to The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs, which focused primarily on the Old Testament. Though written by a different author, it was inspired by the earlier book, and the Jacobs writes the forward. I don't know if I'll get to this one, or if I'll put it off until after the experiment is over.)

I've also snagged the following audiobooks from my local library, for when I'm in the car:

• The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand
• Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World by Bill Clinton
• The Generosity Factor: Discover the Joy of Giving Your Time, Talent, and Treasures by Kenneth Blanchard & S. Truett Cathy

This list of books should definitely get me in the giving mindset. I might need to occasionally run to the local coin shop and stare at some shiny gold coins just to avoid a full vow of poverty after taking all of this stuff into my brain.