With social media fragmenting, I’m bringing back my old “You Tell Me” Wednesday discussions to try to get good old fashioned blog conversations going. If you’re reading in a feed reader or via email, please click through to the post to leave a public comment and join the discussion!
It’s not likely any of us would be writers if certain books hadn’t had a profound effect on our lives.
With the exception of your own books, and setting aside religious texts for the purposes of this discussion, which book(s) had the most profound effect on your life?
I’d probably have to go with The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier, which I somewhat randomly checked out from my local library. It was the first novel I ever read. The jump from picture books to a full novel completely blew my mind.
What about you?
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Art: Vanitas-Still Life with Violin, Score, Flower Vase and a Skull by Pierfrancesco Cittadini
The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson which started an elementary schoolgirl to change her life and protect the environment, and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion which drew me into fantasy and began my quest to conquer worlds of my own.
There are several books that would vie for this honor, but Level 7 by Mordecai Roshwald (1959) gets the nod. Like you, Nathan, I chose this book by random in my high school library in 1962. This was at the height of the Cold War and the seventeen year-old me was drawn wide-eyed into an account of what could happen if someone pushed “the button.” The ending was unexpected and sobering.
I can’t say this book changed my life, but it certainly affected it.
I’m going to go with Where the Red Fern Grows. That was the first book that I had powerful emotional response to. And then, Wilson Rawls visited our grade school when I was in 6th grade (1974) and I remember him telling us not to throw away what we wrote. I’m sure my husband regrets I ever heard those words. Lol
So many, but one that stands out is The Giver by Lois Lowry. I first read it in 3rd or 4th grade, and (as many Newberry books do) it treated me like a person capable of grappling with big ideas and emotions. As an adult I’ve taught it to my 8th grade classes for seven years, and we have amazing conversations about ‘freedom from’ vs ‘freedom to,’ and how so many terrible societies have been created by people trying to solve real problems. As a writer I see now the book has a lot of flaws from a craft perspective, and I don’t care at all. Last year an 8th grade boy looked up shocked and said, “This is the first time I’ve ever felt anything when I read a book.” There’s no higher praise.
At age 13, The Outsiders by SE Hinton taught me books can be enjoyable to read and turned me into a bibliophile. I’ve read probably 2000 books in the 47 years since. But no book has changed my life more than Finding Claire Fletcher by Lisa Regan, which I read 2 years before it was ever published. BTW, I met Lisa through your critique partner forum back in 2010. So thanks for that.
I just loved Gone with the Wind. It was so long and I had to be so sneaky about reading it late into the night. Just stayed with me.
The first masterpiece I ever read, The Count of Monte Cristo. It was an abridged version, but I was nine, and did not know better. When I was in my early teens, I found the full book, bought it, and was amazed on how writing can take you away. It made me become a part-time writer, and it is still something I read annually.
when I.was 15 in 1962 I read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and it moved me and made me realize how difficult life could be. I was stunned by it. I wrote to John Steinbeck then (and following every book of his I read) and received a letter back from his publisher Elizabeth Otis saying he will enjoy my letter when he returns from his trip (I still have it!) I was also quite pleased and felt superior to my friend who at the time was writing Pat Boone. haha.
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Winston Graham’s ‘Poldark’ series. I read the first four in the 70’s. Then I found the bodice rippers.
I read Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men in high school, and at one point, the character, Jack Burden, describes how he feels when he learns that the great love of his life is now Willie Stark’s lover. Even in all my teenage ignorance, I knew that it was great writing. On occasion, I still think about that passage.
Since I was little (my mother read them to me first) Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Yes everyone’s insane and the world doesn’t make sense. The Hobbit. Brontes. In high school we read The Sound and the Fury. Stream of consciousness blew me away. I started watching myself think sometimes. Weird disconnected randomness! Still a strong book for me. Started rereading about a year ago. Stopped about halfway. Protagonist’s suicidal agony too distressing.
Honestly, it’s easy to say which book(s) had the most profound effect on my life, as opposed to just that “stay with me” or that set me on my path.
It began, for me, with “The Sun Also Rises.” I’d read a fair amount of ‘popular fiction’ in high school, and started enjoying reading when bored on a friend’s family farm one night and a paperback copy of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” just happened to be on a lamp table near a lamp.
From my 8-year-old reading of “The Hound,” to reading of “Lord of the Flies” in 6th grade at an American school in India that had also boarding students, many of whom reminded me of the characters in William Golding’s novel, to “The Guns of Navarrone” and “Force 10 From Navarrone” on the way back to the US for 8th grade, to Phillip Jose Farmer’s “Riverworld” trilogy to my mother’s collection of “Lew Archer” mysteries and joining “The Book of the Month” club in early college, it was Hemingway’s first novel – which I read in my Junior year of high school because a friend had been assigned it Sophomore year – that set me on my path as a writer, and a journalist, and a “creative humanist.”
That novel, and its editor – Maxwell Perkins – changed American fiction from Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and Edith Wharton and Henry James to something all the more “American.” As American as Huckleberry Finn. And as much a snapshot in time of real people, real language, real attitudes as Twain’s tome.
I thought, until reading it, I wanted to write science fiction, or mysteries, filled with drama and pathos and fanciful ideas and experiences.
That book taught me to OBSERVE the world around me. To TAKE NOTES on everything, including the way people actually speak, for authenticity. And to not shy away from stark statements of impressions.
That people often have REAL lives, that are as filled with drama and pathos as a movie or television series, with very little needing to be ‘made up,’ and that, as a writer, I could (perhaps) make a living writing about fictionalized versions of at least others’, if not my own, life, I owe to reading that book.
I like everyone’s stories of discovering literature. I was a reader from a young age and always loved books, but I don’t think I quite grasped how thrilling fiction could be until I read “The Diamond in the Window” by Jane Langton. I was probably younger than 10 but I really don’t remember, except it inspired me so much I started writing right away.
I too was an early reader but I think the first book that really twigged my imagination was The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, given me to read by my father when I was a teenager.
Aloha, Breakfast of Champions and Stranger in a Strange Land when I was twelve. Up till then I had been absorbed in horse and Indian books – Misty of Chincoteague and The High Chaparrel: Apache Way type stories. Needless to say reading those two books at that age rearranged my brain cells and thought processes. Two years later Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee also had a profound impact on me and still does till this day. My first children’s book is called The Frozen Wolves and is about a young Indian boy who must care for his dying great grandfather during a fierce winter snow storm while sheltered in a cave that is also a place of refuge for a pack of wild wolves. I believe as a storyteller all of the books you read in a lifetime come together and sift around into your own tales.
It took me a while to figure this out . . . which book most changed my life.
And then I realized . . . it was “The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding,” which is so much more than how to feed a baby.
I knew how I didn’t want to raise my children (how I was raised), but I didn’t know how to raise children.
WAB to the rescue . . . I leaned parenting tips that help me into my grandparenting style.
So thankful for books of all kinds!