15 Books That Changed My Life

By Emily A. Solley on April 30, 2016

For those of you looking for a book to start your summer with, I spent a few hours making this short list of books I would recommend to anyone, accompanied by quotes and anecdotes about my five favorites. I won’t say that every book I’ve read has fundamentally changed me, but there are a few that remain rooted in memory, as much a part of that day, week, or year as the people I met and places I went. My sophomore year of high school will always be the year of Slaughterhouse-Five, my sophomore year of college the year of Cloud Atlas. Pick a book to take with you to the beach tomorrow afternoon and you might just be picking the theme for your entire summer.

1. Mama Day by Gloria Naylor.

Courtesy of amazon.com.

She could walk through a lightning storm without being touched; grab a bolt of lightning in the palm of her hand; use the heat of lightning to start the kindling going under her medicine pot. She turned the moon into salve, the stars into swaddling cloth, and healed the wounds of every creature walking up on two or down on four.

I didn’t think I was going to like this book. The first few pages of the novel are confusing due to its narrative structure, but once you settle in with the style, you won’t be able to set the book down. The language is more tapestry than fiction, which will allow you to feel the impact of human hands on the story. I read the entire book lying in the sun on Landis Green, and ended up crying at several points throughout.

2. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: “Why me?”

“That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?”

“Yes.” Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.

“Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

I’m one of many who has had their life changed by Vonnegut. I rarely say that Slaughterhouse-Five is my favorite Vonnegut book, but it is without a doubt the book that got me hooked, mostly because of the quote above. I always loved sci-fi and fantasy, but this was my first venture into the genre of literature Vonnegut seems to have perfected, which uses sci-fi to construct not only a new world but a a new philosophical movement.

3. The Call of the Wild by Jack London.

Courtesy of Gary Paulsen.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

Jack London is the author of my favorite words: “I shall use my time.” I first read The Call of the Wild when I was seven and didn’t reread it until my senior year in high school, when it reminded me to really be present in each moment.

4. American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

“People believe, thought Shadow. It’s what people do. They believe, and then they do not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjuration. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe; and it is that rock solid belief, that makes things happen.” 

Neil Gaiman will make you laugh, cry, and cringe. His writing consistently straddles the boundary between the real and the imaginary and will make you question everything you think you know with a gentle reminder that the world is complex and terrifying. Gaiman has a deep understanding of human nature, and in his novels it weaves with the fantastic to create a world all his own.

5. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood.

Courtesy of amazon.com.

“When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You’re your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don’t yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you’ve been.”

This book is perhaps the most complex and fulfilling I have ever read. I found it sitting on my desk one day. Each of my family members swore they had never seen it before, so I have accepted that it was left by the literary fairies. It is one of the best gifts I have ever received. If there is a writer with as much insight, gentleness, and grace as Margaret Atwood, I have yet to encounter them. Her writing is uniquely dreamlike and changed the way I think, read, and communicate.

6. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.

“I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.” 

Ender’s Game might change the way you look at yourself in the mirror. It may be difficult to believe that this book full of children attending a space academy addresses deep philosophical questions of identity, but Orson Scott Card has created a universe where the children are being trained as military masterminds and the adults are asleep at the wheel. Its examination of xenophobia and love despite our differences makes Ender’s Game pertinent to our current political climate.

7. Song of Myself by Walt Whitman.

Courtesy of CUNY Digital Archives.

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

 Let’s not forget poetry. I may be biased (since all of my Spotify playlists are named with quotes from this poem), but I will venture a guess that Walt Whitman has at least one stanza that will make you think he’s been reading your journal. The brilliance of Whitman is his complete irreverence. Remember, he was writing in a time of high poetic form, but his poetry is freeform and almost excessive in its expression of the range of human emotion. This poem is actually a series of smaller poems that both celebrate the most mundane parts of the human experience and praise the singularity of the self. Let this poem open your mind.

8. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman.

“But Balthamos couldn’t tell; he only knew that half his heart had been extinguished. He couldn’t keep still: he flew up again, scouring the sky as if to seek out Baruch in this cloud or that, calling, crying, calling; and then he’d be overcome with guilt, and fly down to urge Will to hide and keep quiet, and promise to watch over him tirelessly; and then the pressure of his grief would crush him to the ground, and he’d remember every instance of kindness and courage that Baruch had ever shown, and there were thousands, and he’d forgotten none of them; and he’d cry that a nature so gracious could ever be snuffed out, and he’d soar into the skies again, casting about in every direction, reckless and wild and stricken, cursing the air, the clouds, the stars.” 

This is the last book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. I began reading these books when I was in elementary school, and even though I couldn’t really appreciate the deep political, religious, and economic commentary within, the fantastic world and painfully real characters kept me captivated. These books have remained some of my favorites as I grow older because they offer disturbingly accurate representations of human emotion, and force me to ask questions I truly don’t know the answers to. The world is one of the most interesting and vivid ever created, and will not dissapoint the reader needing a break from normal life.

9. The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin.

Courtesy of amazon.com.

“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”

Keeping in the vein of fantastic worlds, Ursula Le Guin’s fantastic exploration of scientific inquiry, space, time, war, utopia, and human relationships will leave you reeling. Within, two very different worlds, one the colonizer and one the colonized, are shown in exquisitve relief as Le Guin constructs societies that both reflect and critique our own. Le Guin is another writer that has been with me since my childhood. I read her young adult novels religiously, so when I discovered her extended universe of speculative fiction and sci-fi, I bought out the shelf of the bookstore and spent a few months trapped in her Hainish Cycle. If you need something different than anything you’ve ever read but still want to be challenged, this is the book for you.

10. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.

“The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful … Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.” 

The funny thing about this book is that while I had to stop almost every other page to gape in awe and amazement, I can’t think of anything to say about it. It defies description. The Wikipedia page describes it as “a novel about two women, two men, a dog, and their lives.” That’s absolutely true. It is also a novel that challenges one of the most powerful philosophical developments in the modern world: Nietzsche’s brand of eternal recurrence. While Nietzche asserted that due to the infinity of time and the finite number of events, everything will reoccur ad infinitum (in other words, that everything that has happened, will happen, and will continue to happen), he also recognized that this idea would put an unbearably heavy burden on the human soul. In contrast, Kundera asserts that each human has only one life to live (hence the lightness of being). Our lives, our relationships, the people we love, are the result of a series of coincidences and happenstance, and are often fleeting, even if we as humans need to see them as meaningful and fated. So consider your own view of time, of life, of reoccurrence, and open this book to fall in love and have your heart broken.

11. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Courtesy of amazon.com.

“SADNESS OF THE INTELLECT: Sadness of being misunderstood [sic]; Humor sadness; Sadness of love wit[hou]t release; Sadne[ss of be]ing smart; Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]; Sadness of having options; Sadness of wanting sadness; Sadness of confusion; Sadness of domes[tic]ated birds, Sadness of fini[shi]ng a book; Sadness of remembering; Sadness of forgetting; Anxiety sadness…” 

This book was given to me by a friend during my junior year of high school. I read it in a single afternoon, lying in the bed of my Dad’s truck at my favorite park. This is a book I would recommend finishing in a short amount of time, because although I don’t remember many of the specifics, I will never forget the feeling of tranquility it draped me in. Foer will take you on a journey to strange worlds that, while not entirely that much different from our own, feel as fantastical as Narnia or Westeros. He is an undeniably optimistic writer, so don’t worry about having your hope for humanity shattered.

12. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.

“You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it [dignity]. It’s never dignified, always brutal. What’s dignified about dying? It’s never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it’s fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it.” 

I didn’t know this book was so famous (or so controversial) when I found it on the bottom shelf in my favorite section of my favorite used book store. I happened to be sitting in front of it because I had chosen a spot by the friendly tabby that prowled the aisles. How could I not read a book that began a list of “Rules and Suggestions for Enjoying this Book” and explained its own symbols before I even encountered them? This is another one that I read in a single day, sweating and laughing my way through some of the most brilliant prose and unflinching characterization I’d ever read. It was funny, real, and a bit disturbing. In some ways, Dave Eggers draws from Vonnegut’s self-insertion and biting witticisms, and in others, he complete ignores the Vonnegutian rules of style. Decide for yourself whether or not he succeeded.

13. A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.

Courtesy of amazon.com.

“Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words–”friend” and “real” and “story” and “change”–words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like “identity” and “search” and “cloud,” had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had “American” become an ironic term? How had “democracy” come to be used in an arch, mocking way?” 

What a weird book. What a great book. This is essentially a series of short stories about wildly diverse characters that are connected in some way, each belonging to the music industry or at least lingering near it. It spans several continents and decades and straddles the past, present, and future with grace and a slightly apocalyptic leaning. It would be difficult not to finish this book, since you only get the full story by combining information from each of the narratives, but at least push through until you get to the chapter that is told entirely in Slideshow format. That’s not a typo. There is actually an entire chapter that is told through a PowerPoint presentation. It may not be the last I encounter in a novel, but it was definitely the first.

14. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

“Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides… I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life’s voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.” 

I can’t claim credit for this book. A dear friend gave it to me for my birthday last year, so I read it on my plane from the US to Italy. While I definitely would not recommend reading it in one sitting, once you begin this book, it will call to you from across the room. So be careful. Cloud Atlas is a series of six stories that work like a nesting doll; they go from far past to far future and back again, with each narrator encountering the others in interesting coincidences. Each narrative is interrupted by the next, although thanks to Mithcell’s innovative narrative mirror, you get to travel back and get a conclusion. Eventually, it becomes clear that each narrator is the same soul living in a different human body.

This book doesn’t quite fit in any genre. It’s part mystery, part thriller, part historical document, part speculative science fiction; whatever it is, David Mitchell weaves a world that leaves you both in awe and terrified of what he has called “the universality of human nature.”

15. The Feather Room by Anis Mojgani.

Courtesy of amazon.com.

“This is what the walls taste like. Cucumbers sliced and salted. Dill growing in the window. The smell of coffee. Lick the wall.”

I will leave you with another book of poems. Anis Mojgani is one of my favorite spoken word poets, and this book did not dissapoint. However, I’ll let him speak for himself.

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