The Book That Changed My Life
Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter to Them Most
Everyone has a memory of that one book, the one that inspired or awakened, the book that changed his or her life. Edited by Roxanne J. Coady and Joy Johannessen, The Book That Changed My Life is a collection of 71 essays by writers celebrating the books that matter most to them.
Favorite Book, Greatest Book, Most Inspiring Book
While the book that changed one’s life may well be either their favorite book or the one they most admire (the “greatest”), it doesn’t necessarily have to be either, as is evidenced in this collection.
It may be the book that opened doors to new worlds, the book that finally got one to enjoy reading after years of bad classroom reading assignments, or that work that helped develop the reader’s life-philosophy, or angle at which they view their days. Life-changing is the key element here.
For instance, this author feels that Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a masterpiece, and reads it about every other year, at least ten times to date. Upon reading The Book That Changed My Life, however, and really thinking about it, he came to realize that it was Roald Dahl’s magical Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that first brought him to another place, at age 10. He hasn’t returned since.
Some Surprises in Writers' Choices
Readers of this collection will be both surprised and not at the essayist’s choices, particularly if they are familiar with the writer’s own work. Harold Bloom, for example, is the renowned author of The Western Canon (with two dozen other volumes), considered perhaps the foremost authority on books of influence. His choice: a little-known fantasy book entitled Little, Big (John Crowley, 1981) for its perpetual freshness and his own inability to describe it.
Doris Kearns Goodwin chose Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, about World War I. Goodwin went on to become a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, several of her books detailing war.
For Elizabeth Berg, the author of 14 literary novels, it was Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Berg was in high school, and had heard that Salinger’s book was “dirty.” Instead, she found that a good book “could tell a secret publicly and it could still be a secret privately.” She credits it with starting her writing career, a “literary aphrodisiac.”
A Sampling of Choices of The Book That Changed My Life
The essays included in The Book That Changed My Life, each about two pages in length, and their topic/choices are as varied as the authors here. A small sampling of the others:
- Senator John McCain -- For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
- Nelson DeMille -- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- Sebastian Junger -- Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
- Barbara Leaming -- The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
- Senator Joe Lieberman – The Bible
- Frank McCourt -- Henry VIII by William Shakespeare
- Micheal Stern – The Sears Catalog
- Laura Numeroff –Eloise by Kay Thompson
Editors Coady (a bookseller) and Johannessen (a professional editor) have each included their own “very opinionated reading lists” at the end of the book, and there is a recap of the choices that could serve as the starting point for anyone looking to add to their own “must reads” or “lifetime reading list.”
As with compilations of this sort, The Book That Changed My Life is not a one or two-sitting page-turner, but rather a book the reader will best digest little by little, perhaps using it as their own resource, or for literary inspiration, returning to it often.
Coady, Roxanne J. & Johannessen, Joy. The Book That Changed My Life, 2006, Gotham Books/Penguin. (ISBN: 978-1-592-40317-2)
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