ha!  I first need to find the book I read it in.  Not so easy as I'm in the middle of 3 right now and just finished a 4th.  I also don't recall the name of the "life changing" book ever being mentioned. 

It was a simple remark but one that stuck with me and has triggered a lot of thought.  I figured that if anyone I knew had read a "life changing" book, they would likely be on Shejidan.          

It’s a great question, Sk8er.i think there are many such books for me. As long as we don’t interpret the term in too grand a fashion, many books changed me, Or changed my views, changed something important in my experience, which changes at least something of my life.

I am going to give this thought. A moment’s reflection produces three titles off the bat, and I’m only up to age 11. But it’s too late to type right now. I’m assigning time on my to-do list to this. I have a feeling it will be a long list. OMG I just thought of a 4th and a fifth. I’m going now to make a list so I don’t lose track!

Agree it's a great question.  And I also agree with Star.  There are many books which changed me over my life in significant ways, but I can't think of one individual title I'd actually call 'life-changing'.

But I'm also making a list.




 

I have thought about it

                               Life changing books

There are far too many entries here to explain in detail how each changed my life. But I’ll say at last something about each.

“The Ugly Duckling", age 3 or 4, Philadelphia. I remember crying when my mother read this to me: “They were so mean to him!” Fostered early development of empathy. Winnicott wrote a beautiful paper “The Development of the Capacity for Concern” that fits well here. Although he wrote it a year or two after my experience. That gets my attention.

The most life-changing book of my life: The title is long gone. One day when I was maybe 4, my mother took me to the library. I was examining a picture book. I will never forget the instant when the letters on the page began to shimmer. There was movement and swirling and something magical taking place. In what must constitute a miracle if anything in this life does, the letters coalesced into words. A powerful jolt of surprise and awe grabbed hold of my small self. And Joy! “MOMMY! I CAN READ! I CAN READ!” I followed her around like an imprinted duck as she searched the stacks, reading out loud in laughter and amazement. The whole library watched and shared my joy. One of the most vivid emotional experiences of my life. Life changing, for sure.

Rivets and Sprockets, Age 5, El Paso TX. The first science fiction book I read. I see now that it is by Alexander Key and was published in 1964. I was delighted. It opened a life-changing door for me. Which comes straight out of my unconscious, as he later wrote the better known The Forgotten Door. I realized there were countless worlds for me to explore through books. And all I had to do was open a book and read. 

I spent second grade, age 6 to 7, in Lexington KY, wallowing and reveling in the classic Thornton W. Burgess Old Mother West Wind series written in the early part of the the 20th century. I mean all of them, as my elementary school library had at least 20 of these. They featured the anthropomorphic and sentient Laughing Brook and Green Forest as characters, along with Peter Rabbit, Reddy Fox, Jimmy Skunk, Chatterer the Squirrel, and Grandfather Frog. These taught me to stay in bed reading all day because what was in books was maybe better than anything outside them. Life changing!


At the Earth’s Core, age 10 or 11, outside Philly where we settled down. Expanding on the experience above, few kids ventured into the stacks of the library. So I had the place entirely to myself. One day, I discovered ancient riches. I found one of the jewels of my childhood. It was an old ornately-illustrated 1922 edition of At the Earth’s Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs. No one had taken the book out since 1948. It was a treasure map, a trip to wonderland, a private excursion all mine. I felt like Kepler when he discovered the laws of planetary motion:

 “I have stolen the golden vessel of the Egyptians to make from them a tabernacle for my God, far from the confines of the land of Egypt. If you forgive me I shall rejoice; if you are angry, I shall bear it; I am indeed casting the die and writing the book, either for my contemporaries or for posterity to read, it matters not which: let the book await its reader for a hundred years; God himself has waited six thousand years for someone to gaze upon his creation with understanding”.

Reading is a private, personal trip into another realm. I embark on the Hero’s Journey, and return changed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Earth%27s_Core_(novel)#/media/File:At_the_Earths_Core_1922_Dusk_Jacket.jpg


“A Sound of Thunder”, age 14, the classic Bradbury story. Origin of “the butterfly effect”. Group read in school enrichment program. Beginning to share my love for SF. 

Foundation Trilogy, age 14. What more to be said. This is for the 14 year old. The promise of reading delivered. Not for adults. Read it when it still works.

Doors of Perception, age 15. Aldous Huxley’s profound 1954 memoir of his mescaline experience. More influential than I can say here. Launched a period of self-exploration that has resonated through my life.

Steal This Book, age 15. Abbie Hoffman introduces me to the counterculture, its values, its rejection of the mainstream.

Jude the Obscure, age 16. Thomas Hardy’s novel crushed my soul and showed me that books were not just wonderful portals to other worlds but could be the truthful communications of human emotion, including the deepest pain.

Sartre, Camus, Kafka, 12th grade. Honors English, senior year of high school. These thinkers precipitated a full-blown existential crisis. That search for identity and the challenge to the conventional notion of self probably played a role in my college majors of neuroscience and philosophy, and in my professional career trajectory. And they were damn good too.

Dangling Man, mid 20’s. As I assembled my own library, Bellow’s first novel delivered to me one of the more memorable metaphors about books. If early on I understood reading as a passage to infinite worlds, it was not primarily for escape from a bitter reality. I relished life for the most part. But with adulthood come the inevitable rugged realities; all is not glimmering, at least not all the time. The protagonist says “My books stand as guarantors of an extended life far more interesting and meaningful than one I am forced to live daily.” Boom!
Journey to other realms integrated with human struggle. A worthy contribution.

Downbelow Station, 2005. Long delayed. Instant recognition that I was in the hands of a trusted practitioner of her craft. And importantly this was the book that led me to this community a year later. Thank you all for what that has meant!