Self Help Books

I used to love to go to the book dumpster and dive in. The book dumpster was not actually a dumpster. That was what we called it, but it was actually a series of trash bins behind a local used bookstore. It was amazing how much they threw out. Occasionally, you could find real gems there. I got a few classics, as well as a full color Encyclopedia of British mythology out of the dumpster. The majority of it, however, was stuff that no one would want. There were religious books, books talking about strange occult conspiracies in the highest echelons of government, and of course a fair share of pulp fiction. The best finds, however, were the self help books.

Now, even the top self help books can be pretty ridiculous. Either they are filled with mindless affirmations, or else they are filled with advice that anyone could figure out on their own if they had half a brain. But these were second and third tier self help books. These were atrocious. There were self help books for teens written in this really chummy, phony tone, as if adolescents listen to someone who is clearly an adult if they pretended to be a teenager. There was book self help for alcoholics, telling endless stories of desperation in prose so purple that major it was hard to care. But the best were the religious self help books.

Most of these did not come from any of the ordinary religions. True, there were some Christian self help books that promised to introduce you to programs that would improve your relationship with God in 30 days, but these were only a tiny minority. Most of the self help books were written by groups like the Moonies, the Scientologists, and even weirder and more obscure sects. Some of these were truly entertaining.

My favorite self help book was written by L. Ron Hubbard. It was not actually a Scientology book, but obviously it was meant to recruit people into the Scientology fold. It basically told you that your body was filled with toxins, but that through spending hours and hours of time and thousands of thousands of dollars being trained by one of his technicians, you could detoxify and live a healthier, happier life. Most of the self help books advice was pretty commonsensical. It basically boiled down to this: if you jog, eat healthy foods, and spend a lot of time in the sauna, you will feel better. For this advice, they wanted thousands of dollars!