I know this because I finally counted. Eleven copies of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, given away over about eight years. It is not the book I would pick to describe myself. It is the book I keep picking for other people.
The book is short — you can read it in a long afternoon — and the first half is a Holocaust survivor’s memoir of Auschwitz. The second half is the theory of meaning he built out of what he saw there. What I keep noticing is that people never come back to me and mention the first half. They come back to me and say something specific from the second, in their own words, about a decision they had been putting off. It is not a self-help book. It is a book that gives you permission to take yourself seriously.
I do not push it. I put it in a shopping cart quietly with a note that says “you do not have to read it now.” About half the time it works. The other half people forget it exists, which is fine too — it is a heavy gift and it should be optional. But when it lands, it lands as a permission slip, and the person you gave it to comes back four months later and asks you what else you have.