Meme: Books That Changed You
Jul. 11th, 2009 06:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Over in
sounis, they're having a discussion about about "stories that have changed you - how you think, how you feel, how you live your life." I haven't read very many me-changing books -- mostly, the euphoria I get from reading a really good book is the goshWOW! of discovering the story itself or its author's talent (generally leading to an investment in her career that requires me to buy more shelving, too :-). But as I thought it over, I realized that I had read three books that moved me personally:
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When I was 12 and had just finished The Lord of the Rings for the first of many times (a life-changing experience of the goshWOW! variety), I picked up a copy of Paul Kocher's Master of Middle-Earth and my world 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, meta-books, books 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.Thus me. Anyone else have a self-changing literary experience?
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.
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Date: 2009-07-11 06:26 pm (UTC)As for autobiography, David B.'s Epileptic and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis changed the way I thought about graphic novels, while on a far more personal level, Elie Wiesel's Night helped me come to terms with what was done to my grandparents and their families during the war; knowing that he and my grandmother came from the same town, that any one anonymous person could be her, gave me something to hold onto at a time when I was struggling to find a medium for my pent-up grief and anger. I don't know that I could call it a "favorite", but it's important to me.
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Date: 2009-07-22 07:57 pm (UTC)Oh, that's OK. I loved The Cloister Walk too. I sometimes have a little Benedictine in me, too (and I should probably see a doctor about that), but the Jesuit/Jedi is louder.
-Krizzzz
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Date: 2009-07-23 04:47 pm (UTC)