Free LDS Books Online

I first heard about the book Bonds That Make Us Free from my dad. Apparently, it started as a manuscript by C Terry Warner that was floating around Utah but had never been published. Called "Bonds of Anguish, Bonds of Love," it became so popular that copy shops would keep copies on hand to let people photocopy.

He finally published it under the name Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming To Ourselves.

Dad had found the whole book online, formatted it for the PDA, and shared it with me. So I first read the book on my Palm Pilot a couple years after I was married.

Who should read this book? Anyone who has ever had feelings like those described int he first chapter:

We have felt hurt or provoked or upset by the people around us-angry, for instance. Or resentful. Or envious. Or intimidated. Or fearful. Or humiliated. Or disgusted by something done to us. We feel helpless to rid ourselves of these feelings.

We don't rid ourselves of this sense of helplessness by trying to ignore the supposed offenses of others or attempting to distract ourselves from our feelings. The unfairness, indifference, disrespect, rudeness, or cruelty troubles us through and through-sometimes only faintly but always unmistakably. The pain, which is real, seeps into and taints every sector of life. Unclouded happiness seems impossible.

Everyone who has ever been stuck in such troubled thoughts and feelings knows how they make a shambles of our inner lives. A "gas law" of emotional disturbance operates here, which might be formulated as follows: "Any inner space, no matter how large, will be filled by any agitation, no matter how small." The feelings that we blame on others, and that seem to ruin everything, rudely refuse to be evicted once they take up residence in us. Even though we retreat to the bedroom and lock the door, figuratively speaking, we sleep in terror, knowing those feelings are somewhere wandering about in the house. Families who live on strained terms discover that their impatience and frustration contaminate every project they undertake, whatever the setting- cooking in the kitchen, repairing something in the workshop, reading in the bedroom, even trying to play a game together. It is difficult to overestimate the corrosive power of agitated feelings.

The book deals with these issues in beautiful and unexpected ways. I think it's vital reading.

The book is still online. You can start reading it here at Chapter One.

It's not the only book that deals with these issues. They're also discussed in the book The Anatomy of Peace, a book Marci likes even better than Bonds That Make Us Free.

The Anatomy of Peace is also online: Here's the Prologue and Chapter One.

There's also Leadership and Self Deception, a business book based on the same ideas, which is online here.

Now one of the men who worked on those books, James Ferrell, started publishing books for the LDS audience. His first book was called The Peacegiver, about how the Savior can bring peace into our lives. Chapter One and the Prologue are here.

After publishing that book, he's come out with another one about the love we need to have for holy things. It's called The Holy Secret, and DeseretBook.com is serializing it over the next few weeks. So far, they're up to chapter 5, but you can start reading from Chapter One here.

And while Stephen R Covey's Six Events is not online, they do have a printable version of the calender at the Deseret Book website.

Anyways, all of that ought to give you something to do online for a while.

(Note: If the pages I linked to at Meridian Magazine don't link to the other chapters of the book, you can find the other chapters on Meridian Magazine's Book Archive page.)