Life changing books

I glanced at the cover of Markus Zusak's THE BOOK THIEF the other day (it's working its way to the top of my TBR pile) and noted this blurb:

"It's the kind of book that can be life changing."

Has there been such a book(s) for you? A volume that altered everything you believed, that permanently and fundamentally rearranged the deck furniture in your mind?

Examples:

When I was a kid, the first book I remember affecting me was the story of "Beowulf". THE WIZARD OF OZ blew my mind when I was around 10-11. Ray Bradbury's THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN made me a science fiction fan for life. William Shirer's THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH stole my innocence and introduced me to true evil. Hunter S. Thompson's FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS brought me out of my protective shell, William Burroughs' NAKED LUNCH and INTERZONE taught me that the rules of narrative can be shattered and...

But that'll do for now.

Anybody else?

I prefer to remember moments where I read books that changed my life--

case i point, I always remember reading Wuthering Heights in a youth hostel at 1 AM, vividly hallucinating Cathy's ghost mumbling at the window that looked over a landscape much like what i imagine Heathcliff's looked out upon.

My favorite was reading one of the best books I've ever happened upon-- City of Saints and Madmen. I first found it in one of those rich suburb libraries that are scattered around the West Coast where I live. Anyway, I was sitting on this bench, looking out a giant window that reminded me of an houseboat, reading about Dradin and his ill-starred love affair in a trance. I seem to prefer memories where I was reading whilst it rained, i guess.

The first time I read To the Lighthouse was inauspicious, but the second time (when I really grasped how to read the book and what it was about), i was reading it sitting on a creekbank a stone's throw from Yosemite National Park. Not sure what that means, since the book's landscape is oceans and not almost dry creekbeds, but it was still evocative enough.

I don't remember where I first read Tombs of Atuan, my first feminist sci-fi book, (no really), but I know that the sense of blind, inhuman old gods terrified me and excited me in a visceral way that I've never forgotten.

That's really what I prefer in books-- I love things that stir up my unconcious, kick it about and let it drift down in new patterns. I also seem to love books with lots of ocean or water images, I guess.

Full fathoms five thy father lies...

Brave New World was my first real introduction to science fiction and dystopian literature (besides children's/YA marketed books) - not life changing, but definitely memorable and important.
Life of Pi and The Body of Christopher Creed stand out in my mind, too.

The two books that "rearranged the deck chairs" of my mind were The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind, (goofy touchstone), a book I heartily recommend to anyone interested in Big History, and, at about the same time The Tao of Physics. These two books created an entirely new worldview for me. One that works quite well, I might add.

Being an essentially religious person, they situated God for me in a way that allows me a rational belief without having to throw out the parts that don't make sense to most others. It has allowed my faith to blossom without requiring an intellectual retreat to the twelfth century.

Juliette by DAF Sade made me realize, with horror, how far one can go with the written word. And how something written in the 18th century could still be shocking today.

Inquisitor War by Ian Watson got my hooked on Warhammer 40K fiction.

An Adultery by Alexander Theroux got me hooked.

The Royal Family by William Vollmann -- I admired his blend of pornography, reportage, mysticism, and epic. A truly unique reading experience.

99 Novels by Burgess. If anything, it changed my book-buying habits, keeping an eye out for the odd title that Burgess really liked.

Ulysses by Joyce floored me. Same with Trilogy by Samuel Beckett

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein soured me to his writing. I've been reluctant to read anything of his ever again.

Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. I got one chapter into it and couldn't bear to read it anymore. My eyeballs were bleeding from the bad writing. I enjoy books about conspiracy theories and evil clerics, but for that I read The Illuminatus! Trilogy in college.

Catcher in the Rye taught me that you sometimes need to be at a certain age to really enjoy and appreciate a book.

Conversely, Pride and Prejudice taught me that some books are timeless.

A Room of One's Own taught me to not assume that great women writers are the minority.

On the Road taught me that not all great literature is that great to me. And that's okay.

The Lathe of Heaven taught me that science fiction could be about so, so much more than space battles. (Although I do still have a fondness for a good space battle.)

Midnight's Children taught me that serious modern literature need not be po-faced and serious, it can also be delightfully fun at times.

And, as a child Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass both taught me that books could be wondrous, exciting, adventurous, breath-taking, clever, puzzling, and sometimes unfathomable. Still love those books to pieces.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was one of mine, too. Also Be Here Now by Ram Dass.

in high school i was somewhat intrigued with borges but found him too cold and cerebral. i thought pablo neruda was more interesting. with the years i've come to realize that borges really changed my world view without me realizing it. in high school i had read his ficciones and some of his anthologies. i still like neruda but i don't think he changed my perspective on the world the way borges did.

I look for every book I read to change me in some important way. Dave Barry may change me only for the duration of the book, but laughing out loud is an important way to be for at least awhile. If I am not changed by a book I reckon it "unnecessary," but it sometimes takes me awhile to realize whether I have been changed.

The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener probably led me on paths that might have taken me until after my death to find otherwise. Most of my shaping, however, has been done in bits and pieces, many easy to overlook, but none in the end unimportant.

Robert

Oh dear, this is so boring of me because this book actually had those words on the back cover, 'This book will change your life', but for once I think they were right. The book that opened my eyes to the fact that annoyances I had to put up with every day were actually universal and not just my own bad luck had to be The Women's Room. I guess if I were to reread it now (and I do plan to, one day) it might seem a bit polemical but to those of us who were at just the right age to absorb it at the time of its original publication it was like getting glasses after years of bumping into things.

Peak-in-Darien moments are funny - they often involve books that seem rather unimportant in hindsight. I suspect that even Keats might have been a bit embarrassed later in life about all the fuss he had made about a new translation of Homer (not to mention getting Cortez and Balboa mixed up...).

I can think of plenty of books that have changed my relationship with language — from Hiawatha when I was about three or four to Zazie dans le Métro a year or two ago — but it's much more difficult to pick out individual books that have identifiably changed the way I live my life. Probably I ought to nominate Thomas Cook's Continental Timetable, or some of the pile of law books on my desk.

#11 Okay, someone has to ask: What is a 'Peak-in-Darien' moment?

>12 Booksloth:
You obviously haven't travell'd sufficiently in the realms of gold. You'd better get your Ken to arrange a holiday in Greece for you. :-)

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_First_Looking_into_Chapman%27s_Homer

Well, Fear and Loathing is an obvious choice for me. City of Saints and Madmen is another; I'm glad to see that VanderMeer has had the same effect on others, as his works are so consistently strange and substantial. After reading Lem's The Cyberiad, I feel he could be a game-changing author for me. The same goes with Steinbeck; not too long ago I finished Tortilla Flat, which was profound.

Hmmm, perhaps others might be:

Blood Meridian
The Hobbit
Kon-Tiki
Tao Te Ching
The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way - Nagarjuna

Regarding The Book Thief: it didn't change my life, but it did make me cry, which is rare (not counting tears of boredom).

Starting the Victorian classics on my own (George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Victor Hugo, Brontes) and the earlier Jane Austen changed my reading life, though I guess you can say Anne of Green Gables was the prelude to all that. They taught me that I could enjoy 'required reading' without being forced to read it in school. On a slightly shallow note, reading Anne of Green Gables made me long for red hair...which I have now.

#13 Thanks for explaining that - have to confess I'm not a big Keats fan. Now I have to ask about 'my Ken'? I hope that doesn't make me Barbie;-)

>17 Booksloth:
Sorry, old schoolboy joke:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;

I'm not a huge Keats fan either, but that sonnet gets quoted very often, by all sorts of people. I think it must have been a staple of the schoolroom in the Edwardian period - just look at any random PG Wodehouse novel, or Chapter I of Swallows and Amazons, for instance.

The Book Thief might have changed my life had I read it as a young adult. As it was, I would say The Diary of Ann Frank had a huge impact on me when I read it in my early teens.

The Spanish lit that I read in college was mind-altering for me, particularly magic realism such as the works of Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

More later...

Tove Jansson's Moomin books had a big impact on me when I was a kid.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Chosen hit me like bags of bricks when I was in middle school.

Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord hit me like a bag of bricks when I was a teenager and in the midst of dropping out of high school.

2666, which I finished early this year, was the most visceral reading experience of my life. It continues to haunt me months after reading it. Sometimes I realize that it is all I want to talk or think about, but I know only two people who've read it. Kaddish for an Unborn Child was similarly intense but for different reasons.

The Book Thief definitely did not change my life! It was compelling in some respects, but I was as bewildered by it as I was compelled!

No Logo and My Name is Asher Lev changed my thinking, so my life you could say. I'm very protective of these books! I discovered My Name is Asher Lev in a second hand book shop YEARS ago and felt like I'd discovered this amazing writer that nobody else knew about- I soon came to realise that I wasn't the only one who knew about him!

Yes, My Name is Asher Lev is a wonderful book. I wish I had read it when I was younger.

the Teaching of Buddha while not great writing is solely responsible for turning me on to Buddhism. I found a copy in the library of a family friend, read it in a day and had this "Holy sh*t this makes a lot of sense" feeling. I've been studying Buddhism and practicing meditation off and on since then. Now I've run into the problem of finding good books that go beyond basic teachings.

the Path: Autobiography of a Western Yogi and Autobiography of a Yogi are responsible for, in the case of the first giving me this distinct feeling of assurance that I wasn't the only one questioning things and looking for answers beyond just swallowing Chrisitan dogma or becoming an Atheist. The second is responsible for turining me on to Hinduism, and inspiring a renewed interest in Christianity, this time from a more mystical PoV.

Perhaps this is a boring response, but Anna Karenina fits the bill for me. For the first time I felt as if I might have some religious conviction-- I like Tolstoy's religious views.

In my more formative years I'd have to say Green Sky Trilogy-- a sly lesson in the causes and harms of racism.

Reading THE BOOK THIEF at the moment.

Can't say it's "life-changing" but it's certainly a well-told yarn.

Reading Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia as a kid until a couple of the books fell to pieces inspired a love of fantasy which I still enjoy indulging, although I don't read much fiction anymore (though thats changing :) ).

#7: Holy cow, I didn't know anyone else had ever read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind! Read it maybe 15 years ago, but I still think about it at least once a week.

The first book I thought of was Walden. Thoreau's ideas about time and money (the first being the only important form of the second) were too simply true for me to absorb as an undergrad, but a few years later they tore my mind open and freed me from a lot of junk I'd blindly done and thought.

My own writing has been (almost certainly unhealthily) flavored by The Crying of Lot 49, which seemed to crystalize everything I wanted from fiction when I first read it.

I thought something similar about White Noise when I read it five years later.

>28 GeoffWyss:, I found White Noise in a second hand bookshop and bought it on a whim having never heard of DeLillo. In exactly the same vein as my message numbered 21, thought I had discovered a genius and felt pretty highly of myself (or more accurately - thought lowly of everyone else who in my view had no knowledge of the masterpiece). I continue to live and learn. :D

When i was around 4, my mother read from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses Soon I knew them by heart & then I could pick out the words. So it taught me to read & also that poetry always rhymed. Books like Little Women showed that life can have sadness as well as joy.

A talk to our high school "Future Writer's club" by the local librarian, Alice Mary Norton, introduced me to the amazing world of science fiction (she had just published her first book) & also to the fact that it was necessary for women writers to change their first names.

The book that really changed my life was Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset. My husband & I weren't getting along too well, but we had 6 kids & life was kind of blah... & then I read "Kristin" & the same dumb things she & her husband did & how if affected her sons & their lives...
I recently read the new revised translation, but I like the old one better.

Second be here now and add cutting through spiritual materialism.

Absences a relatively early collection of poems by James Tate was the first book of poetry that i bought that really blew me away back in the day. I just bought another used copy on Abebooks.

limits to growth the initial attempt by the Club of Rome to model global economic/environmental behavior got me out of a bar band and back into college and into my major of geography.

childhood's end and a wrinkle in time hooked me into SF in jr high.

read a lot of fantasy as a kid - E Nesbit, Eager, Tolkien, the Just So Stories, Poe - and have kept reading fantasy since then.

the coming plague Laurie Garrett.

The Tennis Partner and my own country Abraham Verghese - both autobiographical and both intensely moving. The first dealing w/ his attempt to mentor a resident, ex tennis pro, drug addict; the latter about living/working in a hospital in rural Tennessee and being the person who first documented the unseen epidemic of AIDs in the rural south are two of the most affecting books i've read in the last decade.

Read Be Here Now and Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism but didn't get a life changing experience. Came to them at the wrong time in life I guess. Who knows, maybe I'll revisit one or both and they'll change things up at a later date.

having just gone through a couple of semesters living on various mind altering substances in the late 60s during my fresh/soph years @ W&Mary undoubtedly played a role in Be Here Now's influence.

28> That was my response to Crying of Lot 49 as well. When I finished it, I thought, "Goddamn, this is the novel I've been waiting for my whole reading life!"

I, too, absolutely loved Anna Karenina. At the tender age of twenty I felt it had a lot to say about love, life, and God. I'm thinking I might be due for a reread.

In high school, I read plenty, but the book that really stands out is The Elephant Man. It was the first book to make me cry. I hadn't known that was possible until then.

Another that I remember vividly is Confederacy of Dunces. It was great to realize that a book could be funny and smart.

Hot, Flat and Crowded tended to knock me off-side the head and back into reality. Who needs dystopian literature?

emaestra:

I'm just starting Confederacy of Dunces, and so far it's brilliant. I have a feeling it may be added to my list above.

CONFEDERACY is a delight. Ignatius' approach to film reviewing is very similar to mine...

Winnie the Pooh, In which Eeyore has a birthday - shows how to put up with disappointments!
I keep popping in to see how you are all doing - couldn't resist lowering the tone.
oldstick.

POOH doesn't lower the tone, you silly old bear.

This will appeal to your sense of the absurd, Cliff.
I once turned down a proposal of marriage from someone from a different culture because he hadn't read Winnie the Pooh!
oldstick.

#41 What's absurd about that? Sounds like good sense to me. (Though, I guess he could have read it if he'd been really keen. I always longed to be able to set tasks for my children's boyfriends, as they do in fairy tales, and I think that one has to be on the list. That and dragon-slaying, of course.)

I've enjoyed reading through all of these posts.

I feel like this will sound silly but just over a year ago I read Eat, Pray, Love and it did change my life. Helped me make some of the hardest decisions in my life. The kind that are way over due.

Jurrasic Park by Michael Crichton really made me realize there is fun and great reading in every genre.

I'll be putting some higher priority on the books I've seen mentioned several times in this thread.

oldstick: My sense of the absurd is one of my (very) few good qualities--and your anecdote is a zinger. Thanks.

43> Jurassic Park! Yes!