Books That Change Lives

I’m generally skeptical when I read yet another “book that changed my life” story, because I think this kind of thunderclap is rare.  It’s become the obligatory question in author interviews; NPR and the National Book Association both maintain webpages devoted to the life-changing books cited by dozens of “distinguished writers.”  (I had to check on Joyce Carol Oates – hers was Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass, which she read at the age of 8.)

I don’t doubt that books can have a profound effect, though, and Oates’ point is that she was inspired by the courageous, curious heroine.  For myself, I was strongly influenced by a Rachel Carson book my father gave me. No, not the famous one that launched the modern environmental movement, but a gentler, more descriptive book called The Edge of the Sea.  My family spent its vacations at the shore, and I was fascinated by her descriptions of tide pools and coral reefs.  I still have that crumbling, yellowed paperback, held together with a rubber band, and while I didn’t become a marine biologist, I do carry a continuing appreciation for clear, compelling nature writing.

The August 8 New Yorker magazine highlights a more significant kind of life-changer, in an essay by Stephen Grenblatt about a work by the Roman poet Lucretius.  “On the Nature of Things”, according to Greenblatt, “persuasively laid out what seemed to be a strikingly modern vision of the world,” including a theory of atoms and a belief that “we are made up of the same matter as the stars and the oceans.”

Needless to say, these were not mainstream beliefs in the years before the first millennium of our current era . For a variety of reasons ranging from religious to political to coincidental, the poem and its ideas were very nearly lost, only to be rediscovered centuries later as the Renaissance was dawning.

Greenblatt weaves his story of the influence this work had on modern science and philosophy with a personal story of its effect on his own view of the world.  He writes: “There are moments, rare and powerful, in which a writer, long vanished, seems to stand in your presence and speak to you directly.” It’s a wonderful look at the micro- and macrocosm, and a reminder to me that a work of literature can indeed change the world, and the fragility of circumstance that makes it happen.

Was there a book or poem that changed your life?  Or maybe just nudged you in a new direction?  Discuss!