life is too short to read bad books

[snugglekitty]

Ask You a Question Month is drawing to a close. (In a few days, Ask Me a Question Month will be beginning. Stay tuned for details.) But it's not over yet! Has a book ever changed your life? If so, how? If not, what has?

ETA: Another interesting followup to the "Marry Him" article here.

Comments

[artemis44.livejournal.com]

Not much time to answer the how part, but the which?

Mists of Avalon - provided a "story" for my spiritual beliefs at the time, was my absolute favorite book for many, many, many years

Endless Steppes - YA book, one of MANY I loved that were based on holocaust and other horrors... helped me put my own issues in perspective, I suppose, and also helped nurture love of history

City of Gold and Lead - another YA book, not sure why I loved it so, but I recall it as having a major influence on me...

Jesus Was a Carpenter - led to my conversion to Christianity

Various 12-step books - Led to my ability to stop using drugs and other crutches and to finally grow up and act like a decent adult

Stone Butch Blues - for mostly obvious reasons...

there's tons others, but those are the first that come to mind (and I'm amused, as they seem somewhat biased by whose journal I'm posting in... wonder if I would have recalled those two YA books if someone else had asked the ?... interesting!)

[elkor.livejournal.com]

Has a book ever changed your life? If so, how?

While I get corny looks and comments when I admit this, I have to say that The celestine prophecy (http://www.amazon.com/Celestine-Prophecy-James-Redfield/dp/0446671002/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204233363&sr=8-2) would be the book I'd list.

While few of the concepts in the book are really innovative if you spend much time in Pagan circles, the way those concepts were explained really sunk in and let me absorb them.

The book put my view on interpersonal dynamics and energy work into a new perspective.

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

One of the books I would list is like that. It's Gossamer Axe by Gael Baudino, a feminist urban fantasy that from the perspective of full adulthood is not really that good. However, its main character had relationships with men and women, which made me go, "Hey, I could do that, I could be like that!" (Not a lot of queer resources where I grew up.) I related to her in other ways as well, which maybe made it easier.

[bossym.livejournal.com]

Multiple ones, for different reasons. Paradise Lost is a biggie. Certain passages in religious texts. Aristotle's Ethics, which explained a lot. A Handbook for Arguments, which explained how to explain the stuff I learned elsewhere. Northanger Abbey, which gently reminded me that I wasn't in a book. There have been others, too, although as I try to think about it and read others' lists, I'm having difficulty finding books that were deeply significant to me and were written recently. Sometimes it was about the content, sometimes it was about the experience of reading--in one case, it was about the book as a physical object more than about its text.

[ceelove.livejournal.com]

That's a complicated question. There have been LOTS of books that have changed my life in small ways. Nothing comes to mind as "And then everything was different!", but in the past year, quite a number have added up to a sea change for me. And at this point, I'm actively seeking out life-changing books, so do those count?

So, some that, together, have been life-changing for me, in that they made me more aware of what I believed, caused me to look more deeply and with an openness to the greater ramifications: The Power of Now, Conversations with God, Radical Forgiveness, Anatomy of the Spirit, Yoga for Beginners, The Spell of the Sensuous, and Eat Pray Love.

Steinbeck's East of Eden was extremely influential when I was about seventeen. It showed me what could be done with words, how stories could be about something larger than themselves. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues did the same thing when I was about twenty-three. In college, a single paragraph in the introduction of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook changed my whole view of education.

I'm sure there are a dozen others, at that level of revelation, but it would take far too long to dredge them all up, weigh them, and try to figure out what they'd each taught me.

My faves.

[any-contingency.livejournal.com]

I'm going to sound so incredibly Gothy here. I am, however, being quite honest.
There were two books that stand out quite strongly from my childhood.
The first was "Bridge to Terabithia", by Katherine Paterson. I first read it in third grade. I was incredibly envious of the relationship the main characters shared. Also, I wanted to be Leslie. I wanted to be her every single moment of the book.
The second was "1984", by George Orwell. First read in seventh grade. I found that book to be an amazing commentary on humanity. It lent a fresh perspective for the world. Perhaps "fresh" isn't entirely an appropriate word for the outlook I gained.

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

I read Stranger in a Strange Land at the age of 12. I grew up in a VERY repressive, conventional household, so conventional as to be nearly a stereotype. By 12 I knew that I didn't want to live that way, but I didn't know what else was out there -- I was carefully sheltered from everything nonconventional.

But my mother thought that reading was good for children and that it was "educational," so she didn't censor my library reading. It was educational, all right, though not the way she meant. :-)

I didn't understand all of SIASL at 12, especially since I'd been so shielded from other realities, but I knew that there was something important in there that I needed to understand. I read it over and over again, two or three times a year all during my teens.

When I reread the book recently, after not having read it for awhile, I was surprised to see how much of my personality and thought processes are lifted directly from Heinlein. I owe that man my life.

From what I know about you, I think this story will sound a bit familiar, though the title of the book will be different. :-)

Have you read For Us, the Living, his unpublished first novel? He wrote it in 1939, and almost everything he would ever write was contained in that book in microcosm. It's wild to realize how much he knew about where he wanted his writing to go, nearly 50 years before To Sail Beyond the Sunset.