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For me, it would have to be Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I don't entirely accept her ideas, and I think the book itself was barely above mediocre, but no other book has so drastically challenged my beliefs.
I used to be aggressively liberal, but now I find myself agreeing with conservatives more and more. Greed is virtuous, and welfare is armed robbery. I can't argue with her there. Atlas Shrugged transformed me from a bright eyed anarcho communist, to a cynical anarcho-individualist.
One notable book would be James Joyce's Ulysses.
I remember starting it in the early morning as I watched the sun rise on the beach. I remember reading Stephen Dedulas's thoughts while walking along the shore in chapter three, realizing that I was doing the same thing.
And after finishing Molly's epic soliloquy that I had went outside, and after being infiltrated by those words, my mind was racing and I just felt ultra-sensitive. It was like no other feeling in the world.
The book that changed my life was carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World. A great way to look at the world with a skeptical eye.
I used to be aggressively liberal, but now I find myself agreeing with conservatives more and more. Greed is virtuous, and welfare is armed robbery. I can't argue with her there. Atlas Shrugged transformed me from a bright eyed anarcho communist, to a cynical anarcho-individualist.
So where wee you when I was being vilified on the Oxford-Cambridge thread... in spite of the fact that my own political views lean far more to the left than the right... for daring to suggest that there may be something inherently wrong with the notion that everyone is entitled to a share of what labor hard for? Further on this topic, my daughter in New York sent me the following:
I work, they pay me. I pay my taxes, and the government distributes my taxes as it sees fit. In order to earn that pay check, I work hard. At any time I am required to pass a random urine test, with which I have no problem. HOWEVER, what I do have a problem with is the distribution of my taxes to people who don't have to pass a urine test. Shouldn't one have to pass a urine test to get a welfare check because I have to pass one to earn it for them? Understand - I have no problem with helping people get back on their feet. I do on the other hand have a problem with helping someone sit on their a**, drink beer and smoke dope. Could you imagine how much money this country would save if people had to pass a urine test to get a public assistance check?
Hmmm???
By the way... if there were a book or books that changed my life they most certainly must include Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal and J.L. Borges' Labyrinths. Just why will need to wait until I'm not so drunk.:goof::p
Yeah, Conrad was a big one for me too. I've always thought that there was something inside of people that we didn't have a name for, and Heart of Darkness was the first time that I'd heard it mentioned in print (because how can you write about something that doesn't have a name?). That was probably the best book that I've read up until now concerning humanity itself.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
Maybe you're just becoming an old man.Quote:
Originally Posted by Manchegan
:lol:Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
Philip Larkin's Collected Poems. In him I found someone expressing my own conclusions about life- made me feel less alone.
Aldous Huxley's early novels, especially Chrome Yellow and Those Barren Leaves. His descriptions of the ultra sophisticated, urbane English (or British) upper classes gave me a glimpse of truly sophisticated, civilised conversation.
Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. That was the first time I fell in love with the beauty of language and learnt to appreciate a novel for that alone.
Maybe he is but it's pretty much an accepted fact of life that that 'The older you get, the wiser you get.'Quote:
Originally Posted by JuniperWoolf
Maybe he is but it's pretty much an accepted fact of life that that 'The older you get, the wiser you get.'
So where does the phrase "no fool like an old fool" come from? You only have to look around to see plenty of old fools giving the young fools a run for their money.
I freaking hope not. I'm much too young to be old.Quote:
Originally Posted by JuniperWoolf
...not that old folks are bad, but I was hoping I'd be at least 30 before anyone accused me of becoming an old man.
I need to re-read this, it's been far too long!Quote:
Originally Posted by WICKES
I freaking hope not. I'm much too young to be old.
It's not looking good Manchegan, but at least you are using the word freakin'.That gives you yoof potential. :lol:
By the way, are you familiar with Victor Meldrew?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9cR8OTkcdo
The old fools are the exception that underline the rule. Hence the expression.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paulclem
The quiet madness of
Kafka's short stories and his novella The Metamorphosis
and
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Murphy and Watt
had quite an impact on me. Before that,
Orwell's 1984 (especially the appendix on 'Newspeak', for me the very best part of the novel)
The old fools are the exception that underline the rule. Hence the expression.
Good one.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
Having an argument isn't vilification. Not to bring it up again though as apparently we're not allowed to discuss politics...
Anyway, book that changed my life...
hmm...
Gombrich's 'The story of art' if I'm honest. Picked it up randomly one day a couple of years ago and it literally opened up a whoe new world I hadn't even considered. Doing an english lit/history of art degree now. So yeah, that had a pretty lasting effect. Hah.
The Philosophy of Schopenhauer by Bryan Magee - and Schopenhauer's own works, but this is a good place to start. Also many writers in his vein, including Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Conrad, Hardy, stoics, Epicurus,...
Hmm. Can't really think of too many at the moment.
Macbeth by Shakespeare changed the way I looked at good literature. Meaning, I gained an appreciation for it. I no longer walked into the teen section in the bookstore because of it. Basically after my whole English Lit. class I felt sickened by the teen books that were on my shelf, I couldn't take the simplicity and cliches any longer. I just remember being blown away by that play.
Hmm... 1984 would be a biggie. It really changed my perception of the world around me. I'm a lot more attuned to what's controlled around me and the use of language by the government. Also made me a little paranoid. :lol:
I often hear an individual claim that a novel changed his or her life. However, he or she rarely explains how or why it changed his or her life.
What is a novel that "changed your life," why did it do so, and how?
If I had to name one book that changed my life I would go for Dostoyevsky's Crime & Punishment. Why? Because it introduced me to that author & then years of studying him, his novels, his fascinating ideas & many other Russian novelists including Tolstoy, Turgenev & Gogol.
Ulysses, as I've always said, everything I read afterwards was different. Words were just never the same to me.
I don't really know. I think all books change my life in some way or another.
Slaughter-House 5 just reinforced my belief that life is filled with insequential events, yet has enough sequential events to deceive most people.
Dante's Inferno is making me think though, whether or not it's too late for mankind to redeem themselves now.
Hey,
well I would go for Paulo Coelho... I know, I know... how people say that you get tired of Coelho and maybe it's true, maybe not {won't discuss it here}... but his book Veronika decides to die changed my life.... :p made me a much happier person...
About eight years ago I bought the original 1979 edition of The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction edited by Peter Nicholls (Granada) from a local library. They were having a sale of old books. This was a 'reference book only' originally & probably because of that it was in excellent condition. When I first saw it I thought it would just be a load of old Klingons & Daleks or something equally bad. In fact it is an incredibly academic work & apart from the fact that it is thirty years out of date is still a valuable reference book. It introduced me to many authors & critics so I nominate it as a book that changed the way I look at a lot of things.
certainly the works of Joyce have completely altered me. My first European novel I had ever read was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I soon after moved into Ulysses and Finngeans Wake. the latter two have now influenced me more so than Portrait, but I feel indebted to Portrait. As of right now, I've read Ulysses twice, and Finnegans Wake once and a half times, I'm so close to that second! I have not limited myself to James Joyce's works, here's a couple that have had a considerable amount of impact on my life:
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Sterne
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Ficciones by Borges
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
of course the collected works of such poets and philosophers as Wallace Stevens, Yeats, Nietzsche, Donne, Kant & Hegel (I'm certain I'm close to comprehending these colossus giants),
Wow, we have a lot of the same tastes. And we are obviously both dedicated Joyce fans ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Barbarous
Mhmm, I dig that. It's like a build up. Not stationary, then one big change, then stationary again... more a bunch of constant little changes. The Grapes of Wrath hit me pretty hard though, and I wouldn't be who I am today if my fifth grade teacher hadn't read us The Secret Garden.Quote:
Originally Posted by Balak
Oh, and then there's The Swamp Thing saga, the ones written by Allan Moore. I was really affected.
Oh yeah, and the second time that I read Heart of Darkness was pretty revolutionary (I didn't think much of it the first time I read it).
Books that changed my life...? I see I haven't posted a real answer to this as of yet. I think that there must be a number of such books:
Baudelaire- Les Fleurs du Mal- As I high-school student I dutifully read all the poetry assigned... and continued to do the same in college... but this book is really the one that turned me seriously on to poetry. Baudelaire was someone I discovered on my own (not required reading) and I found him immediately seductive... laden with dark imagery, eroticism, dangerous seductresses, a blurring of the senses, a mastery of form and a daring use of the same.
Dante- The Comedia- This work left be simply stunned. It was... and continues to be... the greatest single piece of literature I have ever read. I was simply overwhelmed by the mastery of form, the wealth of characters, narratives, history, philosophy, and theology that were explored. I was enthralled by the variety of language and style as the author moved from the sulfurous pit of hell to the wonder of heaven that virtually surpasses the ability of human language and results in the most eloquent and visionary poetry.
Kafka- The Short Stories and J.L. Borges- Labyrinths (and absolutely everything else)- I came to both of these writers with a certain expectations... and in both instances these were not met. I expected something more blatantly surrealist... rooted in the senses... establishing a clear sense of atmosphere. In other words... with a certain concept of Surrealism I expected an dark, sensual, "gothic" atmosphere ala Poe or Baudelaire with the dream-like unreality of Dali. I got none of this... but for some reason... in both instances... the writing slowly worked its way under my skin until it completely seduced me. Both writers opened me up to an endless array of other works of literature: Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Tomasso Landolfi, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, John Barth, Donald Barthleme, Lawrence Sterne, DeQuincy, The Arabian Nights, etc... They also led to a dramatic re-thinking of many other writers and works of literature: Robert Burton, Cervantes, Jonathan Swift, the Book of Job, etc... Both authors opened me up to the appreciation of a sort of dark, dead-pan humor, a playfulness with ideas taken to their logical... albeit absurd... extremes, an ability to laugh at the absurdities of modern life, an appreciation of a sort of clean, simply prose, a fascination with the blurring of genres and forms (prose and fiction, history and science fiction, criticism and short stories, etc...), and an appreciation for the truncated and fragmentary.
William Blake- Collected Poetry and Prose- Blake is another who stunned me. As with Borges and Kafka I found myself discovering something far different in Blake than what I had expected considering his reputation as a "lunatic" and what I had already come to know of the other Romantic poets. As a visual artist I was (and continue to be) absolutely enthralled with his efforts to combine the notions of the book as a work of visual art (ala the medieval illuminated manuscripts) with the book as the means of the transmission of text. Blake insisted... 100s of years after Gutenberg had effectively killed the hand-made book in which everything from the binding, the scale, the imagery, the writing/calligraphy down to the choice of paper were carefully considered... that all of these elements... were essential to the readers experience. This alone would have made him an essential figure in my own personal pantheon... but to this we must add the brilliance and originality of his imagery and paintings (made for books), and his visionary poetry in which he nearly achieved his oft stated goal of inventing his own system rather than living under that of another man's.
Considering Blake... I must say that the illuminated manuscripts... especially The Book of Kells, The Lindesfarne Gospels, The Tres Riches Heurs of the Limbourg Brothers, and the Shanameh of Tabriz changes my life as a visual artist through the masterful merger of my two great loves: art and books. These works have inspired my continued fascination with the book as a physical and visual object. The Celtic books especially challenged my expectations with regard to art and opened me up to an appreciation of abstraction. All of these books continue to impact my own artistic efforts to a greater or lesser degree.
Lawrence Sterne- The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman- This book was another mind-blowing experience. James Joyce was nothing after Sterne... an also-ran coming 100s of years later. Sterne was virtually there at the very birth of the novel as an art form and (much like Cervantes) he has the audacity to literally deconstruct the very mechanics of this new art form from the very beginning. Long, rambling, digressions; setting himself up as an omniscient narrator of his own life and then describing events he could not possibly have known about in such detail (such as his own comic conception), blank pages, end-sheets and dedications placed half-way through the novel, variety of letter forms, pages left blank in which the reader is expected to fill in the missing "delicate" bits from his own imagination... all of this could have resulted in a mere exotic novelty... but it is all held together through the strength of the narration and the creation of the brilliant characters... especially the author's father and Uncle Toby who stand (again, alongside Cervante's Don Quixote) as one of the finest examples of friendship ever rendered in literature.
Did I forget to mention the Beano annual?
Not that I want to diminish Sterne's achievements or works (I absolutely love his Tristram Shandy) but Sterne did not come out of the blue, but in fact is probably the pinnacle of decades of experimentation with the novel form. And before that, Cervantes, Rabelais, Swift, etc. were already "ahead of our times". It seems like the "canonical" rigidity of the novel form really came with the 19th century and that the 20th century merely rediscovered or reinvented the wheel.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
I have a much less impressive list, but the criteria was "life-changing."
In 2nd grade, I checked out a Sherlock Holmes anthology. The school librarian tried to convince me to leave it for an older child who could understand it. I dug my heels in (life lesson number 1) and read it while my mother was cooking. I would ask her every 10th word, and she would patiently explain each to me. I distinctly remember "prophylactic" making her blush a bit, so I knew there was deeper nuance to this word. So today, I can trace my love of vocabulary to Sir Arthur.
In Junior High I read Shogun. That led me to study Japanese in college. That in an involved but direct way led to me meeting my wife (of 28 years now). So Shogun certainly changed my life.
I work in a library and am working right now,( don't tell anyone I'm on Litnet) and a book just came across my desk. It's called The Book That Changed My Life, edited by Roxanne Coady and Joy Johannessen. Copyright 2006
This book lists 71 writers that celebrate the books that matter most to them.
Just thought I'd share this title.
I might pile a block of serious literature here and say, raising my brow really high, "well, yes, this book gave me a deeper insight to the human soul" etc, but in all honesty, the book that changed my life by giving me a taste of the high art that I am now a humble student of would be:
"The Number Devil"
I remember quite well the moment when I was sick while eleven years old and my father bringing my some books from the library. And it got me hooked. It felt like hearing real music for the first time in your life when all musical you have heard previously are just scales and, what's worse, they claim that scales are real music.
I do think that this book was really influential in my life.
The obvious one would be 1984. I don't think anybody who reads this can really help but see the world differently.
In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje was really a big one for me. It also turned me on to The English Patient, also by Ondaatje, which remains one of my favourites to this day. Really everything by Ondaatje captures the essence of the human condition, and translates it in a way that is poetic beyond belief.
In terms of non-fiction, A People's History of the United States was THE definitive book which really interested me in both history and politics and bridged the gap between ignorant youth and conscientious young adult-hood.
100 years of solitud
it was as if i was dreaming the entire time i was reading it.
Have you read 'Love in the Time of Cholera' or 'The General in His Labyrinth'?Quote:
Originally Posted by marcolfo
I feel that every book that I've read has enriched my perspective on life in one way or another.