Loose Canon Part 2

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Charlotte Joko Beck: Everyday Zen (1989). Zen never seemed less like an endurance contest and more like a path to genuine healing than in this down-to-earth, plainspoken guide. Sogyal Rinpoche: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (1993). A Tibetan answer to The Divine Comedy complete with mind-boggling stories and the real deal on living your dying.

Matt Groening: The Simpsons (1989-). An 'anti-sitcom' that shishkabobs every shabby contemporary trend from infomercials to 'safe' nuclear power without a whisper of political correctness. Ernie Kovacs (1951-1962). This small-screen pioneer created a surreal world of sight and sound gags -- women disappear as they take off their clothes, hula hoops cut people in half, typewriters tap to music all by themselves -- that stretched and celebrated the new medium.

Viana La Place: Verdura -- Vegetables Italian-style (1991). Earthy recipes for fulfillment -- one of the easiest and most rewarding vegetarian cookbooks around. Erich Schiffmann: Yoga -- The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness (1996). A guide to inhabiting your body in new ways. This accessible, clearly written book opens a doorway to yoga for newcomers and jaded veterans alike.

Julia Cameron: The Artist's Way (1992). It's not about how to paint or write or dance -- it's about how to nurture the part of you that's afraid to paint or write or dance. Cameron's pathway to creativity is through health and fulfillment, not purgatorial pain. Brenda Ueland: If You Want to Write (1938). Shining with the visionary high-mindedness of the old American avant-garde, this classic on unblocking your inner writer recommends watchful laziness, cheerful egotism, and flat-out joy.

Dorothy Allison: Bastard out of Carolina (1992). In the turbulent Southern-poor-white world of this novel, incest isn't a joke -- it's a powerful, brutal family reality, movingly and convincingly portrayed. Sharon Olds: The Dead and the Living (1984). No-holds-barred poems about Olds' own abusive family risk self-indulgence in order to deliver a knockout emotional punch.

James Hillman & Michael Ventura: We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy -- and the World's Getting Worse (1993). Enlightening conversations on the nature -- and limitations -- of therapy, especially the danger of cordoning off psychology from the gritty world of civic and political life. Alice Miller: The Drama of the Gifted Child (1983). A bad title but a good book, which explores the hollowness within people whose parents instill in them an insistent and urgent expectation of success.

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