In a recent interview, writer Jeanette Winterson was asked, “What book changed your life?”
Here is her answer: “The Bible shaped me; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando shaped my imagination; and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities gave me the courage to write whatever I wanted.”
I posed the same question to myself just moments ago and felt hard-pressed to come up with an answer. I guess I’ll have to swish it around in my mind for awhile.
Meanwhile, I pose the question to you: “What book changed your life?”
Please post your answers in the comments section below.
Alice Lowe
Catherine
Kaylee Baucom
Paula Maggio
Stefano Rozzoni
seanmcphail
suzannebellamy1
veronikakra
Vara Neverow
William Patrick Wend
Zoe Wolstenholme
I think I would have to say “Tale of Two Cities,” because, at 15, I was enthralled by the Dickens’ narrative skill and locked on to English lit and never looked back . ..”Antony and Cleopatra” gave me a love for Shakespeare and poetry at 20…Later, “The Feminist Mystique” turned me into a feminist
I went on a Dickens binge once, so I know what you mean. Ah, the power of the pen! Thanks for commenting.
Plato, because one can write in richly metaphorical language without indulging in nonsense.
Kant, because one can write in disgustingly turgid prose without indulging in nonsense.
Schopenhauer, because he offers a plausible solution to the problem of life and a compelling aesthetic theory to boot.
Searle, because he’s the best at analyzing the systematic connections between third-person biological processes and first-person conscious states.
Walden, because the daily bread of experience is our most important spiritual sacrament.
My Antonia, because setting, place, landscape matters; or characters are deeply rooted.
Little, Big, because the evocation of mood is an unplumbable mystery.
The Power of the Dog, because under-appreciated gems can still illuminate the darkest recesses of the mind.
Quixote, because Sancho Panza is eternal; and we are not.
Gilead and Home, because great taut skeins of light stretch between them.
Cheers,
Kevin
Between the Lines
http://jkneilson.wordpress.com
Marquez’ “El otono del patriarca” taught me how to dream.
Yourcenar’s “Memoirs d’ Adrien” made me dream about becoming a writer.
Woolf’s “The Waves” made me realize there’s nothing left to be written.
PS. This is a great blog! I feel at home here.
I love your response!
While it’s not a book and not the only literary text that changed my life, Virginia Woolf’s short story “Lappin and Lapinova” was a revelation about interactions and tensions between newly-weds….
Of all Woolf’s works, I believe Mrs. Dalloway remains the one that has had the most profound effect. I’d read it several times and even taught it a couple of times BEFORE I registered the key scene early on when Clarissa and Sally are walking after dinner and Sally kisses Clarissa. I’d simply read past it until the crucial moment when I suppose I was “ready” to take in the radical nature of the scene. Like all people, I’d been conditioned to value opposition and heterosexuality in literature, never mind that I was a lesbian. Well, when I finally “saw” that scene, it changed my whole mode of teaching, reading and theorizing. I went on to posit that sameness can be every bit as exciting as opposition and never again did a scene of homoerotic desire escape me. Of course there are many other aspects of this novel that make it a favorite of mine and many others, but the nub for me is what I’ve just written.
1) THE SECRET GARDEN by Frances Hodgson Burnett: as a child, it is one of the best books which introduces you to the marvellous and misterious world of literature and literary recreation by fuelling your imagination, by giving you a shelter against which the real world disappears, and by making you feel the delicacy and the strength of human emotions and desire of knowledge.
2) MRS DALLOWAY by Virginia Woolf: As a late teenager, it is the first book that revealed the amazing possibility to explore human consciousness and to recreate it with words. And a book which, at that age, leaves you with the feeling that you have to go back to it in order to comprehend more. As an adult, I realised that all of Woolf’s books need to be re-read at different times as they offer you new insights which always change and grow according to each phase of your life you are going through.
3) ULYSSES by James Joyce: The first book which surprisingly shows how the fictitious world of literature could (and should) be more “realistic” than the real world itself. By moulding and shaping his vibrant language, James Joyce is still a great lesson to us all. And, despite the well-known and mostly debated rivalry between Joyce’s and Woolf’s critics, we should realise that their attempts and amazing achievements (some of them still unsurpassed) are rooted in the same heroic need to understand, explain and artistically recreate the unsolvable misteries of our identities.
Although there have been many books that have evoked a powerful response in me, without a doubt, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf changed my life. Because of the relationship between Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe and what their private thoughts revealed about them (through Woolf’s writing), I am, in the middle years of my life, currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English with women’s issues as my focus.
Wow. Great answer. Thanks for your response.
I have three answers that I always give:
1) Paula Danziger’s The Pistachio Prescription – when I was ten, the first book I read where everything wasn’t okay
2) Jeanne Marie Laskas’s Fifty Acres and a Poodle – when I was seventeen, the first book that sounded like the inside of my head
3) Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts – when I was twenty, the first book I read that so gracefully delved into the things people don’t say to each other.