books that changed your life

Hopefully This Link will take you to Pattisons choice of life changing book.

Possession by A.S. Byatt and L'isola di Arturo by Elsa Morante for me. I am sorry the last one does not touchstone, even if I have it in my catalogue, but it probably is due to the fact that it is in Italian....who knows....

Here are touchstones for the previous post:
ISLA DE ARTURO or Arturo's island

Thank you! You are GREAT!

Dr. Zhivago, read in the late 70's. The idea of the individual vs. community is what I found so thought-provoking at the time, if I remember correctly.

The Handmaid's Tale, read when it came out in 1985. The warnings of the book had echoes in personal experience. Scared the bejeebers out of me because of it.

Those are my top two which echo even now, decades after they were first read. Others which come to mind...

We Need to Talk about Kevin, read this year, a mind-blowing book whose effect I have yet to be able to adequately articulate...(it might be because something blew up in my brain...).

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, read in the early 70's. I remember being very moved by this but I no longer remember why!

Another recent book, Rape, a Love Story really challenged my idea of justice. It's a pretty horrible story, but it's very short (maybe novella length) and succinct.

The Secret River by Kate Grenville, also read this year, made me think about the price paid for success.

Don't Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock has pretty much kept me away from all fast food restaurants since I read it.

Do you *really* want to know what they're serving you? It's frightening!

Edited to add: The movie created from this book is amazing as well. It's called "Super-Size Me". It's well done, very funny, and certainly worth seeing.

The power of positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale , was life changing for me. Still thankfull today that I picked this book up on a friends bookshelf. Makes you think about what you have on your own bookshelf

Inspiring books...hmmm..
I would agree that The Handmaid's Tale really stays with you

The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany are really something, just because of the way John Irving writes.

Thats my two pence....

Oh, Birdsong too

I love Irving and Atwood, too, but the first book that actually changed my life was Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury because it was the first book I finished and immediately turned to the beginning to reread because I knew there was more in it than I'd gotten the first time. It's the book that taught me what fiction could be, what it could do in my head.

Would definately agree with a Handmaid's Tale. It certainly has made me stop and think.

The book that changed my life was Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan. I read it when I was 16 from my school library, shortly before leaving under a cloud. The incongruity of the subject matter coupled with Behan's poetic expression and wit really chimed with my (perceived) disreputable lifestyle. From there I read Sean O'Casey and Flann O'Brien then signed up for A' level English at night school.

I thought I was too old to be changed by a book, until I read The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley. Wow!

booklifeozarks: Three Cheers for you and I hope you have re-read The Sound and the Fury every few years for the sheer joy of it, as I have. Check my library and you will see that I am a Faulkner fanatic. My first Faulkner experience was with The Hamlet, and I loved it so I went tearing (as much as one can) through the entire trilogy, and then settled down to a lifetime of reading and re-reading his novels and the vast body of criticism and analysis that has built up about his work.

As for other books that changed my life, I put Thoreau's Walden at the top of the list; I first read it when I was about 13, and I believe it was the first non-fiction book I became totally engrossed in, absorbed like a sponge, and assimilated as part of myself. I had always loved to read, but I consider that the book that made me a Reader.

I've read and enjoyed The Handmaid's Tale, Siddartha, and The World According to Garp, though they don't quite make it into the "books that changed my life" category. Here are three that I do put in that category:

My Antonia by Willa Cather ~ It was the first "literary classic" I read as an adult, and it changed my aversion to anything that was labeled "classic" or "literary," an aversion that began when I was forced to read Dreiser's An American Tragedy (which it was: a tragedy that anyone should have to read it) in high school. *picture me gagging at the thought of that book even now, 40 years after the fact*

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell because it made me think about God and faith and the unbearably tragic losses of life in an entirely different way.

The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe - OK, I lied. My Antonia wasn't exactly the "first" classic I read after the disaster of An American Tragedy. In fact, I read The Story of San Michele when I was a senior in high school after the head of the English Dept. at the community college where I worked after school gave it to me as a gift and told me it was the best novel he'd ever read. Since I respected him and his opinion greatly (what can I say? he liked my poetry), I read it and fell in love with it too. It actually fostered my love of Italy, which I finally visited some 40 years later (in 2003) for the first time. Unfortunately, I didn't make it to San Michele on that trip, but I plan to go back so...

Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. I'll never look at a snowfall the same way again...

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. As a kid and teen I lived and breathed books. Once I graduated high school and fell into some bad company and bad times, I quit reading. I was managing a video store and had no idea who this "Harry Potter" was, but I sure was annoyed at all the craziness the movie had produced. I got a giftcard to B&N one Christmas, and being out of it for a couple years, had no idea what to get...the rest is history! Thanks, J.K!

Incognito by Petru Dumitriu. I picked this randomly (I believe) from the library shelf at the age of 15. It blew my socks off. I found it randomly twice more in later libraries. Every time I read it I get more from it. I have my own copy now. The author's insight into life and spirituality is profound. The author, by the way, had escaped from Soviet Romania before he wrote this book. It's powerful.

The first book that really changed my life and the way I read was Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I read it in junior high out of a personal desire to be "well read," whatever that means. It completely blew away my entire conception about what classic literature was, or could be. I never imagined I could love a story considered "classic" so much. That book was quickly followed by another life changer, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. As an adult, I've been greatly affected by the Russians, specifically by The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostevsky. Really, though, there are pages and pages of books that have changed me in some fundamental way.

It's hard to pick any individual books that changed my life, but I think a love of reading itself changed my life because I was painfully shy* as a child and reading was my refuge. If I hadn't discovered how much I loved reading very early in life, I would have had a much more difficult time growing up.

*People who meet me now never believe this.

Lets see, well, I've got quite a few actually. Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda would definitely be one. A Course in Miracles and Love Without End: Jesus Speaks both dealing with Love and Forgiveness, along with the sequel to the second have had a life changing effect on me. I've had issues for almost my whole life in relation to my dad, who is a white supremacist in every way except for openly declaring such, and I used to harbor a lot of anger against him for his intolerance. While I still find myself getting angry with him, these books have helped me begin to move past this and learn to forgive him. While I can't really name any one specific work, the books of Alice A. Bailey and Yogi Ramacharaka are responsible for shaping my theological and spiritual views.

Catch 22. I read it when I was 18 and realised that other people as well as me felt their lives were being controlled by irrational idiots. I'm much older now and Catch 22 makes even more sense. Bush, Howard, Blair, Iraq.

pamelad, I suppose you've hit on exectly why I hated Catch 22. I was working for the giverment (sic) and certainly did not need a book to tell me my world was being controlled by irrational idiots. It wasn't the least bit funny, either. A reminder of a painful life rarely is.

I think I have quite a few, too. But the books that stand out in my childhood are, Thy Friend Obadiah by Brinton Turkle, A Figure of Speech by Norma Fox Mazer and The Language of Goldfish by Zibby O'Neal.

As an adult, I felt the same sense of awe while reading Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. I found myself re-reading paragraphs because it was so beautifully, yet simply, written. Her most recent book, Gilead, was wonderful as well.

Gilead was absolutely wonderful. Remember the part where they stand between the sun and the moon?

Anyone read Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks? Makes John Brown really stick around in your head. What an enigmatic man.

Wow. Lots of great books mentioned here. I think by the time I read it, I may have been too old for Siddharta to change my life, but I still like to reread it every year or two. So maybe it actually did change my life.

Two that I read at a more formative age were:

- the Chronicles of Narnia, which made me always look for the magic in life, and,

- Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which I read when I was about 14, and it made me very, very careful about the guys I dated (sorry, not as metaphysical as most of the responses here, but very practical in the long run).

Dang it! I really should have read Mr. Goodbar. Reading it now, well, that'd be like locking the barn door after the horse got stolen. ;D

Nickelini #26, the one that did that (in the Mr. Goodbar-ish sense) for me was stranger beside me about Ted Bundy. I was in college and living in an apartment on the ground floor. Every noise made me jump out of my skin. My roommate was reading the book, too, and we would call to each other at night through the walls to make sure we were both still alive. No book has ever scared me so much! Mainly because it was TRUE.

His abilities to lure women away were so frightening. Hopefully reading it made me wiser and more aware.

The man who mistook his wife for a hat forced me to work harder at understanding people whose perceptions of the world were different from mine. Maybe I don't come up quite as short in the empathy department as I once did.

I've always been interested in the rest of the universe, but Coming of age in the Milky Way was the one that gave me a proper dose of humility about it all.

Notes from the underground and The Possessed, both of which I read much earlier in life, taught me a few lessons in taking ideas to logical but insane conclusions.

And I have to mention The southpaw and Bang the drum slowly, simply because Mark Harris's writing style made a huge impression on me. I reread them both this month and found myself talking like Henry Wiggen again!

>Pawcatuck
Have you read Crack in the Cosmic Egg? I'm off to look up Coming of Age in the Milky Way. Hmm...sounds intriguing. I remember sitting up late one night at my grandmother's looking at a fold out map of the galaxy, the Horseshoe Nebula and whatnot. The end result was I couldn't sleep. Stirred me RIGHT up.

I just had to jump in with my two cents on this one...
The Handmaid's Tale has been mentioned several times, and I wholeheartedly agree! My other world changing book is Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon. Both really made me think about the instability of society and gender roles.

I am also on the Handmaid's Tale bandwagon... what an amazing book!! I'd also say To Kill a Mockingbird, The House of the Spirits, East of Eden and The Red Tent had quite an effect on me....

I read Anne Frank's diary - The diary of a young girl - when I was about eleven years old. I really shook my world.

p.s. it seems that the work is quite a mess - there are several of them and many have a wrong author, even one with Eleanor Roosevelt as the author...

>30 Dene: Dene,
I've seen The crack in the cosmic egg but for some reason or another never picked it up.
Yeah, maps of the galaxy.... I think the book I've had the longest is a little paperback of star maps. It was really incomplete and pretty badly drawn -- it's also in about 40 pieces now -- but it got me started.

"Sophie's Choice" by William Styron was and still is perhaps one of the most influential books I have ever read. Not only did it bring to light, for me, how inhumanely humans can treat each other, it also stressed the long lasting affects such treatment can have. The book brought to light the true horror of war !
I read the book many years ago and the choice Sophie had to make still crosses my mind quite often, especially during the past six years. One wonders if we will ever learn ? I hope to never have to make such a choice but worse by far is to be he who is forcing another to do so, for then, it would seem to me, that person has lost all sense of decency.
Two wrongs can never make a right ! I learned that as a small child.........it seems that there are some adults, adults who have claimed the mantle of power, who never had to learn such a thing !

Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda; The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger; On the Road by Jack Kerouac. :)

I wouldn't say it changed my life but Hamlet by Shakespeare had a profound effect on me as a young teen. There he is, essentially the boy next door, away at university having a great old time, when an unimaginable event happens which shakes his entire view of every single aspect of his life. Totally inexperienced, he is forced to face greed, evil, murder, power, corruption, his mother's sexuality, his own unpreparedness for life until he ends up questioning whether his own life is worth continuing. At the end, circumstances sweep him along until he too falls victim to them. A classic innocence to experience story, it taught me that you might think you know how it all is in life but really, you just never know.

I read the book Chew on This, a simplified version of Fast Food Nation, because at the time I couldn't find FFN.
As soon as I read it I couldn't eat meat again.
So I'm now a vegetarian. That's life-changing, huh?

I was gradually leaning towards going veggie anyway, but this book pushed me over the edge. I think deep down I knew it would even before I began.

Angela

Books have been my best friend since I was a little baby, but reading Cannery Row (touchstone broken) by John Steinbeck in high school cinched my love for actual adult literature since I had been reading nothing but The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series for several years.

When I was 16 I read Dennis Wheatly's The devil rides out. I could'nt put it down, and ,in between work, read it in two days. It changed my life because it was the first real book - apart from school - that I had read, and from that moment I was hooked on books.
I once read Paul Getty's autobiograghy. It changed my life because he wrote about how he stopped smoking, and that helped me to stop!
I have read all of George Orwell's novels, but in The road to Wigan pier, he made me understand what socialism is, and it's not labour or communist.

The Brothers Karamazovwhen I was young and (too) impressionable; later, if we count essays (and why not?), Orwell's "Inside the Whale".

Hmm, After some thought the brothers K because it changed my views of draft dodgers and my father's generation in general. and The client by John Grisham because it was "The Book" that led me to more adult fiction and led me to be the reader I am. Although I have moved onto many other genres. Grisham was the one who got me started.

Two more I have read since my original post:

The Vegan Sourcebook After seeing "Meet Your Meat," helped me take it a step further.

Eat, Pray, Love Finished it this week. If and when I can get the courage/energy to put what I learned to use.

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse was a seminal book in my mind, I read it in college as an undergrad engineering student, kind of a different path to the way I looked at life. I had also read Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund, and Steppenwolf prior to that, but The Glass Bead Game made the most impression.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig I read in gradual school. I was completely moved by the idea of quality and started to question a lot of the things we do in life. It literally changed my worldview completely.

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I read this in high school, it was very instrumental in getting me to think about my goals in life and how society treats people who don't think along with the mainstream. I also read Atlas Shrugged, but that one was way too full of dogma and too pedantic for me, I got to John Galts speech and skimmed through the rest of the book. She made her case with The Fountainhead and unmade her case with Atlas Shrugged, IMHO.

The Women's Room was given to me by a feminist friend who cared enough about me to blow my thinking about genders and the interrelationships. I didn't exactly agree with everything but it did open my eyes.

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard made me examine my need to write and how I appraoched writing for myself, if not for mass consumption.

Dogs Bark, but the Caravan Rolls On: Observations Then and Now by Frank Conroy. This book introduced me to the possibilities of the essay form as I would want to practice it.

Funny this came up as I have been asked that for a newspaper article. I have no idea! I feel that so many books I've read have collectively helped shape me.