Are there any non magic related books you've read that have really helped your craft so much that you'd recommend them? Maybe it's a book on how to present yourself professionally and it's helped your stage show or maybe it's a mystery series full of mental puzzles and it's helped you develop clever illusions. I'm just curious.
Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown. Not a magic book per se, but it helped me think in a different way about magic.
Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon.
The Harry Potter series by Rowling.
The Percy Jackson series and Heroes of Olympus series by Rick Riordan.
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome.
Sherlock Holmes series by Arthur C Doyle.
But really, all books I've read, from The Fault in Our Stars to The Theory of Everything, they have all shaped me as an individual and introduced a new aspect of my mind to myself. They have revealed how I think (when I analyze which parts I found the most interesting, which parts made me cry, laugh and which were the parts I skimmed over).
Thus they have all shaped my magic.
Though this thread is not about that, I'd add ''watch everything'' as well. Especially with respect to movies. And try out listening to all kinds of music. But I won't fly off on a tangent...
I think what's important in magic (and any art at all really) is to know yourself. But knowing more about ourselves becomes so much easier when we realise that we consume the content that we do, for a reason. There's a reason we hate something or love something. Through that, we can figure out ourselves.
Often, a recurring advice by more experienced magicians is to ''be ourselves''.
But in my opinion, only when we figure out at least a sliver of who we are, can we ''be ourselves''.