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

[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.