While She Knits - Books that Have Changed You

[peggy-2.livejournal.com]

There was an article in the Guardian about stories that have changed you - how you think, how you feel, how you live your life.

the very idea of a novel changing hearts and minds on a massive scale is rather shocking. Stories are no longer the sacred cultural treasuries they once were. Books have become unholy, cheap and familiar. You've read the seven plots again and again; you've ploughed through Proust with the same blasé greed with which you ploughed through the trash on the front of the mag. You may have cried, and laughed, and shaken your head at the terrible ways of men, but when did a novel last actually change what you think and what you do?

I need to think a bit to come up with a novel that meets the criteria (although I know they exist, in my attic or on a bookshelf), but what comes first to mind is that after reading Stiff, a book about happens to a body after a person has died, I've never been able to think about having Rice Krispies for breakfast, or chicken soup for lunch, in quite the same way.   And I Wanna Be Sedated ("30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers") left me much more tolerant of various parenting styles and teen behaviour.

How about it, Sounis? What have your read that changed how you view some aspect of the world? altered the course of your life, either a little or a lot? As the Guardian article finishes, "be it in a serious or frivolous way, for good or for bad – what was the last story that really changed you?"

Comments

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

When I was 12, and had just finished The Lord of the Rings for the first of many times, I picked up a copy of Paul Kocher's Master of Middle-Earth and my life was never the same afterward. That was my first experience of literary criticism and it blew me away to realize that people didn't just write books -- they also wrote books about books, metabooks, that took stories apart and showed you all the fascinating mechanics of how they worked and what they could mean. Twenty years later I took my doctorate in English literature, and that's why.

In college, I was unexpectedly bowled over by Dorothy Sayers's Gaudy Night -- I was groping toward an understanding of my own identity as a woman and an intellectual, and reading a well-written story about a sympathetic character doing the same threw a raking light across my own struggles. Unfortunately, I wasn't hanging out with anyone as compelling as Lord Peter Wimsey, so there was a certain amount of vicarious wish-fulfillment involved :-), but I reread that book a lot because it spoke to my fledgling social/intellectual integration in a way that no other feminist text did.

Most recently, I read The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris and developed an interest in Benedictine spirituality. I'd been surrounded by friends who came up in the Ignatian tradition, but it was The Rule of Benedict that really spoke to me once I'd rediscovered it (sorry, Holy Cross people!). Norris's poetic evocation of the seasons of the church year made me want to pay more attention to the spiritual rhythm of my own life. I haven't always been successful, but I return to this book whenever I need to reinvigorate my commitment.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Have you read Madeleine L'Engle's The Irrational Season? It's a long time since I've read it, but I found a lot of L'Engle's non-fiction very powerful.

[willow-41z.livejournal.com]

Oooh yes! I just finished reading The Irrational Season for the first time last week. I really liked it. I've read the first two in that series as well but not the last one yet.

What else of her nonfiction would you recommend?

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Cool synchronicity to the timing there.

I really liked Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art a lot. Also Two-Part Invention, which is very different as it's about her marriage.

[traboule.livejournal.com]

Oh, gosh, Gaudy Night was practically a life-changing experience the first time I read it! I already had such a crush on Lord Peter, and then Harriet came out and...lo and behold, the story was about her. Not the flashy amateur Holmes flirting with a stereotype, but a real, intelligent, funny, and extremely stubborn woman. She really talked, and I really listened, and I'm pretty sure Harriet Vane is one of the smartest ladies I know. I love what she has to say about living in academia, and I love that, 80 years later, it's still relevant and true to some extent.