In response to a recent thread about whether a specific book was responsible for changing people (it was something by Rand I believe), I would like to ask whether any book as had that affect on a fellow Doper?
I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything and felt changed by it afterwards, is it just me?
— G. Raven
Well, last semester I took a Mass. Comm. class, and the text book used really pressed the idea of the power of media and newspaper, and it really kind of changed my veiw of things.
As far as reading a Boy Scout manual and then decided I wanted to have a sex change goes, no nothings ever changed me completely.
John Varley’s Titan.
Before I read it, I was a reader of science fiction who had fantasies of being an SF writer.
Afterwards, I began to seriously attempt to break in to the field (with some success).
I can’t even begin to explain why the book had that effect on me. It just did.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, changed my life. I read it when I was 14, and I see the day I finished it as the day I starting living. Up to that point, I focused a lot (rightfully so, I think) on my childhood and how inadequate it was. I hated thinking about the past, because I felt it still defined me in ways I couldn’t comprehend. But once I read that book, I realized that my past didn’t have to define me, that I could be whatever and whoever I wanted, that the only limits on me were the ones I put there myself.
It’s basically the story of a girl, Francie, growing up in Brooklyn at the turn of the century. Her dad is a drunk, her family is completely destitute, and she has nothing but the people around her. It sounds depressing, but it is the most inspiring, hopeful, beautiful story I can imagine. The simile of the Tree - the one that struggles to grow, even out of dirt heaps and concrete, is a beautiful metaphor no matter how many times I’ve read it. There are universal truths in this book, ideas everyone can relate to, about overcoming conflict and being the best possible person you can be, about dealing with what comes your way with strength and fortitude and character. I cannot say enough good things about this book!
There’s a line from another novel I love - For Kings and Planets by Ethan Canin. “I was in a shell, but from then on it was opened.” That’s how I felt the day I finished A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and how I feel every time I read it anew. I think it would have taken me much longer to solve some issues in my life without that book.
THE GODFATHER
I became EXTREMLY proud of my SICILIAN/ITALIAN heritage. I’m now like DeNiro; professionaly Italian.
The book was “Dr. No” by Ian Fleming.
No, I didn’t want to become a spy or be like James Bond. How it changed me was different. It made me discover the power of books.
It was my sophomore year in high school and like most high school sophomores, I thought books were just for adding weight to the bottom of a school locker. Then I got mono.
I spent the next three weeks in bed. No television, no radio (they both seemed to crash around inside may head), but I could read, but I had no books. An older neighbor had the complete collection of Fleming’s James Bond books, and she brought them over. I am sure she thought they were pearls before swine, but she liked my mother so made the loan.
Out of ennui (jeez, I love that word), I picked up one (“Dr. No”) and began reading. I was hooked. I have been a reader ever since. My grades went up. My test scores were higher. I went to college (people were laying odds that it would be another kind of state institution earlier). I’ve picked up a couple of degrees. I even have been published a couple of times myself.
In my opinion, I owe most of that to “Dr. No”.
TV
I wish I could name a novel, some work of stunning artistic genius that left me a changed man, but it was Diet for a New America that made me stop eating meat for a significant time. I lasted 7 years before cracking and becoming a carnivore again.
Jeanette Winterson taught me that Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. It contribute to the general screwing up of my family life. But upon hindsight, I haven’t been happier since.
It’s actually happened several times for me.
In junior high, it was the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It fascinated me to such a degree that I studied Tolkien’s invented languages and writing systems, giving over thoughts of becoming an engineer in favor of being a philologist. I outgrew both LOTR and (somewhat later) philology, but my life took a much different track from that point forward.
As a sophomore in high school, it was Hermann Hesse’s Demian; between the Jungian interpretations of LOTR I’d read and this book, it was almost inevitable that I’d spin off down the path of trying to reconcile Christianity with the whole host of other religious and mythological systems that came to my attention, melding them all into something that was supposed to be greater than the sum of its parts. Never was, of course, but once again a book acted on me as an outside force to change the direction and velocity of my life. This is another book (actually, Hesse is an author in general) one has to read as an adolescent or shortly after, or not at all.
I can’t exactly explain why Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a satire on the place of the artist in the totalitarian society of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, should have been such an apt book to have fall into my hands during my senior year of high school. Our family had just moved from Fayetteville, Arkansas (as cosmopolitan and liberal as it gets in Arkansas, what with the University and all) to a small town of about 2,000 in the Delta area of Arkansas. This was the poster town for narrow-mindedness, bigotry, anti-intellectualism, and general petty meanness. By some miracle, the local library had a copy of Bulgakov’s masterwork, in the Michael Glenny translation. My efforts to get at everything that’s going on at once in the book started a chain of events that led me to literary studies as my major in college. I continue to re-read it at least once every eighteen months or so.
The next book that profoundly altered my course of life was Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, during my second year of graduate school. I did a paper on information theory in Lot 49 that I still consider one of the better bits of academic writing I ever did, though a lot of what seemed exciting and arcane in 1987 would now seem trite and mundane in a world grown accustomed to thinking of information as something that can be quantified, encoded, and transmitted with a controllable degree of fidelity. That interest in information theory led me, a few years later, to Jeremy Campbell’s Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life, which first connected for me the information theory concepts I’d become acquainted with through Lot 49 and (then) current ideas about evolutionary biology, the nature of language, and a host of other topics. As a result, I’ve become fascinated with evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, genetics, etc. I doubt I’d have read Daniel Dennett, William Calvin, Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, Robert Wright, Jonathan Weiner, Matt Ridley, RIchard Dawkins, Steve Jones, Antonio Damasio, V.S. Ramachandran, or a number of other scientists and writers without having read Campbell’s book, and I’d not have read it without Lot 49. What I’ve learned from all these sources has dramatically altered my ideas about of human behavior, consciousness, the nature of language, and how the world in general works.
Okay, okay, I know it’s not GD, but I’ve got to say it:
The Bible.
Also, Max Lucado’s He Chose the Nails. Very good book.
On the more secular side of things, I have to say Pratchett’s The Lost Continent, simply because it was the first of his books that I read. Ditto Richard Bachman’s The Long Walk. (Richard Bachman being Stephen King’s occasional nom de plume.)
Also, Stephen King’s On Writing has helped me a lot.
Great responses people, I think this is arpidly becoming my most successfull thread to date 
And I personally have nothing against the Bible mention, my choice is also spiritual.
To answer my own question, I think it has to be “The Power of Now” by Eckhardt Tolle (he’s German, I’m not 100% sure how his first name is spelled because I lent someone the book).
It’s a very special spiritual journey, narrated by a man who seems to see the universe with more clarity than I thought possible.
If you like the works of Krishnamurti or Ramesh S. Balsekar, you will love this book.
— G. Raven
Arpidity - The quality or state of messageboard dyslexia.
What Dreams May Come
I had a severe fear of death until I read this book. One 3 hour period later and I was changed. I no longer looked at death in a bad light since then. The movie was excellent as well.
A little background for those who don’t know me. I was born and raised in a very conservative Southern Baptist family. Went to church every Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night prayer meetings as well. Sang in the choir, taught a Sunday School class … the whole works. For some reason, though, it just never really “clicked” with me. I ended up going through the nonsense of “rededicating” my life to Jesus numerous times because I thought there was some kind of “feeling” you were supposed to have that somehow I just wasn’t getting.
My brother and I were both science fiction fans, and I still remember looking through the racks at the old Adams Drug store in North Kingstown, RI for something new to read when I came across a new book, just published.
The Eye in the Triangle by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.
It was, of course, the first book in the Illuminatus trilogy and it was like an explosion going off in my head. It opened me up to so many possibilites that had never occurred to me. It truly changed my life.
/me tries out secret handshake on Euty…
Mahok! You are one of us!
Illumi, Illuminae, Illuminiaeus…
— G. Raven
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, by Chögyam Trungpa.
I read this book in HS when taking an alternate class in Eastern Philosophy. I was the typically fucked-up angst ridden teenager then, and really needed a way to look at life differently. This book showed me how to do that in a way that allows you to think laterally, with different perspectives on a problem.
One of the best lessons I learned from that book was that sometimes, when you’re going through something and you just don’t know what to do next, you should take an aerial perspective, and try and see the whole situation. It’s too simplistic to explain in a post, but after reading an entire chapter on it, it makes sense.
A better example would be one of the many Tibetan stories in the book. This particular one was about the monkey that was trapped in a room which had no door. The monkey stormed around the room consumed with anger at his seemingly helpless situation. He kept pounding his fists against the walls, trying to get out, but all did was to make himself madder. Finally, he decided to stop being mad, and just give in to his situation.
At that time, he sat down on the floor. Now that he was more relaxed, he was able to clearly look around the room and see what he hadn’t seen before. He looked up, and there was a window.
Like I said, it has much more of an effect when the book is read, but the point is that it helped me to deal with a lot of stuff, and it still helps me to this day.
My mother handed me a battered, dog eared copy of The Collector when I was thirteen and said “I think you may like this”
I don’t know if she was catching vibes from me or what, but it really is my favorite book of all time. My favorite stories are ones of obsession, kidnapping, damsels in distress and forced relationships. This had it all. I’ve read it at least 100 times, wrote a stage adaptation of it, and performed the lead character on stage.
All of my writing is influenced by John Fowles, his style, his attitude, his detail. He’s my hero.
I was also VERY VERY moved by A Prayer For Owen Meany. I don’t know quite how it CHANGED my life, but I know I looked at the world differently after reading it.
jarbaby
“Of Mice and Men.” It was the first time that I ever really saw things in shades of grey instead of just black and white. The relationship between Lenny and George was more complex than I’d ever witnessed before. Just the big climactic scene at the end made me stop and think about the complexities of human life.
Another Gunter Grasse book
The Flounder
It’s about fish, kind of, no, about sex, sort of, well, it’s about life, that’s the thing.
Anyone who’s ever been in romantic love should read this book. It definitely changed me, though I’d have a hard time explaining exactly how.
I am loving this thread, great topic!
I read Saved by the Light in one day. It’s based on the true experience of a man struck by lightning who claims to have visited heaven briefly. It’s a very inspirational book. Very uplifting.
Happy reading!