We are so excited to dedicate this week’s Inspired By to the editor of SparkPress, Wayne Parrish.

Here, Wayne shares five books that have inspired her as an editor.

Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha

A young man leaves his family for a contemplative life, then discards it for one of the flesh. He conceives a son, but bored and sickened by lust and greed, moves on again. Near despair, Siddhartha comes to a river where he hears a unique sound. This sound signals the true beginning of his life — the beginning of suffering, rejection, peace, and, finally, wisdom.

Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics

An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism.

Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain

 Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, the intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father’s derelict farm and learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away.

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon

Here is the magical legend of King Arthur, vividly retold through the eyes and lives of the women who wielded power from behind the throne. 

Margaret George’s The Memoirs of Cleopatra

Told in Cleopatra’s own voice, this is a mesmerizing tale of ambition, passion, and betrayl, which begins when the twenty-year-old queen seeks out the most powerful man in the world, Julius Caesar, and does not end until, having survived the assassination of Caesar and the defeat of the second man she loves, Marc Antony, she plots her own death rather than be paraded in triumph through the streets of Rome.