What book changed your life?

[Varoun]

Title says it all. What book has, in your opinion, changed your life, whether it be how you think or feel about certain things, or if it completely changed your outlook on life?

[Meant2Move]

The first book that made me think about where I was health-wise and where I wanted to go was Healthy Aging by Dr Andrew Weil. I don't agree with many of his food suggestions but this book got me thinking about how important the food we eat is to our overall health and long-term well being. It caused me to read more, learn more, and make big lasting changes.

[Nomad Jay]

The phrase "changed your life" is a bit broad (no offense) because everything we intake shapes us in some form or fashion, be it ever so small. Certain books have been highly influential to me.

 

In the fiction category, Sir Terry Pratchett's Hogfather made me reconsider the nature of abstractions and examine my rather materialist (in the original sense) views on the universe. Years later the same writer penned Going Postal which still makes me consider the nature of personal responsibility, the social contract, and the necessity of consequences. It doesn't hurt that both are laugh out loud funny. Ray Bradbury's (may he rest in peace) novel Farenheit 451 and amazingly prescient short story The Murderer influenced my thoughts on how we use technologies.

 

The non-fiction books that have shaped or influenced my views are too numerous to list, but the ones that spring to mind immediately are G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, Max Boot's The Savage Wars of Peace, and Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman.

[Raxie]

Ray Bradbury's (may he rest in peace) novel Farenheit 451 ... and Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman.

 

These are two of my favorite books of all time!

 

Dan Simmons' Endymion Series (4 books: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion), particularly the last two, were wonderful/life changing/thought provoking.  Probably my favorite books in the "written in the last 20ish years" category.

 

Anything by Heinlein also tends to completely change how I look at the world after I'm done with it.

[emclinux]

Fearless: The story of Adam Brown.  It has made me stop and do the right thing rather than leave it to some one else.  Also that nothing is out of reach.  Just one ineradicable story.

[El Exorcisto]

Nineteen Eighty-Four by Orwell. Learning to question authority's motives and realizing the degree of control they exert over your daily life is a lesson everyone should learn.

[Meant2Move]

Nineteen Eighty-Four by Orwell. Learning to question authority's motives and realizing the degree of control they exert over your daily life is a lesson everyone should learn.

 

You got that right!  I would not count The Hunger Games books in the life changing category by any means, but the thing I really liked about reading them was that they got me thinking about government, authority, and what it takes to get a people to rebel when in an injust situation.

[El Exorcisto]

Meant2Move have you read Animal Farm or Brave New World? If you haven't and you like a good dystopia as much as I do they are must-reads.

[Donar]

Nineteen Eighty-Four by Orwell. Learning to question authority's motives and realizing the degree of control they exert over your daily life is a lesson everyone should learn.

 

You got that right!  I would not count The Hunger Games books in the life changing category by any means, but the thing I really liked about reading them was that they got me thinking about government, authority, and what it takes to get a people to rebel when in an injust situation.

 

 

"Atlas Shrugged" would be right up your alley. When I finished it....I just thought.....whoa.

[Bekah]

I have several in different areas...

Diet: Life without Ed

Overall Health: The Ultramind Solution

Life: Aspergirls

Fiction: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo et al.

Religion: Jesus, The Prophet of Islam and The Tao te Ching

Psychology: it was a research study that influenced a later book, but that book is called Healing Trauma through Yoga

There are many other things I have read that have changed my life in some way, but not always books as awhole, but maybe an article, or excerpt or whatnot.

[alienjenn]

How to behave so your children will too - Sal Severe

[Raxie]

Meant2Move have you read Animal Farm or Brave New World? If you haven't and you like a good dystopia as much as I do they are must-reads.

 

Yes! Animal Farm is excellent.  Brave New World is also great, especially after reading Orwell, such a different type of dystopia and still so thought provoking.

[Thetemplarreservist]

Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein

 

Major reason i joined the military and tried out and made it through USAF TACP training.

[Mad Hatter]

Yes! Animal Farm is excellent.  Brave New World is also great, especially after reading Orwell, such a different type of dystopia and still so thought provoking.

 

I remember reading Animal farm in English class. The teacher picked out characters for all of us to read, suspiciously based on personality. For example the chatterboxes in class were the hens and the most aggressively political guy was the Stalin pig. I got the Lenin pig. Still not sure what to think about that... 

 

And Brave New World is awesome!

[Raxie]

@MadHatter that's kind of hysterical.  There are only so many non-offensive characters to be compared with in that book, if any, hahah.  Old Major was probably one of the more respectable pig characters in the book... definitely better than Napoleon (Stalin) or Squealer (the fact manipulating pig). 

[tekno77]

Keeping with the dystopian themes that some people have talked about, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood has completely changed the way that I view a number of different things. Capitalism, body image, food, race, social hierarchy, religion, and probably a few more. Really connects well with the topics explored on nerd fitness, especially changing body image and the Paleo/Primal diet ideologies. Most life changing thing I found with this novel is the fact that Atwood makes it seem very close in terms of where technology is at in society today.

 

Many of the criticisms that Atwood gets at can be connected to the dangers that fad diets, and specifically in the novel plastic surgery/genetic modification, can have on people wanting a change in their appearance. I am a huge fan of most of the other dystopia works and 1984 was my favorite novel until I read O&C.

 

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is also just an amazing book that deals with social identity, societal/communal pressures, and the true meaning of happiness and inspiration. This also deals with Latin American culture as well so it really covers all the bases well.

[Raxie]

Man I need to stop looking at this thread.  Everytime someone posts something I feel the need to go back and reread all of these amazing books and hug the people saying these books changed the way they looked at the world.  (Reading is probably one of my favorite things to do in the world, I might get a little too excited over books).

 

@Tekno77 have you read the other books in the Oryx and Crake series?  It's a trilogy.  I haven't read the third one yet, but The Year of the Flood was wonderful for all the same reasons as Oryx and Crake, except it shows the downfall of the world from a city dwellers point of view, as opposed to someone in the "middle class" as in the first book.

 

Which makes me want to add to the original list of books that changed my life: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, another good dystopia.  It's pretty extreme, but what dystopia novel isn't?  Reading that book in middle school promted me toI look into the state of women's rights in other parts of the world for the first time, and it completely changed how I saw the entire situation.  Obviously I knew that women's rights was an issue but it seemed so far in the past, and this book made me realize it is still a very real issue in many parts of the world.  It was the first time I realized the whole world is not like it is in my part of the world with other issues as well.

[tekno77]

I took an Individual author study on Margaret Atwood last year as part of my last semester of undergrad studies and we read The Handmaid's Tale and that is another great example of a life changing book. I have read Year of the Flood which is also just stellar and I agree with you that it was nice to get a varied perspective that connected with the first novel skillfully, looking forward to picking up the final installment. I was hesitant about reading a bunch of Atwood in the class but as it turns out she is was of the smartest and most down to earth writers, not to mention funny and self-depriciating, that is alive today.

 

I hate to keep you coming back to this thread but have you checked out the Positron series that Atwood wrote. Its online at byliner.com, which has a free trial if you feel so inclined, and she is releasing it in a serialized fashion that is very interesting and makes it hard to stop reading!

 

Side note, this is the first I have gotten to talk about literature since I graduated in May and it is awesome!

[Raxie]

Hahah no worries.  Books are awesome. I am actually really jealous of that class!  None of the lit professors in my school were very good so I ended up going mostly history for electives (which I love, but definitely not the same).

 

Ooh no I had no idea she was doing that! I will definitely have to check Positron out!  Thanks :]

[Thetemplarreservist]

I know i normally don't stray outside thrillers or military Sci fi but the Warded Man series hooked me and i couldn't stop reading made me want to get wards tattooed on my whole body.

[pirateradio]

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, read it when I was in my early teens and it really spurred a love of history (as an interesting side note, JFK said that reading this book, which came out just before the Cuban missile crisis, was one of the reasons that he refused the action recommended by most, bombing Cuba, saying that WWI was caused by a gigantic mistake [it was], that cost 17 million lives.....and he has been proven right in his course of action since the fall of the Berlin Wall). 

[MariahSnow]

I read Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins in college and the whole thing blew my world wide open. Also, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was a great analysis of feminism in it's many different forms.

 

Also this quote is pretty much autumn in my childhood: "sweet-apple chomps, in blasts of blue sky and painted leaves, with crisp football afternoons and squirrel chatter and bourbon and lap robes under a harvest moon." 

[mevre]

Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea cycle, without a doubt. my name here on NF comes from a minor character in one of those books, i wrote my senior thesis on another of the books, i'm writing my own fantasy series because of them...on and on, the influence of those books shows up time and again in my life. i think it helps that i read them as a college student though, and so i had the right frame of mind to take them in.
The Secret Lives of People in Love by Simon Van Booy, The Awakening by Kate Chopin [reading this book quite literally changed my life; it was the book i talked about in an interview for a scholarship i later won, without which i would not have been able to attend my wonderful university], and anything by Adrienne Rich would also qualify. looking further back, reading Wish You Were Here by Barbara Shoup in middle school was a life-saver. for the first time, i felt like someone "got" me, and was pushed to the boundaries of what i had previously thought a book could do to a person's emotions. ditto Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier. pre-teen girl angst, you know. she understood it, and nailed it! Born Confused was the first book i read more than once.
and then of course, from even earlier in life, i owe my love of books in general to Holes and the Hank the Cowdog books being read to me when i was in 4th grade. 

[Becoming-Bane]

Lullaby by chuck palahniuk. It makes you think about the power of your words as well as your actions.

[Superman116]

' Art of Racing in the Rain' Changed my mind on how I feel about dogs. I now have a dog, he is my hiking and running buddy, and yes his name is Enzo. I know I'm a nerd, but that's why I'm here!