But today, I want to hear from you on the topic of books. Because there’s a particular book that upended your world, and I’d love to know what it is, and how it changed you.
It’s the book where there was the You before reading it, and now there’s the You after reading it, the person you are today.
Maybe it’s fiction that expressed something deeper than you could ever put into words. Maybe it’s non-fiction that worked like a doorway to a world of knowledge you never knew existed. However it happened, you read it, and then it unfurled inside your mind, or exploded, or - something. Something that left you marked and advanced and renewed.
What’s that book, and what magic did it work upon you?
Fiction - If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. I read it for a literature class in high school and it blew my mind. It was such a strange and non-conforming story it felt like permission to explore the outer limits of what literature could be.
Non-Fiction - The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. I can't remember how it came into my life, but after I finished working my way through it, nothing was ever the same. I turned my life completely upside down and it felt like there was no going back to who I was before.
(Also in a weird way, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. When my daughter was younger I told her how I'd read the book and there was a hilarious chapter about how sheep wake up every morning and forget everything that's gone before. She came to me one day and said - it was one sentence. And I said - no it was a whole chapter! And she showed me the page.... This experience taught me the power of a book to speak to every reader in completely different ways and that your experience and interaction with a book is unique.)
(For anyone who has not come across OuLiPo, it was a group of authors and thinkers that explored the use of constraint and algorthms as a spur to creative writing. Members included Calvino, Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, Raymond Queneau. If on a Winter's Night is Oulipian, as is Perec's Life: A User's Manual. It's a fascinating rabbit hole to go down).
The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell changed the way I think about what sci fi looks like and remains one of the best explorations of religion I think I've ever seen.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer changed the way I think about academia and the natural world and the proper place of people in creation.
The autistic memoir Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate changed how I view myself and my childhood.
This is such a great question, Mike! I can think of books like 'To Kill a Mockingbird' -- which I read as a teenager, and probably every American would say is life-changing! -- but later in life, books like 'Why Fish Don't Exist' have been hugely influential for me, in that it totally changed the way I see the natural world and really the social world as well.
Then, there are books that were life-changing in different ways; as in, they showed me something totally new that a book could do. I'd put 'The Lost City of Z' in that category, just a completely new (to me, anyway) way to approach an adventure story, and to explore a lost civilization. The way David Grann researched and wrote that book, weaving in his modern-day trip into the Amazon with looking back at the people he wrote about, I remember having my jaw on the floor at that.
Last year, I read a book called 'Christianity: The First 3,000 Years' by a man named Diarmid McCullough that totally changed the way I see religion -- that there really is no such thing called Christianity; rather, there are many (many, many) Christianities all around the world.
Gosh, different books have had huge impacts on me. It's like picking a favorite child!
Here are a few.
1) The Chronicles of Narnia -- made me realize how badly I wanted my own wardrobe to transport me to different worlds. I credit it with igniting my desire to travel to far-off places.
2) Where the Red Fern Grows -- made me aware of the fragility of life and prepared me for dealing with tragedy.
3) Anne of Green Gables -- made me realize I wasn't the only one who felt like an oddball.
4) Atlas Shrugged -- made me realize I didn't want to be a selfish jerk.
5) Becoming a Man -- made me realize that being gay and falling in love weren't mutually exclusive.
6) The Deerslayer -- made me want to write historical fiction.
This is a hard question because there have been so many seminal books at different points in my life! I think in my early days the books that got me really hooked on reading were Narnia (my son is named Caspian), and His Dark Materials (my dog is called Scoresby). Interestingly, as an adult fantasy is not my preferred genre.
There were three books that I've read in more recent years that really solidified my (already strong) opinion that fiction is a truly excellent art form, and they were The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel, and Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. They are all astonishing and beautifully written and I knew I wanted to do that myself one day. (Currently halfway through writing a novel - not the first I've started, but the first I'm going to finish, I think.)
Fiction: Never Let Me Go -- I'll be thinking about that book for the rest of my life. The beauty and the horror of human life, lyrically explored.
Non-fiction: I read very little non-fiction (outside of work), but Longitude absolutely knocked me out. Also loved Mary Karr's memoirs, which introduced me to a ton of poets.
Sir james jeans astronomy and cosmogeny. Read when around 11 years old. So fascinating it set my lifes course. Got physics ph.d spent work and home in physics and astronomy study. Plus 16 inch telescope. No girl attracted me more despite spending half my life with them. I still remember the shock when I finished the book about 65 years ago and realised it had determined my life.
Guards! Guards! By the great Terry Pratchett recommended by your good self many many lots of moons ago, it transported me from the world of clay and repetition that was Hornsea Potteries, and dropped me into the brilliantly wonky mirror of the Discworld and rekindled a persisting love of reading in me.
I’m drawn to books about the mind, body, spiritual connection. Two of my favorites are Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements and Bernie Segal’s Love, Medicine and Miracles. Interesting they’re both written by doctors (I’m a nurse). These books confirm to me we have more control over our bodies and minds than we know. It’s something everyone should learn and is the reason I started my substack.
Anna Karenina - I read this during a low point during my first year of college. It made me feel better just by reading such a monumental piece of literature, and also by getting insights into the meaning of life based on the journey that Levin goes through.
"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" inspired me to leave a pretty great waitress job -- the boss was the hospitality industry's version of Nurse Ratched. I moved to LA for waitress work and ended up as a writer. A few years later, I actually interviewed Louise Fletcher for a story! Lovely, gracious woman, not at all like her famous character.
Way back in 2017 I read "Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics" by Dan Harris and Jeff Warren. I learned that I really wasn't doing meditation all wrong after all and that encouraged me to try guided meditations for 5-10 minutes a day whenever I remembered. This habit made it possible to enjoy my job enough to keep going to work until 2020 and then work from home until I was able to retire at the end of that year. I also discovered that my favorite meditation teacher Sebene Selassie has a newsletter on this new platform called Substack, which led me to discover more newsletters, such as this amazing one, just as I was wondering how in the world I would keep from being bored in retirement.
What a fantastic question! I think the ones that still hold me hostage to this day are All Things Great and Small by James Herriot, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, and Range by David Epstein. I think about each of these minimum of once a week.
The Diamond Age by Stephenson, and Singularity is Near by Kurzweil. Both were very eye-opening to what was possible, both vastly more than I initially thought. I loved the hard sci-fi descriptions from Stephenson. I went pretty far down the futurism rabbit hole, but eventually found a good balance that includes what's possible and what's likely.
1) Harry Potter. I was kind of already a Hermione-y toddler, but the books felt like I got permission to be outwardly smart and studious and have it be okay.
2) Anna Karenina. The descriptions of people and feelings and *vibes* are just perfect, I've never felt so seen.
In keeping with the theme of this newsletter, there are two books that immediately came to mind.
1. Biomimicry by Janine Benyus: My habit has always been to peruse books stores for titles that will jump out at me. This one did just that back in the late 90's. It change the way I view our world and the wisdom, ingenuity, and awesomeness of all of its inhabitants. It made me rethink intelligence as it is typically framed from a human perspective vs intelligence as a means of living and surviving as inhabitants on our home planet. How often do we humans try to reinvent the wheel when the solution (or a means or starting point to developing a solution) already exists? It is a question I have asked of myself a lot over the years.
2. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach: In the early 00's, this title peaked my curiosity. Aside from opening up the world of how we living humans treat our dead (both respectfully and not so much), this book profoundly changed the way I view my own body and death. I no longer fear, hide from or ignore death's eventuality. In fact, I view it as quite amazing really, in the grand scheme of Life on Earth. I have often wondered what it would be like if we could see our own insides - our hearts and lungs and brains and all the rest. I have asked surgeons if they would video my surgeries using the argument that they get to see more of me than I ever will, and I'd really like to see what my insides actually look like (not just the images from the numerous x-rays, MRIs and other scans I'd seen). They politely declined - liability issues - which was disappointing but I knew it was a long shot.
When I was 16, in 1966, I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. I was always interested in science, especially biology, but this book showed me that science could be both good and bad. I didn’t know anything about ecology, and of course at that time “the environment” was not a thing people were really discussing, at least in my young circles, or my parents’. It opened my eyes to the larger world.
"Childhood's End" by Authur C. Clarke. It was a required reading in highschool, as I recall, and opened my mind to SciFi and so much more. The Hobbit isn't far behind for same reason.
Sapiens was one of those books that forever altered the way i see the world, but I’m not sure it changed my life.
Truth, Lies and Advertising by Jon Steel was what got my foot in the door at my first job in advertising and put me on a career path that severely impacted my life’s trajectory.
Getting Things Done by David Allen would have to be up there—a systematic way to be productive that I still employ everyday.
Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon was instrumental in getting me to start The New Fatherhood, so it would be rude to leave it out.
Oof. This is such a big question. I feel as if I am a human made up of changes created by books.
The first book that changed me was Le Petit Prince. My Dad read it to me in French when I was five. I have read it once a year every year since. I carry a copy in my purse. I have one tattoo and it’s a line from that book.
I think that books are what helped me achieve an inner adventurous life, and got me away from the difficulties of existing as an autistic child in a world not made for kids like me.
Books let me escape and taught me how to make magic in my own life, and they gave me things to talk about. I found friendship with other readers.
There are so many books that have made me who I am. I’m excited to be a part of this book club, and to read along with a group of humans who love to be amazed.
I read it when I was 13 and it rewired my mind. Genuinely insightful and incisive on so many topics - ecology, religion, the nature of power, history - and mildly iconoclastic as it did so, all encased in a grand Hero's Journey with a subtle twist at the end
I read somewhere a piece about how Dune is one of those books that has really endured (was in the context of being made into a film). How do you feel the book stands up now? And do you love film? (I haven’t read book so am really curious - I find dune 2 somewhat problematic…)
No adaption is perfect, so I have some minor tonal and emphasis issues with Dune 2, and the ending is somewhat different. But it's a fairly faithful adaptation with some stunning direction in places, and I don't really believe that it's possible to do better with such a complex book.
I think you may benefit from reading the book, as I think it will address most of your concerns. And it's a great read. To address your points
Specifically
1. That is probably fair, but the only other desert-lands film I can think of of the top of my head is Lawrence of Arabia, where Omar Sharif is one of the main characters and he was Egyptian.
2. It is about a Messiah, a literal one, with godlike powers of prophecy.
3. Southern fundamentalists is an invention of the movie. In the book they're all fundamentalists.
Excuse the cut and paste from a post viewing FB post...
* I wish that films set in "desert lands" cast actors with Middle Eastern heritage in speaking roles.
* I wish that a story/film that claims to not be about a white saviour messiah, portrayed the people he was (not) rescuing as having more agency and doing something other than clamouring for the white (not) saviour to save them. (Zendaya being the seeming only holdout but even she hooks up with him...).
* I wish that films about indigenous uprisings didn't just lump people together into amorphous groups like "the fundamentalists in the south"
I might also add that in the movie Zendaya's character has a much larger part than the book. And the character of Liet Kynes was originally a man fwiw.
A few of my lifetime favorites have been named here, mostly for the reasons I would list (Narnia, LotR, Discworld - which always lifts my spirits, some classics.)
We need to discuss those of us who are re-readers - who find books we love and habitually return to (despite the pile of shiny new ones we intend to read). I find re-reading can sometimes be more impactful than the narrative as originally presented for so many important reasons - not the least of which we notice details that were "background" material on a first read.
My case in point - Madeline Miller's "Circe." I'm an historian by training, so the work women do as a narrative leitmotif usually doesn't grab my attention (unless it's wrong). It's scenery to the story's action; I know what it is and how to do most of it. But my third reading, or maybe it was a listen, to Circe and I started noticing ALL the weaving. So much weaving. And it was connecting, in my mind, to the spells she was working on and learning. And that process was SO familiar as I'm a fiber artist, so I could strongly relate. I credit that particular reading of Circe as the impetus I needed to buy a loom and learn to weave.
Now, I have a business as a fiber artist. I teach weaving, write a weaving Substack, and write weaving patterns. All (to some extent) because I re-read a book.
For non-fiction I have to go with "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter. It was published the year I started college and the connections it explores between mathematics, art, music, and the study of consciousness continues to guide my thinking about ... almost everything.
For fiction my immediate choice is "Little, Big" by John Crowley. Hard to explain the impact, but impact me it did.
Grimm's Faire Tales when I was a child provided morals and values that I still live by today. Dostoyevsky,s Crime and Punishment helped me to see a whole new world and the human condition.
How to be Brilliant by Michael Heppell. Before reading it, I was an unhappy employee. After reading it, I became self-employed and gained such freedom and confidence!
Five Hundred Mile Walkies by Mark Wallington - a humorous account of his walk around the SW Coast Path. It was the first time I had heard of the route, and this book sowed the seed of a dream that I realised 25 years later.
I'm not sure it would still hold up for me, but Matthew Crawford's "Shop Class as Soulcraft" became a touchstone book for me after reading and remained so for a long time. It clarified so many murky feelings and thoughts I had about intelligence, crafts, what becomes valued in a society and why (why???), education, and the choices we make about how we want to live our lives (on that subject see also Paulo Coelho's "The Alchemist").
fiction: Gotta be Diane Duane's Door into Fire, which, along with being a great fantasy novel, also showed a world where being queer was, simply, unremarkable -- this absolutely saved my life.
nonfiction: I'd been coming to the idea of a gift economy basically my entire life, long before I knew the phrase; but Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass took me so far beyond the tiny bits I'd scraped together on my own & taught me so many vitally important things, including that a true gift economy is actually possible.
As a much younger person (19/20 years old) the book Ishmael rocked my worldview, as did the book The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff.
As an adult, the book Braiding Sweetgrass was affirmative and solidifying of the worldview that was slowing making itself home in me.
Fiction - Skallagrigg by William Horwood in my teens, and the Broken Earth Trilogy by N K Jemisin when I was older. This trilogy is like nothing I have ever read before and it stays with me.
The first book that came to mind was I'm OK You're OK, by Thomas Harris. It helped me grow up and learn to accept people for who they were, rather than getting upset and wishing they were different.
Wow so many and in some case so long ago, I’ll attempt to get them in order.
Narnia was a gateway into LoR I read every year through high school but even prior to Narnia was a now name forgotten book about a medieval village boy who on rescuing a lords hawk become a page and then by stages a squire. This discovered in very early primary school cemented in me a life long interest in the medieval world and I guess a fascination in how people used to live and think. Dune which awoke an interest in politics and also the possibility of different ways of living. Doris Lessing’s Shikasta series and AA Attansio’s Radix which are both a different kind of sci fi.
A book called Complexity which introduced me to the idea of systems so complex they seem random.
Fighting Globesity about health, waste and consumerism.
The Spirit Balance, a meta study of inequality.
The Angel and the Assassin which is about micro-glia, and the brain’s immune system.
Fiction - If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. I read it for a literature class in high school and it blew my mind. It was such a strange and non-conforming story it felt like permission to explore the outer limits of what literature could be.
Non-Fiction - The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. I can't remember how it came into my life, but after I finished working my way through it, nothing was ever the same. I turned my life completely upside down and it felt like there was no going back to who I was before.
(Also in a weird way, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. When my daughter was younger I told her how I'd read the book and there was a hilarious chapter about how sheep wake up every morning and forget everything that's gone before. She came to me one day and said - it was one sentence. And I said - no it was a whole chapter! And she showed me the page.... This experience taught me the power of a book to speak to every reader in completely different ways and that your experience and interaction with a book is unique.)
Calvino wrote a small essay on how he wrote 'If on a Winter's Night' that was published in the Oulipo Compendium by Harry Mathews. All of the transformations and permutations are spelt out. https://torggatablad.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/how_i_wrote_one_of_my_books.pdf
(For anyone who has not come across OuLiPo, it was a group of authors and thinkers that explored the use of constraint and algorthms as a spur to creative writing. Members included Calvino, Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, Raymond Queneau. If on a Winter's Night is Oulipian, as is Perec's Life: A User's Manual. It's a fascinating rabbit hole to go down).
Oh interesting! I should reread the novel and the read that. Thanks for sharing.
Oh so many.
The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell changed the way I think about what sci fi looks like and remains one of the best explorations of religion I think I've ever seen.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer changed the way I think about academia and the natural world and the proper place of people in creation.
The autistic memoir Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate changed how I view myself and my childhood.
This is such a great question, Mike! I can think of books like 'To Kill a Mockingbird' -- which I read as a teenager, and probably every American would say is life-changing! -- but later in life, books like 'Why Fish Don't Exist' have been hugely influential for me, in that it totally changed the way I see the natural world and really the social world as well.
Then, there are books that were life-changing in different ways; as in, they showed me something totally new that a book could do. I'd put 'The Lost City of Z' in that category, just a completely new (to me, anyway) way to approach an adventure story, and to explore a lost civilization. The way David Grann researched and wrote that book, weaving in his modern-day trip into the Amazon with looking back at the people he wrote about, I remember having my jaw on the floor at that.
Last year, I read a book called 'Christianity: The First 3,000 Years' by a man named Diarmid McCullough that totally changed the way I see religion -- that there really is no such thing called Christianity; rather, there are many (many, many) Christianities all around the world.
Gosh, different books have had huge impacts on me. It's like picking a favorite child!
Here are a few.
1) The Chronicles of Narnia -- made me realize how badly I wanted my own wardrobe to transport me to different worlds. I credit it with igniting my desire to travel to far-off places.
2) Where the Red Fern Grows -- made me aware of the fragility of life and prepared me for dealing with tragedy.
3) Anne of Green Gables -- made me realize I wasn't the only one who felt like an oddball.
4) Atlas Shrugged -- made me realize I didn't want to be a selfish jerk.
5) Becoming a Man -- made me realize that being gay and falling in love weren't mutually exclusive.
6) The Deerslayer -- made me want to write historical fiction.
I could keep going, but that's enough!
This is a hard question because there have been so many seminal books at different points in my life! I think in my early days the books that got me really hooked on reading were Narnia (my son is named Caspian), and His Dark Materials (my dog is called Scoresby). Interestingly, as an adult fantasy is not my preferred genre.
There were three books that I've read in more recent years that really solidified my (already strong) opinion that fiction is a truly excellent art form, and they were The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel, and Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. They are all astonishing and beautifully written and I knew I wanted to do that myself one day. (Currently halfway through writing a novel - not the first I've started, but the first I'm going to finish, I think.)
Fiction: Never Let Me Go -- I'll be thinking about that book for the rest of my life. The beauty and the horror of human life, lyrically explored.
Non-fiction: I read very little non-fiction (outside of work), but Longitude absolutely knocked me out. Also loved Mary Karr's memoirs, which introduced me to a ton of poets.
Sir james jeans astronomy and cosmogeny. Read when around 11 years old. So fascinating it set my lifes course. Got physics ph.d spent work and home in physics and astronomy study. Plus 16 inch telescope. No girl attracted me more despite spending half my life with them. I still remember the shock when I finished the book about 65 years ago and realised it had determined my life.
Guards! Guards! By the great Terry Pratchett recommended by your good self many many lots of moons ago, it transported me from the world of clay and repetition that was Hornsea Potteries, and dropped me into the brilliantly wonky mirror of the Discworld and rekindled a persisting love of reading in me.
I’m drawn to books about the mind, body, spiritual connection. Two of my favorites are Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements and Bernie Segal’s Love, Medicine and Miracles. Interesting they’re both written by doctors (I’m a nurse). These books confirm to me we have more control over our bodies and minds than we know. It’s something everyone should learn and is the reason I started my substack.
Anna Karenina - I read this during a low point during my first year of college. It made me feel better just by reading such a monumental piece of literature, and also by getting insights into the meaning of life based on the journey that Levin goes through.
"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" inspired me to leave a pretty great waitress job -- the boss was the hospitality industry's version of Nurse Ratched. I moved to LA for waitress work and ended up as a writer. A few years later, I actually interviewed Louise Fletcher for a story! Lovely, gracious woman, not at all like her famous character.
Way back in 2017 I read "Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics" by Dan Harris and Jeff Warren. I learned that I really wasn't doing meditation all wrong after all and that encouraged me to try guided meditations for 5-10 minutes a day whenever I remembered. This habit made it possible to enjoy my job enough to keep going to work until 2020 and then work from home until I was able to retire at the end of that year. I also discovered that my favorite meditation teacher Sebene Selassie has a newsletter on this new platform called Substack, which led me to discover more newsletters, such as this amazing one, just as I was wondering how in the world I would keep from being bored in retirement.
What a fantastic question! I think the ones that still hold me hostage to this day are All Things Great and Small by James Herriot, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, and Range by David Epstein. I think about each of these minimum of once a week.
The Diamond Age by Stephenson, and Singularity is Near by Kurzweil. Both were very eye-opening to what was possible, both vastly more than I initially thought. I loved the hard sci-fi descriptions from Stephenson. I went pretty far down the futurism rabbit hole, but eventually found a good balance that includes what's possible and what's likely.
Oh so many...two all-time favourites:
1) Harry Potter. I was kind of already a Hermione-y toddler, but the books felt like I got permission to be outwardly smart and studious and have it be okay.
2) Anna Karenina. The descriptions of people and feelings and *vibes* are just perfect, I've never felt so seen.
In keeping with the theme of this newsletter, there are two books that immediately came to mind.
1. Biomimicry by Janine Benyus: My habit has always been to peruse books stores for titles that will jump out at me. This one did just that back in the late 90's. It change the way I view our world and the wisdom, ingenuity, and awesomeness of all of its inhabitants. It made me rethink intelligence as it is typically framed from a human perspective vs intelligence as a means of living and surviving as inhabitants on our home planet. How often do we humans try to reinvent the wheel when the solution (or a means or starting point to developing a solution) already exists? It is a question I have asked of myself a lot over the years.
2. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach: In the early 00's, this title peaked my curiosity. Aside from opening up the world of how we living humans treat our dead (both respectfully and not so much), this book profoundly changed the way I view my own body and death. I no longer fear, hide from or ignore death's eventuality. In fact, I view it as quite amazing really, in the grand scheme of Life on Earth. I have often wondered what it would be like if we could see our own insides - our hearts and lungs and brains and all the rest. I have asked surgeons if they would video my surgeries using the argument that they get to see more of me than I ever will, and I'd really like to see what my insides actually look like (not just the images from the numerous x-rays, MRIs and other scans I'd seen). They politely declined - liability issues - which was disappointing but I knew it was a long shot.
When I was 16, in 1966, I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. I was always interested in science, especially biology, but this book showed me that science could be both good and bad. I didn’t know anything about ecology, and of course at that time “the environment” was not a thing people were really discussing, at least in my young circles, or my parents’. It opened my eyes to the larger world.
"Childhood's End" by Authur C. Clarke. It was a required reading in highschool, as I recall, and opened my mind to SciFi and so much more. The Hobbit isn't far behind for same reason.
Great question.
Sapiens was one of those books that forever altered the way i see the world, but I’m not sure it changed my life.
Truth, Lies and Advertising by Jon Steel was what got my foot in the door at my first job in advertising and put me on a career path that severely impacted my life’s trajectory.
Getting Things Done by David Allen would have to be up there—a systematic way to be productive that I still employ everyday.
Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon was instrumental in getting me to start The New Fatherhood, so it would be rude to leave it out.
Oof. This is such a big question. I feel as if I am a human made up of changes created by books.
The first book that changed me was Le Petit Prince. My Dad read it to me in French when I was five. I have read it once a year every year since. I carry a copy in my purse. I have one tattoo and it’s a line from that book.
I think that books are what helped me achieve an inner adventurous life, and got me away from the difficulties of existing as an autistic child in a world not made for kids like me.
Books let me escape and taught me how to make magic in my own life, and they gave me things to talk about. I found friendship with other readers.
There are so many books that have made me who I am. I’m excited to be a part of this book club, and to read along with a group of humans who love to be amazed.
Thank you for doing this.
Discourses of Avatar Meher Baba.
After reading it I realized who and what The Avatar is and why it is the most amazing thing happening in the world.
Dune.
I read it when I was 13 and it rewired my mind. Genuinely insightful and incisive on so many topics - ecology, religion, the nature of power, history - and mildly iconoclastic as it did so, all encased in a grand Hero's Journey with a subtle twist at the end
I read somewhere a piece about how Dune is one of those books that has really endured (was in the context of being made into a film). How do you feel the book stands up now? And do you love film? (I haven’t read book so am really curious - I find dune 2 somewhat problematic…)
No adaption is perfect, so I have some minor tonal and emphasis issues with Dune 2, and the ending is somewhat different. But it's a fairly faithful adaptation with some stunning direction in places, and I don't really believe that it's possible to do better with such a complex book.
What about it do you find "problematic"?
I think you may benefit from reading the book, as I think it will address most of your concerns. And it's a great read. To address your points
Specifically
1. That is probably fair, but the only other desert-lands film I can think of of the top of my head is Lawrence of Arabia, where Omar Sharif is one of the main characters and he was Egyptian.
2. It is about a Messiah, a literal one, with godlike powers of prophecy.
3. Southern fundamentalists is an invention of the movie. In the book they're all fundamentalists.
Excuse the cut and paste from a post viewing FB post...
* I wish that films set in "desert lands" cast actors with Middle Eastern heritage in speaking roles.
* I wish that a story/film that claims to not be about a white saviour messiah, portrayed the people he was (not) rescuing as having more agency and doing something other than clamouring for the white (not) saviour to save them. (Zendaya being the seeming only holdout but even she hooks up with him...).
* I wish that films about indigenous uprisings didn't just lump people together into amorphous groups like "the fundamentalists in the south"
I might also add that in the movie Zendaya's character has a much larger part than the book. And the character of Liet Kynes was originally a man fwiw.
A few of my lifetime favorites have been named here, mostly for the reasons I would list (Narnia, LotR, Discworld - which always lifts my spirits, some classics.)
We need to discuss those of us who are re-readers - who find books we love and habitually return to (despite the pile of shiny new ones we intend to read). I find re-reading can sometimes be more impactful than the narrative as originally presented for so many important reasons - not the least of which we notice details that were "background" material on a first read.
My case in point - Madeline Miller's "Circe." I'm an historian by training, so the work women do as a narrative leitmotif usually doesn't grab my attention (unless it's wrong). It's scenery to the story's action; I know what it is and how to do most of it. But my third reading, or maybe it was a listen, to Circe and I started noticing ALL the weaving. So much weaving. And it was connecting, in my mind, to the spells she was working on and learning. And that process was SO familiar as I'm a fiber artist, so I could strongly relate. I credit that particular reading of Circe as the impetus I needed to buy a loom and learn to weave.
Now, I have a business as a fiber artist. I teach weaving, write a weaving Substack, and write weaving patterns. All (to some extent) because I re-read a book.
Just off the top of my head:
For non-fiction I have to go with "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter. It was published the year I started college and the connections it explores between mathematics, art, music, and the study of consciousness continues to guide my thinking about ... almost everything.
For fiction my immediate choice is "Little, Big" by John Crowley. Hard to explain the impact, but impact me it did.
Grimm's Faire Tales when I was a child provided morals and values that I still live by today. Dostoyevsky,s Crime and Punishment helped me to see a whole new world and the human condition.
How to be Brilliant by Michael Heppell. Before reading it, I was an unhappy employee. After reading it, I became self-employed and gained such freedom and confidence!
Five Hundred Mile Walkies by Mark Wallington - a humorous account of his walk around the SW Coast Path. It was the first time I had heard of the route, and this book sowed the seed of a dream that I realised 25 years later.
I'm not sure it would still hold up for me, but Matthew Crawford's "Shop Class as Soulcraft" became a touchstone book for me after reading and remained so for a long time. It clarified so many murky feelings and thoughts I had about intelligence, crafts, what becomes valued in a society and why (why???), education, and the choices we make about how we want to live our lives (on that subject see also Paulo Coelho's "The Alchemist").
fiction: Gotta be Diane Duane's Door into Fire, which, along with being a great fantasy novel, also showed a world where being queer was, simply, unremarkable -- this absolutely saved my life.
nonfiction: I'd been coming to the idea of a gift economy basically my entire life, long before I knew the phrase; but Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass took me so far beyond the tiny bits I'd scraped together on my own & taught me so many vitally important things, including that a true gift economy is actually possible.
As a much younger person (19/20 years old) the book Ishmael rocked my worldview, as did the book The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff.
As an adult, the book Braiding Sweetgrass was affirmative and solidifying of the worldview that was slowing making itself home in me.
Fiction - Skallagrigg by William Horwood in my teens, and the Broken Earth Trilogy by N K Jemisin when I was older. This trilogy is like nothing I have ever read before and it stays with me.
The first book that came to mind was I'm OK You're OK, by Thomas Harris. It helped me grow up and learn to accept people for who they were, rather than getting upset and wishing they were different.
Leadership and Self-Deception is by far the best personal development book I've ever read.
Wow so many and in some case so long ago, I’ll attempt to get them in order.
Narnia was a gateway into LoR I read every year through high school but even prior to Narnia was a now name forgotten book about a medieval village boy who on rescuing a lords hawk become a page and then by stages a squire. This discovered in very early primary school cemented in me a life long interest in the medieval world and I guess a fascination in how people used to live and think. Dune which awoke an interest in politics and also the possibility of different ways of living. Doris Lessing’s Shikasta series and AA Attansio’s Radix which are both a different kind of sci fi.
A book called Complexity which introduced me to the idea of systems so complex they seem random.
Fighting Globesity about health, waste and consumerism.
The Spirit Balance, a meta study of inequality.
The Angel and the Assassin which is about micro-glia, and the brain’s immune system.