Horizon

Yeah, Atlas Shrugged is funny that way. The only book I ever read that complete strangers would walk up to me and give me that changed-my-life line. And it was awful. And there are still people around who call themselves "Objectivists", as far as I know.

Perhaps the more interesting question is: can a good book change anyone's life? Because as far as I can tell the life-changers are all bad, half of them on Oprah's book list. And on the other hand, friends I know who give me books that they think will help me some way because it helped them (ie, they don't use the line but it's pretty much the same thing), well, all I can say is I couldn't tell the difference between the pre-epiphany them and the post. And after the glow wore off neither could they.

L's mother gave her, for some reason, a self-help book for xmas. It's called something like "You Can Heal Your Life" and I gather is moving well right now. This is written by the same woman who wrote a book called, "Heal Your Body: The Mental Causes for Physical Illness and the Metaphysical Way to Overcome Them". Here's what the back of the book says"

Hay believes we make ourselves ill by having thoughts of self-hatred. She includes a directory of ailments and emotional causes for each with a corresponding affirmation to help overcome the illness. For example, the probable cause of multiple sclerosis is "mental hardness, hard-heartedness, iron will, and inflexibility." The healing "thought pattern" would be: "By choosing loving, joyous thoughts, I created a loving joyous world. I am safe and free."

L's mother is a perfectly normal, sensible person. So what is it that appeals to her about this stuff?

As usual, I suspect it's some kind of purely aesthetic response.

From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L Konigsburg changed my life. My second grade class was discussing it and we were only supposed to read the assigned pages - reading ahead was forbidden. The book was so good I rebelled against authority for the first time in my life and finished the book that night. Unfortunately I was so excited about what I read, I let something slip in the class discussion and was caught. When the teacher tried to punish me by "making" me read and write a report on another book, she just helped to cement my love of reading.

I learned that rules can be stupid and should be broken and I've been a voracious reader ever since.

Bravo.

A nursery teacher made me sit in a room by myself one day to "punish" me for helpfully reading out the small-print Suggested Responses from the bottoms of the flash cards she was using. It seems I wasn't supposed to be reading yet.

It was the end of that school for me. Also the beginning of the notion that the authorities can be wrong.

Orwell saved my adolescence for the same reason: he provided a reminder from a respected source that authority -- even an authority that has a claim on one's emotional loyalty -- can be wrong.

It's that thing he says about Winwood Reade -- the feeling of "This man is on my side."

Apocalypse Now probably changed my life because I saw it at such an early age and it must have had some effect on my somewhat macabre tastes. It might even ultimately be behind my unhealthy obsession with movies. But it would never occur to me to walk up to someone in the video store and tell them it changed my life with a knowing just-wait-you'll-see sort of smirk -- the kind that a flight attendant gave me when she saw Atlas Shrugged in my hand. There's a difference.

Our coolest airline experience ever was the time a flight attendant saw a Faulkner novel in J's hand and a copy of Proust in mine and went into extended highly literate rhapsodies about both -- in, IIRC, at least two languages and possibly more. The conspiratorial wink came when he asked J, "Have you ever tried reading Faulkner [wink] drunk?" He recommended it. Said you'd end up staring at the same page without turning it but you could get into a wonderful kind of trance that way. Never tried it. Has anyone else?

I think my most memorable run in with elementary school authority involved being ordered to write a story about catching a Leprechaun for St. Patrick's day. I refused, so I was sent to the corner with a stern warning to get started. The teacher came back a little while later and I'd written a single sentence to the effect that I'd let the thing go because Leprechauns were stupid.

So I got sent to see the principal, who knew me very well by this time. A vein on his forehead was starting to pop out, as it usually did when I showed up. He asked me why I refused to write a story, and I said I did write one. He jumped up, slammed his fist on the desk, and screamed "ONE SENTENCE?"

I guess it was then that I realized there wasn't much career potential in the short-short story.

Now I think about it, all my creative writing assignments in elementary school were complete flops.

The times books have changed my life, it's never been because of the quality of the book itself, but rather because of the intersection between the circumstances of my life and the ideas in the book, however poorly written.

Bruce Bawer's Stealing Jesus was transformative for me, an experience not shared by the four people who read it on my recommendation. Thorstein Veblen's largely irrelevant Theory of the Leisure Class combined with the dreadfully written Millionaire Next Door to define my views on money.

Yes, I don't really want to reread Studs Terkel's *Working* because it would now probably come across as hokey. It didn't on first reading.

http://www.dreaming.org/~graeme/articles/archives/000021.html

I think that says it all from me on this subject.

Wow, Graeme.

I distrust the 'life changing' book types. They're the sort of people who spout Marx the week they're reading him and Christian Gnosticism the next week. 'Work changing' books I do understand, in the sense of being a writer. Working my way though Elizabethan drama for instance was a pretty amazing experience.

It's not just a type of person, but a type of book. There is a difference between a book that might have an effect on the course of a life in some way and a life-changer like Atlas Shrugged, a book carefully, specifically designed to be a life-changer.

When I read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind I thought my world had been rocked, but it turned out to be less than a passing rain shower. Waiting for the Barbarians, Under the Volcano, In Our Time, The Third Policeman, The Day of the Locust, and To the Lighthouse all somehow made my eyes wider.

Long ago, there was Ruth Gannet's My Father's Dragon. The boy is on the docks with his exiled stray cat, wishing aloud that he could fly away (from his mother, as I remember). And the cat suddenly says, "Do you really want to fly?" It didn't change my life, but it did do something.