I have a lot of the classics on my list, but a new one that I've found extremely growth spurring was "Ego is the Enemy" by Ryan Holiday. I never really considered myself an egotists; confident perhaps, but something I never struggled with. This book showed me that I indeed did have more ego than necessary and gave me some really good guidance on how to live a better, happier, and more fulfilled life. Really something for a book I didn't even know I needed.
When in the middle of long refactorings, I'm notoriously terrible at going back and removing deprecated code. So, I made a gem that allows me to mark somewhere in the code to self destruct on a particular date. Prior to that date, you will see warnings in your test suite letting you know when and why the self destruct mechanism is there. After the date, it will start throwing exceptions in your test environment to basically self destruct the build. So far, it's been a great incentive/reminder to go back and clean up after myself.
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Supposedly, The Obstacle is the Way is in the vein. I haven't read it yet; it's on my list this month though. Supposedly a fairly good read though. It's written by a big PR guy though so who knows.
This has become my preferred translation. It's a great modern translation and uses very approachable language. To me it reads much more like a journal than the other available translations.
Unhappy with my existing copy and as part of a general effort to replace low-quality physical books with either higher-quality dead-trees or ebooks, I surveyed every translation of Meditations that I could find a few months ago, comparing key passages between them and with the original Greek.
I settled on Maxwell Staniforth's translation. The only hardcover of it I could find was from the Folio Society[1]. There may be paperbacks available from other publishers, I don't know.
Folios are somewhat cheaper on the used market, and used copies of Folio Society books tend to be exceptionally well-kept, probably because they're so pricey new.
As usual, most older (public domain) translations don't have much going for them for a modern reader. Several of the newer ones were OK, but Staniforth's manages to hold very close to the original while remaining easy to read, besting most other translations on both fronts, IMO.
The Hays translation linked by the parent strays, to my eye, exceptionally far from the form of the Greek text, so if fidelity to the original is important to you I'd avoid it.
Hopefully that helps save someone the three or four hours I lost to this :-)
Side note. I use to read a meditation or two every morning as part of my morning routine. I've fallen out of the habit but am going to start again. There's some really great thoughts in here.
I've recently been reading meditations (and carrying it around in my bag always at the ready). Very good book and I highly recommend writing your own meditations as well.
