The Book that Changed Me

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Most of us can name a book that’s left some sort of indelible impression. Perhaps Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre taught you the difference between conventionality and morality. Perhaps Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex convinced you that ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’. Or maybe Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment made you cancel plans to murder your local pawnbroker. Books can change the way we see the world – shaking us up and changing our minds.

For the Wheeler Centre's annual Gala Night of Storytelling in 2016, we asked ten storytellers to share the books that changed them. What are some of yours?

opalesque-obelisk

Haruki Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes changed me. I could no longer accept that everything was real in the sense that I had assumed it to be, and so I tested the limits of that by changing a lot in my life. It remains an influential shadow, but I have not had the opportunity to read it once more since.

ExitOnly

How could anyone not be changed by A Little Life?

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ExitOnly Hm, I found it kind of flawed, though? Powerful but not sure if it changed anything.

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The book that changed me was this one –

Need I say more? shudder

Kaatje

This is how you lose her, by Junot Díaz, was it for me! Amazingly I did not notice until I read this book how reluctant most male writers are to be completely bare with their unlikeables, especially at the expense of their own vanity. his protagonist does not appear flatteringly (and he has constantly had to deflect the likeness albeit halfheartedly) but golly how refreshing.

emilyharms

Nobel Prize-winning author, Doris Lessing's first book written in 1950, The Grass is Singing, left an indelible mark on me when I read it in my early 20's. Set in the days of apartheid, her brilliantly written novel explores themes relating to the effect of apartheid on the lives of people (both black and white), revenge and explores an individual's need for self-delusion to avoid facing uncomfortable truths.

mrconnorobrien

Erlend Loe's 'Naive. Super' was it for me – an incredibly charming Scandinavian novella that takes the search for the 'meaning of life' as its focus, and goes off in completely unexpected directions.

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mrconnorobrien Never heard of it but definitely keen to check it out now…

LKoschmann

After a misspent youth mired in Virginia Andrews’ novels and Dolly magazines, reading Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s, The Leopard, for Year Twelve English opened my world to the sheer beauty of literature. Reading it in suburban Melbourne, I felt every moment of the oppressive Sicilian heat and the languid life of an ageing Sicilian aristocrat. A special memory was re-reading it during a long, hot Italian summer years later. Needless to say, I never returned to Virginia Andrews.