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PowellsBooks.Blog
Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers.

Original Essays

Seven Books That Actually Changed My Life

by Josh Hanagarne, May 1, 2013 12:00 PM
I'd predict that 99 percent of the small talk in the staff elevator at my library involves the following question and its answers:

"Are you reading anything good?"

Most recently I asked this of a woman holding The Poisonwood Bible, which I adored.

"Yes!" she said, waving the book in front of me. "I'm almost done. This book has changed my life."

Hearing that a book changed someone's life is one of my greatest pleasures. I can't think of a better compliment an author could hear. Unfortunately, my follow-up question doesn't always yield a satisfying answer:

"How?" I said. Meaning, how did it change your life?

"Because it was amazing!" she said.

This is a pretty typical response, and I know I do it sometimes as well.

"Because it was just so good!"

"It was incredible!"

"I loved it!"

These are all great to hear, but none of them indicate any clues about how a life might have been changed, not that anyone owes me an explanation if I ask. Still, "This changed my life!" is pretty high praise and shouldn't be interchangeable with "This book is really good!"

Now, I don't go around watching everyone I talk to, so that I'll be able to pounce from dark alleys, proclaiming, "I knew your life hadn't changed!" And of course, every book you read changes your life, if only because you are now a slightly different person — the person who now has one more book kicking around in their brain.

But saying something "changed my life" really isn't something I want to note casually. So, as someone who tries (and often fails) to heed Mark Twain's admonitions about using the correct word, I've been trying to figure out if any books have actually changed my life, and how.

Here are a few:

Charlotte's Web by E. B. White

I was in first grade when I brought Charlotte's Web home from the library. I instantly fell in love with Fern. I had loved books and stories before this, but this was the first time I felt a visceral, immediate connection with a character in a book. I loved her. Madly, painfully. This book taught me just how real a character can be, and how much truth fiction can have.

Misery by Stephen King

I started bringing Stephen King books home from the bookmobile in fifth grade. Misery was the book that my mom caught me reading prior to banning Stephen King from our house until I was older. I was usually an obedient kid, but I continued sneaking King's books into the house. Misery taught me that reading the books I loved, regardless of the effort the subterfuge required, was way more fun than obeying my mom.

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

My favorite bookstore owner of all time — Keith Clawson from the defunct Experienced Books in Salt Lake City — recommended Motherless Brooklyn to me as soon as I told him that I had Tourette Syndrome. He wouldn't let me pay for it, either. "This one's on me," he said. The protagonist of the book has Tourette's. Mr. Clawson put this book in my hand at a very desperate time, when my condition was worsening every day and I despaired for my future. Saying "It saved my life!" would be melodramatic, but this book helped me smile at a time when I couldn't find any other reasons to do so.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

One of my favorites, if not my absolute favorite book. Confederacy was recommended to me by Mr. Clawson as well, so I owe him for this too. At the time Confederacy was the funniest book I had ever read, but it was sad, too. This book has come to define nearly all of my ideas about humor. I've reread it every year since. Each year, the book is still funny, but I'm increasingly aware of how inextricably intertwined sadness and humor often are. So much of humor is based on acknowledging a lack of something, or a brief flash of superiority. I often laugh because the alternative scares me.

Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses by Mark Twain

Okay, this short piece by Twain isn't a book, but its quantification of the mistakes Cooper made in The Deerslayer tales and The Last of the Mohicans should make writers question whether their words are actually communicating what they're meant to. It has certainly had this effect on me. Also, this piece gets my nomination for the most hilarious piece of short writing in existence.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Depending on the mood I'm in, Blood Meridian is either my favorite or least favorite book. I say it has changed my life because I can't stop reading it. If ever a book has deserved the description of "haunting," for me, it is this book. Each time I finish it, I shudder and think, "Okay, never again. That's enough." I rarely make it more than a month before I'm revisiting scenes, paragraphs, and pages. Why? I'm not sure, and therein lies my fascination. It could be the fact that I love Westerns, or the campfire lectures delivered by the horrific Judge Holden. It could be the archaic language or the scene on the edge of the volcano. It could be the dancing bear or the idiot and the parasol in the later chapters. It could be all of these things, or none of them. The activity of reading is itself a compulsion for me. But Blood Meridian is the only book that compels me to read it again and again. Its power is that I can't leave it alone, even though I know how shaken I'll be at the end.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Many of my ideas (ill-formed or otherwise) about how we deploy language — either to our favor or to our detriment — come from the linguistic absurdities of Catch 22. Often, when I find myself struggling to define an abstract concept, I think of the characters in Catch 22 chasing their own words around. Language can make the meaningless meaningful, or vice versa.

How about you? What books have truly changed your life? Do you know why?




Books mentioned in this post

Motherless Brooklyn

Jonathan Lethem

Catch 22

Joseph Heller

A Confederacy of Dunces

John Kennedy Toole

The Last of the Mohicans & Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses

James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain

Worlds Strongest Librarian A Memoir of Tourettes Faith Strength & the Power of Family

Josh Hanagarne

Misery

Stephen King

Charlotte's Web

E. B. White

Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy

Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver

Deerslayer

James Fenimore Cooper
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9 Responses to "Seven Books That Actually Changed My Life"

Elizabeth Stewart December 30, 2013 at 09:37 AM
The book that changed my life did so because I found it just at the right moment. I was 30 years old, on my way to a divorce, and I read John Ralston Saul's 'Voltaire's Bastards,' a work of philosophy grounded in history. Saul argued that contemporary societal ills are based in technocratic corruption of Enlightenment values; it was a jeremiad in the Christopher Lasch tradition. I might not agree with Saul now, but at the time--when I was considering whether or not to go back to college--his employment of history really made a lightbulb go off in my head and helped me move forward with my next life.

E December 29, 2013 at 07:26 PM
The Young Wizards series, by Diane Duane, changed my life after I read the first few books in my early teens. The worldview articulated in the books, particularly its sense of mission, shaped my own. To try to summarize it off-the-cuff, the important elements were: 1. Young people with 2. specific but not unusual talents 3. commit to a job that 4. allows them to meet a network of like-minded people of many backgrounds while 5. doing terrifying, exhilarating things 6. in service of Life, 7. without lying or 8. otherwise compromising their sense of ethics.

Jess Morgan December 28, 2013 at 03:20 PM
I was greatly influenced by "The Secret Garden" when I was a young girl. My mother would "punish" me by sending me to my room when I was a kid. That was actually fine with me. I would enter into another world through the magic of books. Back to "The Secret Garden". Suffice it to say that I could so imagine escaping into this wonderful sublime place and meeting the boy who was there as well. I still feel I escape when need be with guilty pleasure, daring to step into someone else's imagination. This book gave me permission to allow myself the joy that is reading.

RPS June 11, 2013 at 09:11 PM
What a good list. Have not read ‘Blood Meridian’ but all the others are near the top of my personal charts. I've read maybe 7000 or 8000 books but I think in terms of writers that influenced me rather than specific titles: Barthelme, Borges, McPhee, Murakami, Westlake, Wodehouse. (The thing that really changed my life, as far as I can tell, was not a book but a movie: ‘A Thousand Clowns.’)

Judith May 16, 2013 at 08:38 PM
Two novels come instantly to mind: once I read years ago--Joseph Heller's great Catch-22 which was hilarious and horrifying at the same time and made absolutely clear the absurdity of war. I read it during the early days of Vietnam and it couldn't have been more timely. More recently, Margaret Atwood's "Oxyx & Crake" made me very aware that her dystopian future could be right around the corner. Atwood is a genius--a term that cannot be applied to many authors--but she more than earns the appellation.

Sue May 9, 2013 at 01:51 PM
Memorable books come to mind, and are at hand, as I am a public librarian. But when you mentioned rereading, I'd have to say Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. And in my mind they are one book. I read them as a child would, delighted to learn that books can be a powerful escape to a fantasy world, but reread them into college, memorizing the poems, examining the chess moves, and chuckling over the pokes at traditional British education. This is the one book for me that delivered the message: children's books can be for adults, and words about good and evil, right and wrong, even serious and silly, are powerful tools: "Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe..." thanks for asking!

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