Is there a book you can name that's influenced your life in some way?

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Is there a book you can name that’s influenced your life in some way?

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I loved the series of Anne of Green Gables reading it as a middle schooler, young mother, and as a grandmother. My youngest child was named Anne and she personified that spunky young woman!

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There are two, for very different reasons:

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. I wrote in my review of it, “This stunning work hits all the right chords, imploring us to be kind to one another during a time when it seems hatred and distrust are increasingly the norm. It reminds us how important it is to savor, moment by moment, this truly beautiful world in which we live.” (Hard to believe I said that all the way back in 2017!) I encountered the book at a time when I was pretty miserable, and it’s one of the few things that helped me through that period.

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. I consider this the most important book I’ve read on aging and dying. It made me really think about how I wanted my later years to look, and what will and won’t be acceptable to me when my options become more limited. The author encourages his readers to talk about death and dying with family members while everyone’s still young and healthy, and demonstrates why this is so important.

(And sorry, I know I’ve mentioned these before, but they’re the two books I’d put in everyone’s hands if I could so I continue to evangelize on their behalf.)

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Harriet The Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh, which I read at age 10 in 1968. The first book I’d read about a girl who was honest, sometimes angry and sometime mean. Harriet gave me permission to be honest about my feelings (though hopefully not too mean in public!)

Also To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, which I read in the spring semester of my freshman year (1976)-- the first book I’d ever read in an English class by a woman! It was revelatory, as it mirrored the way my own inner thoughts and feelings worked, and that it was possible to write about such things! It made me become an English major.

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I so agree with Lincoln in the Bardo. So sad and powerful.

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*All the Light We Cannot See got me out of a massive fiction reading slump. I was only reading nonfiction for a degree I was working in and this book rekindled my love of fiction. Degree done. Now I pretty much only read fiction, so the book really affected my reading life.

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