
01 Feb Can a Book Change Your Life?
by Deborah Carter Mastelotto
Every January for the last fifteen years or so, I’ve written book recommendations for each sign of the Zodiac. I base these recommendations on planetary transits and how they impact each Sun sign, and cross my fingers. It’s so tricky to try and do monthly astrology forecasts, and if you
have ever done it you know what I’m talking about. Humans are complex and each individual birth chart reflects that complexity. You can always get closer by suggesting that readers also check out Moon sign and Rising sign recommendations, but the truth is what makes a book
resonate is specific and individual, and mysterious.
What is it about a book that makes you want to give it to someone else to read as well? What is it about a book that helps you decide how to handle certain difficult life situations, or even changes the way you think? I can recall right off the top of my head as I write this, four books that did that for me at specific
turning points in my past, and they had nothing at all to do with my astrological sign (Scorpio, in case you’re asking, and I’m a snake in Chinese astrology).
Linda Goodmans Sun Signs
When Linda Goodmans huge best seller first came out in 1968, it would have been absolutely banned by my ridiculously strict, religious mother but somehow I discovered it in my tiny local library, and I had a library card. I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of astrology so I checked out the book and hid it under my bed. Reading it well into the night under the covers with a flashlight became my guilty pleasure and Goodman’s friendly and often funny way of humanizing each sign sparked an ‘aha’ moment in me, and I became obsessed. I devoured every book I could find on the subject of Astrology, the more complicated the better, which of course led me to birth charts. I was lucky enough to live in San Diego at the time, where Neil F. Michaelson also lived and worked, and he produced the first handy Ephemeris in a one volume
form, put it on his computer and invented (as far as I know) the first computerized birth charts. In 1978 I discovered I could order them by mail, immediately stopped struggling to hand-erect birth charts and never looked back.

The I Ching, Richard Wilhelm translation
Just before I left California for Texas in 1986, and before even moving was a twinkle in my eye, a friend and I sat around my tiny kitchen table drinking good red wine while he introduced me to the I Ching. I scrounged up three pennies and he pulled out his old and battered copy of Richard Wilhelms classic translation and started to explain how it worked. I was fascinated, like I have always been to all things metaphysical, but I was soon distracted by the forward written by none other than Carl Jung! It turns out Jung and Wilhelm were great friends, and some even credit Jung’s groundbreaking work on synchronicity with the hours he spent with the I Ching with his old friend, trying to figure out why it worked. Wilhelm was the first to translate this ancient and sacred text into a western language, first German, then it was later translated into other languages, like English. After that night, I Ching became one of my closest personal advisors. I always had a mental image of a rainy Asian man, sitting on my shoulder and whispering in my ear, giving me advice on how to be a better person. I bought lots of I Ching books after that first
introduction but I kept going back to my yellow cloth-bound hard cover copy of the Wilhelm version, which became sort of my bible. My children used to find stacks of three pennies all over the house. Now I use an app that’s based on the same translation.

The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot
You would think if you read a book that changed your basic understanding of how the universe worked, you’d remember who recommended it to you, right? I cannot remember how I acquired that book or even who suggested it, but it completely and permanently altered the way I looked at the world. It came out in 1991-2 and at that time I was experiencing a big shake up in my personal and professional life. Reading this book shifted my inner reality. I became not so tied to physical things happening on the big world stage anymore. Talbots careful exploration of physics, spirituality, and psychology and how our brains work. His attempts to explain supernatural, metaphysical, spiritual phenomena using physics resonates with me to this day.

Journey of Souls by Michael Newton
In May of 2009 my father died. His death changed everything for me, and there’s no explaining it. He died in May and by July I had closed my big salon on South Congress and opened a small private studio in a tiny house in Dripping Springs Texas. But, in June my sweet friend Holly sent me two of the same book, ‘Journey of Souls’ by a clinical psychologist and clinical hypnotist Michael Newton PHD. It is a bout chronicling his experiences with 25 of his patients who, under hypnosis, talked about what they experienced after death. It was eye-opening and it completely eased my heart.
My new little salon in Dripping Springs just ‘happened to sit exactly across
Ranch Road 12 from where my father had his pizza place he called ‘One Eyed Jacks’. I’d get my coffee first thing on a work day, lean over the bannister on the front porch and say “Hi Dad”, and we’d have coffee together. I don’t think I would have thought to do that before reading this book. “Why two?” I asked her when next I saw her. She told me that after I read it I would want to give a book to someone else. And she was absolutely correct. Now, when I see someone who I think might benefit from this book, I give them two and tell them the same thing Holly told me.

The Pivot Year by Brianna Wiest
While writing my astrological book recommendations for 2025, I came across the book ‘The Pivot Year’ and bought one for myself. It wasn’t even my book recommendation for Scorpio, chose it for Taurus, but I just loved the premise—read one page a day for a year. The pages aren’t numbered according to a calendar year, just numbered, so you can begin your journey any time. I bought one for myself, and one for each of my three kids. I thought it would be fun to do it at the same time. But the weird thing about this book is, it seems to demand, energetically, that you give it away. My book arrived before my son’s as he was leaving for Hawaii so I gave him mine. My daughter bought one herself, forgetting that I ordered her one so she gave that one to me when the one I ordered for her came a week later. Then my fries from NYC picked it up, thumbed through it, and asked me about it, so of course I gave him mine. Then my son’s book arrived when he got back from Hawaii but I already gave him mine so he gave me that one. I brought it home with me but I had it in the kitchen while I made lunch and my husband’s audio engineer walked in, of course picked it up, so there goes my other copy. We even formed
a little group text over that book, and when I got to page 13, I just had to screen shot it and send it to everyone:
DAY 13
“You tell life what you want, and life tells you how to get it. When you ask for soulmate love, you must listen if life says, but not with them. When you ask for prosperity, you must listen if life says, but not like this. When you ask for belonging, you must listen if life says, but not here. What feels on the surface like rejection is often redirection. When you ask for a big life, you cannot keep fighting for a smaller one to stay.”
So, yeah, this book. Whether it changes my life as book number five remains to be seen, but I am certainly giving it away randomly, so there’s that.

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