(no subject)

[wildflowersoul]

There's a meme going 'round the old interwebs about "books that changed your life." I've been mulling this over for a few days, and come up feeling kind of embarassingly shallow, because I can't think of any book that I can point to and say "my life would be markedly different if I had never read this book."

There are a few that come close- I read If You Came This Way, by Peter Davis, a book about homelessness, in high school, and it really opened my eyes to poverty issues, but it's not like that book is what made me work at the homeless coalition later in life, I did that for the cold hard cash and my enjoyment of thankless, soul-crushing social work. I also read Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, and it did make me think a lot, but it's not like I stopped watching tv or being a media consumer whore after reading it. Maybe I could say "Charlotte's Web" and "The Rats of Nimh" ignited my love of reading way back in kindergarten/first grade, but I think any good story would have had the same effect.

There are a handful of books that I have an enduring love for, and would want with me on a desert island, but I can't say any of them changed my life. It's a relatively short list, though: Outlander, Diana Gabaladon; Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte; Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell; The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood; Paradise Lost, Milton; Shakespeare's works (note: I have not read every work of Shakespeare, but I love enough to not be able to choose just one- if forced I could narrow it down to 12th Night, Hamlet, and Henry V); Beowulf; A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens; Tristram Shandy, Sterne; A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy O'Toole; Dubliners, Joyce; The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan. I think I want to add Silent in the Sanctuary, Deanna Raybourn, to the list, but it really has not stood the test of time. It is the book that inspired me to start thinking "hey maybe I could write something like this" so someday it may earn a place on the list.

Then there are the books that were So Important to me at one time or another, which are now no longer important. Which isn't to say that I now hate all of these (though that is the case for a couple), but they are just no longer Big Deals to me: The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie; Nightwood, Djuna Barnes; The Rainbow, D.H. Lawrence; Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins; the works of Charles Bukowski; the works of Rainer Maria Rilke; The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky; High Fidelity, Nick Hornby; Brave New World, Huxley (a great book, but I don't see myself reading it and underlining passages anymore).

So, what books have changed your lives?