reading | On My Canvas

Best Books on How to Write a Book-Read As I Wrote My 1st

lot of books neatly placed in rows in a book store display featuring travel memoir journeys beyond and within this photo is used as a feature image for article best books on how to write a book (1)

My Best Books on How to Write a Book: I Read These While Writing My 1st Travel Memoir

Not all the best books on how to write a book carry this tagline. So many titles, such as Bird by Bird or On Writing, fall directly into the list of best books about writing books. The other books for writers that I have dared to add here are those that have nurtured my growth as a human and a writer for over eight years. These titles aren’t promoted as the best books for writing, but by being so amazing and wholesome, they have slowly guided me along while I wrote my first book, one page, one day, and one breath at a time.

I had written about writers often drinking from the common wellspring of the greatest writing ever written in my favorite books from 2022. I have drunk the books listed here. While reading them, the book had become me, I was her, and everything else ceased to exist.

That afternoon when I learnt to bike and couldn’t believe what I was doing, or when I saw the Himalayas for the first time and was stunned by the pure mountains (more details in my book), and life had grown exponentially larger from what it had been in moments, these books have enlarged my life, too.

A lot of books have changed my life. The Little Prince and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance also belong to the same category. I am not including them here. This list of the best books on writing books is limited to those that directly helped me write better, especially travel and nonfiction, my travel memoir to be precise, made me see how to edit a nonfiction book, inspired me to write and keep pursuing art no matter the outcome, allowed me to feel what I was feeling as a lone writer at work might, and some are science books that enhanced my understanding of the human organism. To write about our species, we should understand the physics of our species.

Not a list is perfect, and not a list is suited to everyone. But this is mine. These titles run with my blood. They sit in my stomach. They shape each word my fingers type and my pen inks.

Enjoy my best books for creative writers. I hope that some of these storm you and cradle you as they have me.

Good luck!

a picture post card on a book used in the article on best books to read in 2023 small

When I started to list my best books to read in 2023 a week ago, there were so many travel books on it that I instead published my best travel books to read. But I am here now, excited to share the best books of 2023. These are not the latest releases of the year. …

This year I read about forty books only (apart from children’s books, online journals, and print magazines). As I don’t bother to finish the books I don’t like, most of those forty were strong books. I am sharing here my most favorite books of 2022: the ones that suffused me with courage and child-like wonder, showed me the beauty and the ordinary genius of everyday life, reaffirmed that we are shadows of our childhood, and equipped me with tools to understand life better.

Without these books I wouldn’t have been who I am today, I wouldn’t have known that ecstatic state of being out of this world that they rollerbladed me into, and my journey as a writer would have stagnated. (My all-time life-changing books are in the link.)

As a runnel of rainwater runs to meet the brook, writers run towards this common wellspring of inspiration, which is nothing else but the river of all great writing ever written. Like a thirsty tiger, we kneel, bend our knees, and drink from it every so often. Here, very humbly, I offer you some drops from that wellspring so not only you could make more sense of everything around you, but also see the beauty in all this.

Shall we?

boy getting knowledge from nonfiction books cosmic energy

Out of the 48 or so books I read in 2020, 25 percent-that’s only 12 books-were non-fiction. The rest were fiction books and children’s tales.

I started reading non-fiction in 2017 when I started this blog On My Canvas. I always read stories and novels, but nonfiction wasn’t a big thing around me. Not that reading fiction was a trend in my social circle either. I can count the selected few readers amongst my friends, batch mates, and colleagues at my fingertips.

There was one guy in college who loved Shakespeare and read philosophy. There is a poetry lover and creator who is still a great friend. Some of the elites from Vidya Mandir and other high-class Delhi schools could talk about Mark Twain and J.R.R Tolkien but only seldom did I see them with a book. Or maybe I wasn’t noticing books at that time myself.

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I write because I read. I grow because I read. I can never be bored because I read.

Out of the 48 or so books I read in 2020, 75 percent – that is 36 books – were fiction. The rest were non-fiction books, children’s stories, and travel books.

Even though most of my writing is personal growth and travel-focused, I also write short stories and personal essays.

And for any kind of creative writing – travel, short stories, and even self-development – reading fictional books is crucial. Otherwise, how would I know how to describe a scene on the street or a conversation amongst two people sitting in a cafe? How would I keep the articles interesting and give them a story arc? A beginning, a middle, and an end, you know.

Apart from helping me write, fiction short story books and novellas are interesting and entertaining. They teach a lot about the history of the world. Fiction books also unravel the behavior and inner workings of human beings. (Here are 21 books that changed my life.)

So while The Outsider taught me how straightforward life can be, Gora and Anna Karenina showed me a lot about the desires and limitations of human beings while telling the history of India and Russia. I wouldn’t have known so much about the Brahmo Samaj and the Russian high class if not for those two books.

Here are the creative fiction books I loved the most in 2020, that helped me understand something better, moved my life ahead, or made me feel as if with the characters I had progressed, too.

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Has anyone ever asked you to read books to change your life? I would go as far as to say reading is one of the synonyms of personal growth.

I started reading books, both fiction and non-fiction, including some great books about travel, sincerely only for the last six years. But during this time, I read books that shifted the course of my life. They exposed me to unbelievable facts. They laid open the science I didn’t know exist. They told me stories I could never imagine. These life-changing books made me cry like I hadn’t before. They made me laugh as if I had nothing to worry about. They accompanied me when I was lonely. They told me life can be lived in many ways. They reassured me it was okay to be who I was. But I could learn, too.

By a life changing book, I don’t necessarily mean a bestseller.

By life-changing books I mean the books in which the most obvious things have been said in the simplest form; that tell the history of life not as how people want us to know but how it happened; that show life writhing out of the mouth of suffering with full force; that remind us of adventures we had as little children that give sense to our today, too; that seem long and convoluted but essentially they talk about things we have always ignored.

These life changing books make us reconsider if the thing is worth beating ourselves about; they make us look at life with a child’s eyes again; they push us to ask questions we were too scared to even think about; they unravel the science behind all this and help us be a little less clueless; they give us hope that change is nothing but little things done every day; they show us compassion and tell us we are okay as who we are.