What makes a book life changing?
My friend and I started a book club recently as a way to get out of the house and hang out more.
The first book we read for March was The Lost Manuscript by Cathy Bonidan. A woman reads a manuscript she found in her hotel room. The story has such a deep effect on her she tries to get in touch with the writer only to find out he had lost it several decades ago in a completely different country. On top of that, he had never finished the manuscript so the last fifty or so pages are written by an unknown author.
Told in an epistolary format, the novel is essentially about how many other people came in contact with this unpublished manuscript and how it completely inspired them to change their lives for the better.
At the book club meeting, we talked about that and you never actually get to read the life-changing manuscript they’re referring to. But, you see it’s affect in every word that the characters write to each other in their letters in emails. So, we had to ask each other: what book completely changed your life.
Here are the top 3 for me:
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
I got my first copy from the free books cart outside my high school library. I took it home and completely devoured. It’s all about this beautiful man named Dorian Gray who wishes that he could be young and handsome forever. It comes true. But his sins and vulgarity begin to reflect in his portrait, exposing him for the corrupted person he is becoming.
It was the first real classic I ever read in high school and was what led me to other future favorites, such as Emma by Jane Austen and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.
It left such a mark on me that explaining it now would be too much like corrupting a memory. Just now that I wrote several quotes from the book and plastered them on all my sketchbooks and school notebooks, so I would always have a piece of it where I was.
It changed my life in the sense that I felt comfortable being different in the way I thought and acted. It taught me that there was a value in exploring different opinions on a subject even if you eventually arrived back where you started.
Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler
“I would tell him that for so long I thought I would be nothing; that my loneliness had been so total that I was unable to project into the future. And that this changed when I got to the city and my present expanded, and my future skipped out in front of me.”
For undergrad, I moved to Atlanta, the total opposite from my small, coastal hometown. And for that first Fall semester, I went through a deep, almost profound, bout of loneliness. So I reread Sweetbitter.
It’s a story about a young woman who moves to New York and stumbles into a job as a “backwaiter” at a very renowned restaurant. Soon she gets entangled in this weird throuple-ish relationship with a hot guy named Jake and an older woman named Simone who becomes sort of a mentor but has this weird hold onto Jake.
I didn’t get the story the first time I read it. But, reading it again while I was in college completely changed everything. Suddenly, I wanted to experience everything—good and bad. I wanted to push against every self-protective layer and really learn how far I could go.
In other words, I wanted to give life the old college try.
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
“I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ’em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.”
What can I say about this book? It simply put everything—my life, my art, my future—into perspective.
I read this for a class and eventually did a presentation (and wrote my final essay) on this book. I talked about her thoughts on art and how it is inherently political as well as the ways that shows up in this text (and all her other books too).
But what I admire most about this novel (really all her novels) is the way that she was trying to create a language that was both female and Black as a way to connect and communicate with other Black women. So, when I think about art and I think about literature and I think about my own writing, I’m reminded of her and this novel (specifically the character of Pilate).
If you still need a reason to read it, here’s a two sentence intro from Goodreads: “Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly.”
When my friend and I talked about the books that changed us, it made me think of how and why certain books leave such a mark.
I think part of the reason comes down to timing. When you read a certain book at a certain intersection of your life, it has the power to spur you down your path when you otherwise would’ve been stuck at a standstill. A part of you has to be open and ready for that life-changing factor. A part of you has to meet the book at least halfway.
I think books change us when we’re ready for change. So, there’s have been 3 times in my life so far where I’ve been ready for change.
