The Catcher in the Rye
discussion
Has there been a book which changed your life? Which one? Why?
What started me on this quest to understand the impact of literature was the memory of an incident which took place in the 7th grade. There was a discussion about things which would make you go to Hell. I remember thinking, "Well, I would never go to Hell, I don't come from that kind of family!" Almost immediately I realized that I had a choice outside the role of a middle class Catholic girl from a "good" family. Obviously, that was the moment when I started on the major developmental task of adolescence..."Who am I?" Looking back, I evaluated the impact of literature on the choices I made.
Many, many books have had an effect on my life. Enid Blyton introduced me to my lifelong love of reading. Shakespeare sparked my love of language. But the first book that actually changed my life was 'Shane' by Jack Schaefer. For reasons that have no place in this discussion, I struggled with a vision for my life through my teenage years. This fine novel provided me with templates for the kind of hu(man) that I could one day hope to become. Still a work in progress :)
Believe it or not, The Magic Faraway Tree. Enid Blyton also caused me to fall in love with reading.
The Book Thief and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which I read consecutively, gave me a new perspective on the impact WW2 had on the lives of "ordinary" German families.
To Kill a Mockingbird, which I read in school, changed my view on race relations.
The Book Thief and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which I read consecutively, gave me a new perspective on the impact WW2 had on the lives of "ordinary" German families.
To Kill a Mockingbird, which I read in school, changed my view on race relations.
For the longest time I couldn't understand people who claimed that "this book/film/thing changed my life" until I came across my favorite book.My favorite book also happens to be the one that changed me most, and that is The Dispossessed by Ursula K.Le Guin.
It helped me change my view of society, of human relationships, of how much the conditioning we receive changes our perception and it taught me to be more tolerant of other peoples' views and beliefs and also to be able to understand the gravity of relations of power between people. It's the book I cherish most and the one that I would recommend to anyone. If you can only read one book during your lifetime, you need to read this one. It talks about EVERYTHING and clears your point of view.
Anelis wrote: "For the longest time I couldn't understand people who claimed that "this book/film/thing changed my life" until I came across my favorite book.My favorite book also happens to be the one that ch..."
I put the book on my list. It sounds worth looking into.
I read "Encounter With An Angry God," and got to know the author, Carobeth Laird. We became friends, and she visited me often. Chapters of her subsequent books were written at my house. She was first published at the age of eighty, a great role model.
In retrospect, I think the book that truly influenced my life was "Caravans" by James Mitchener. I read it between college and marriage. It was a good story, but, more importantly, it woke me up to the realization of an entire world that I knew so little about. I vowed that I would see Afghanistan. I did not, but, I have travelled the world in the years since and learned much. I am still learning and seeking.
East of Eden.In the summer of 1989 I had a compulsion to read the book. I had owned it for several years and seen the Jane Seymour miniseries, but never had read it.
I had a strange feeling that Steinbeck had left an important message in there for me. Never had such a feeling about a book before or since.
I kept reading and backtracking and felt I wasn't getting it. So I rented the 3-volume cassette set from Blockbuster, synched it up with my reading, kept notes, and voila, I had it.
Free Will. Self-determinism.
We are NOT divinely predestined, nor are we perpetual victims of the roll of genetic or social dice. Free Will says we can make of ourselves whatever we want if we accept the onerous responsibility to do so.
I felt immense mental freedom, as if some invisible shackles had been removed. I had been raised in Texas and subjected to a bombardment of extremist right-wing propaganda since high school. I could think for myself and recognized the brainwashing for what it was. (And still is.)
Not long after this, after the Rodney King riots, I realized I had transformed from Conservative to Liberal.
Dead Man Walking: The Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty That Sparked a National Debate - I used to have an embarassingly simplistic notion of "take a life, loose your life." I'd never considered it, never looked into it, just blandly followed this sheep like mentality of my peers in the UK. My then girlfriend now wife argued with me after we saw Monsters Ball and the folllowing day left a copy of Dead Man Walking on the bed and stormed off. I read it, planning to deride it, but somewhere around page 10 I started to feel something changing in my head. By the time I finished the book I had done a complete reversal. I wrote to Helen Prejean to thank her for the book and she very kindly wrote back to me. So yeah, it's a great book and it changed my mind on a huge issue
Read the book Ten Rillington Place by Ludovic Kennedy if you want evidence that Capital Punishment has been delivered to innocent parties. John Christie was an evil man and a killer, but an innocent man was executed in his place. This book also changed my view on capital punishment.
I know the case, my mum lived just around the corner from Rillington Place. Miscarriages of justice are heart breaking. Scott Turrow wrote a great short book on a similar theme
Bluenoon wrote: "It's hard to name just one or two books. I think it depends what the lesson learned is to have a life changing/lasing impact. Sometimes, it's through reading many good books (and in different dis..."
That is true, but I still found that many people can pick one or two books read fairly early in their lives that were like Robert Frost's poem "The Road Less Taken." Some book woke them up to a different reality. Once that happens, I think most people go on to become life long readers and are constantly being changed by what they read.
When I read Of Human Bondage , and learned that people had different realities, I found that I wanted to really hear what people were saying about what they believed and why they did what they did. That led me to read Knock On Any Door by Willard Motley in the 60's and got I interested in working with delinquents and eventually under educated adult prisoners. The book made me long to intervene at any of the turning points which the book chronicled. I felt I could at least give some of these people a choice and that led me to work for a CAP agency and the Dept of Corrections as a teacher and Educational Evaluator for many years. Most of the men and boys I worked with couldn't be helped, but I tried my best and I knew that they could never say, "No one ever gave me a chance." I did my best to see that they had other options; it was up to them to make use of them. There were some successes, and they were worth all the time and work invested in them.
The First Three Minutes: A Modern View Of The Origin Of The Universe by Stephen Weinberg, about the Big Bang theory, pushed me over the line into atheism. I was an agnostic for many years. This book, while it may sound technical, is very readable, especially if you have any type of minimal technical training.Another book that greatly influenced me was Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert Pirsig. I was ill at the time, much like the protagonist in the story, although I did not identify personally with the subject. I also am a fan of philosophy. Like FTM above, this book also has a lot to do with my spiritual journey.
Anne Hawn wrote: "Anne Hawn 0 minutes agoFor years, I have been asking people if there was a book which changed their lives. Of Human Bondage and Marjorie Morningstar changed mine. The first taught me that peop..."
I find this question hard and a bit depressing for myself because while I adore reading, am addicted to it even, I haven't found any one books that really changed me. I will say that most recently, The Fault in our Stars had a great effect on me and taught me that life is short and that things could always be worse, but I wouldn't say that it changed me persay. Personally, I'm working on expanding outward from my reading comfort zone by taking on challenges such as the Boxall books to read before you die, books to read in your twenties, the well-read mind list, the lifetime reading plan, Oprah's book club, and the Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge. I'm hoping that expanding out to the wide array of book choices in these challenges will help me find one or two that "changed" me and affected me in a way that none other has. As it is thought, seeing as I've been reading close to 70 books per year since I was about 12(I'm 26 now) I'm a little concerned that I haven't found "that" book yet. Crossing my fingers that I do.
Kayla, don't feel that something is lacking if a book hasn't changed your life. I read mostly for entertainment. I enjoy getting lost in a good story or beautiful prose. Sometimes you unexpectedly find yourself in a book that changes your view on the world, but others may just make you think and examine your beliefs.
Ultimately if you read often and widely, books will help shape who you are and what you think, over time, without necessarily "changing you" per se.
Regardless, there is no greater pleasure than getting lost in a good book, and that can be enough for me.
Continue to enjoy reading for reading's sake. : )
Ultimately if you read often and widely, books will help shape who you are and what you think, over time, without necessarily "changing you" per se.
Regardless, there is no greater pleasure than getting lost in a good book, and that can be enough for me.
Continue to enjoy reading for reading's sake. : )
Anelis wrote: "For the longest time I couldn't understand people who claimed that "this book/film/thing changed my life" until I came across my favorite book.My favorite book also happens to be the one that ch..."
I have just begun reading the Dispossessed, and from day one realized that it was going to powerful. I am already blown away and I've barely scratched the surface. This one I am reading slowly so that I can take it all in.
Kayla wrote: "Anne Hawn wrote: "Anne Hawn 0 minutes agoyFor years, I have been asking people if there was a book which changed their lives. Of Human Bondage and Marjorie Morningstar changed mine. The first t..."
Kayla, I think I was in my mid 20's when I read Of Human Bondage . Marjorie I read in late high school. I had a good background in the classics in both high school and college, but it took being out of school and being on my own to begin to make choices based on my philosophy. As long as I was still in school, my role was pretty much laid out for me. It wasn't until I had some really big choices to make that I understood how some books helped me figure out what I needed to do.
In later years, I read The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck and when I finished the book I immediately started reading it again. I felt like the book changed me so much that I was a new person and needed to read it over. My sister said that studying Please Understand Me by Keirsey which deals with personality theory was the same way.
I had a college teacher who said that every third book you read should be "good for you," not just entertaining. It sounds to me that you are doing a lot better than that.
Not a book, but a movie. Five Easy Pieces with Nicholson. I had strongly considered a vagabond existence before seeing the movie.
John wrote: "Read the book Ten Rillington Place by Ludovic Kennedy if you want evidence that Capital Punishment has been delivered to innocent parties. John Christie was an evil man and a killer, but an innocen..."Also an amazing movie. Richard Attenborough is amazing as Christie and John Hurt is pretty convincing as the patsy.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I was fairly young when I read it and remember thinking that this alternate perspective of the civil rights struggle in America was one that I only heard about through the potentially biased lens of adults depending on which way their ideologies leaned. In school, we learned about Martin Luther King year after year after year and learned very little about Malcolm X. The little that we did learn was rather negative. I decided to read it because, at the time, there was a fashion trend in the NYC urban areas to wear tee-shirts featuring the faces of "revolutionaries" like Malcolm X, Che Guevara and Marcus Garvey. I figured that if I was going wear someone's face on my shirt, I might as well read their books and find out who they really were. I never did buy that tee-shirt because I thought his autobiography was so profound that it was a shame and a sacrilege that his image was being commercialized in such a manner. It just didn't seem right to me.
I have been pondering that. What does that mean, anyway?
Without a doubt, Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning. It is his story of surviving Hitler's concentration camps. We can be literally stripped of everything, family, friends,possessions, food, the clothing on our backs and still survive.
I am an avid reader. So many books have changed my life, it is hard to pick just one. I will read a book like Psycho Cybernetics (read in 1966) and it will dramatically change my life. Then another one like Handbook to Higher Consciousness and it is change all over again. Byron Katie's book, Loving What Is, and it is change again. Do you experience the same thing.
Graig wrote: "I am an avid reader. So many books have changed my life, it is hard to pick just one. I will read a book like Psycho Cybernetics (read in 1966) and it will dramatically change my life. Then another..."Graig, I definitely experience the same thing! SO many books have influenced me, I am hard pressed to pick just one. The job of a great book is to open the reader's mind, present a new perspective and help us to see the world differently, as we ourselves expand in our consciousness. Also it depends on what age we read them and what is going on in our lives at the time.
Everything we read, see, hear or do impacts us some. Even if the books you read are very lightweight, you are still learning about new places, traditions etc. When I started posing that question to people, I was looking for something that changed the course or direction of their lives. Not everyone has that, but here is a very powerful example:The opening line of M. Scott Peck's book The Road Less Traveled is, "Life is difficult." That one sentence changed my view. For most of my life, I felt like the times in my life that were harmonious and pleasurable were the way life was supposed to be. All the irritations, obstacles, problems, distractions and mistakes were "bad" things that intruded on my "good" life...even things like having to go to work when I wanted to be doing things that I wanted to do.
I don't mean that I resisted those things. I have a pretty strong work ethic, but I felt they were intrusions in the way things were supposed to be. Sometimes they were slight intrusions and other times they were major.
Near the front of that same book, Peck says that all neurosis is an attempt to avoid legitimate pain. You'd have to read the book to get all the ramifications of that idea, but when coupled with the first sentence, I was a changed person.
I learned to completely enjoy the good times in my life because I knew that they wouldn't last. I also learned to soldier through the bad times because they wouldn't last either. The big thing, the thing that made the change was that I didn't have the anger and resentments about the hard times. I no longer felt that life was unfair when things went terribly wrong. It was just life and life was difficult. I can't even begin to tell you how much that helped me through my divorce. Do I always remember it? No, but eventually, in the midst of my grousing about life, it will come back to me.
Denyse wrote: "Without a doubt, Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning. It is his story of surviving Hitler's concentration camps. We can be literally stripped of everything, family, friends,possessions, food,..."Yes, Denyse, it's a big, powerful message. Love this as well.
The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon & Yoko Ono This book has a phrase "Everything is the opposite of what it's supposed to be." That phrase changed my life. It may seem like a paradox but the older I got the more I saw it to be true. It shaped, and continues to shape, the way I see and interpret the world.
When I was a little kid back in the fifties,age nine or ten, my Dad bought me a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories redone for children.That was the start of my life long love of the Sherlock Holmes character.I'm sixty-eight now, and still read, and watch, the latest versions of this classic character.
TOMORROW WHEN THE WAR BEGAN! Whenever I move house now I always try to think about the best way to escape to the nearest remote place possible. I wouldn't say that has changed my life though so much as TAKEN OVER my life.
Great topic.My life changing book was The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, together with some short works by Bertrand Russell, like Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects. Then I realized that there is nobody up there watching me or other people.
Years later, and to much lesser degree, I was influenced by some parts of The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey: it helped me to summarize my ethics (though the part devouted to magic is plainly stupid).
Unfortunately the book that changed my life was The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, one of the seminal books of the feminist era of the 1970s.Now I hate Germaine Greer and her obsession with young boys and I wonder if feminism, while achieving amazing milestones in terms of rights for women now enshrined in legislation in many countries, hsa actually made things worse for women. The backlash against feminism, started in the 1980s and encouraged by neo-liberalism, among other things, seems to have propelled western societies back to the 1950s in male attitudes to women, food and other fsahion and the appalling rates of physical, psychological and sexual abuse against women in most western countries. To say nothing, of course, about the treatment of women in the Middle East and Africa.
Robyn wrote: "Unfortunately the book that changed my life was The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, one of the seminal books of the feminist era of the 1970s.Now I hate Germaine Greer and her obsession with youn..."
I agree, Robyn. The idea was to balance the treatment of women to men, not to change places! Hopefully, the pendulum will swing back and eventually get to the center.
It was "The Book" by Alan Watts. He explains with dazzling logic the utter uselessness of religion and how it holds people back from their true selves and how it keeps people from truly being connected to each other. Unfortunately it was written during the 60's and many of the terms and analogies are out-dated, but, once you get past that there is a world of plain spoken truth that is mind expanding and enlightening.
Robyn wrote: "Unfortunately the book that changed my life was The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, one of the seminal books of the feminist era of the 1970s.Now I hate Germaine Greer and her obsession with youn..."
True, Robyn. As I stated before, the phrase that changed my life... 'everything is the opposite of what it is supposed to be' :)
Tuesdays with morrie by mitch albom changed my life made me realize a lot and the phrase that changed my life " death ends a life , not a relationship "
and " tears are ok "
There are two books that really evolved me.. 1) Jonathan Livingston Seagull
That taught me to evolve
2) The Bhagwad Gita
This taught me faith and honesty.
And I live my the same principles now.
Marie Antoinette. This book made me learn to appreciate the good times because you never know when life will become a nightmare.
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's PurposeI'm not sure if this site allows you to post the same info in two places, but this is one of the ones I came up with, even though I'm obviously ambivalent.
You may be well advised not to ask for whom the bell tolls, as the book recommends, but you might want to ask for whom Tolle recommends against bellowing. Even Jesus raised a ruckus, so I am not sure the citations of the Bible are as friendly or inclusive as we are meant to believe.
What are the motivations of the religions and religious who want to recommend that you dispense with your ego? The problem is that religions of all types have been havens for a variety of miscreants. So be careful out there.
I was disappointed in this book because I thought it would address environmental problems. It does, tangentially.
I think there are advantages to being able to suppress your ego in achieving a variety of spiritual and practical goals including that one, since human desire is infinite or darn near, and therefore exceeds its object most of the time.
This is a helpful idea, but it is also one of the oldest ones and has some problems of its own. So I am not sure it will create a new earth soon. Once again, I find I hope I'm wrong.
So I found that this is one of the books that has most changed my life, even if I'm not sure it's great or even particularly good writing. It provides me with a context for people who pass me on double yellow lines on a snowy day when I am doing the speed limit on a dangerous rural road where someone has recently had a very bad accident.
Notice I didn't say that it helps me understand them. It just provides some context.
But the Christians would point out, probably correctly, that I am trying to remove the mote from someone else's eye in mentioning that.
While I do think that the lack of ego is always relative, I'm not sure getting rid of it would represent a great evolutionary advance, or create a new earth, particularly since our most recent evolutionary advance was acquiring it in the first place.
Just a few books have impacted so much so that after I finished reading them I asked myself: What did I just read? What just happened to me?The Feminine Mystique (read in my early 20s; doubtful it holds the same impact today)
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Illiad by Homer (translated by Alexander Pope)
The Odyssey by Homer (translated by Alexander Pope)
The Aenid by Virgil (Fagles translation)
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Bible
Robert wrote: "Just a few books have impacted so much so that after I finished reading them I asked myself: What did I just read? What just happened to me?The Feminine Mystique (read in my early 20s; doubtful i..."
At last, someone mentioned The Bible! That was the first book I thought of when contemplating this subject. And the Book of Mormon confirms and expands on the themes in the Bible. The Book of Mormon really changed my life the most, how I think and how I live.
The book that truly changed my life was The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I read it kind of by accident when I was 20 years old after it first came out and I've never looked back. Coming from a predominantly Catholic country and being raised in that faith the book finally gave me that little push I needed to say no this is'nt right and it's ok the think rationally and not get caught up in silly superstitions and man made myths. I will be forever grateful to that book and Prof Dawkins.
Alex: The Life of a ChildI read it in 7th grade and it inspired me to become involved with the whole fight against Cystic Fibrosis. That led me to working at a Cystic Fibrosis camp where I met the man who'd one day become my husband.
Sometimes I look at my son and think he came about because of that book I read in 7th grade.
Some interesting choices here. In particular, I will now read Of Human Bondage; I love some of his other books, and have been meaning to read it for years.The important one for me was The Magic Mountain. It made me think in terms of the rational and the irrational, and how wanting a rational basis for society is a moral decision. I later did a PhD that involved a lot of natural science and I think it was partly a result of that book. It had the same effect on me that The God Delusionhas had for some people.
The book that really formed me was Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I read it in 8th grade and it has informed my views of government, culture, and media ever since. I would be a completely different person if I had never read that book. There are many others, including some mentioned here. The Dispossessed really meant a lot to me too! Some books are important when you read them, and then when you go back to them you can't find what was important! One of those was Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, by Tom Robbins. It meant a lot to me when I was 21, but I am clearly not the same person now and when I reread it a few years ago it didn't move me at all.
I still feel it was a very important book to me at the time, though.
Another book that meant a lot to me at the moment I read it was The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver.
It helped me decide that I could become a mother. I loved that book.
So many! Great discussion!
Harry Potter, because I'm pretty sure I'd never have read anything else or learned to speak English if it wasn't for this series. Also I think Pride and Prejudice and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar- not to mention of course Catcher in the Rye. And anything by Chekhov. Chekhov always makes me cry.
It is quite tempting to toss off something comical like 69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess, but I'll refrain.In measurable terms, my first reading of Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain sparked a lifelong interest in neuroscience and cognitive philosophy. Similarly, Shakespeare's Kings: The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages: 1337-1485 kicked off a reading of Shakespeare's Histories, and that in turn led to a renewed (and continuing) interest in the Bard and his contemporaries.
Most responses in this thread have dealt with a deeper change, a fundamental shift in personality or belief. It is difficult to remember such books, as they tend to be at a great remove: the effect seems to diminish with age or the number of books encountered.
I recall feeling profoundly changed when I first read The Magus. I cannot say why. To a lesser extent, I left The Black Book feeling a slightly different person.
Going back to the very beginning, as it were, The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan had an unfortunate influence on my young mind, but this seems to have faded with time.
Excellent question, btw. Had to dust off forgotten parts of the ol' brainbox to come up with an answer.
Need to say more?
The recent death of Colombia's greatest writer reminded me of the need to go back and reread a masterpiece. Salman Rushdie declared that Garcia Marquez was "the greatest of writers". Apart from all the praise, this book opened the doors to literature for me to a world of possibility and nostalgia.
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For years, I have been asking people if there was a book which changed their lives. Of Human Bondage and Marjorie Morningstar changed mine. The first taught me that people have different realities, not just different opinions, the latter, that just because a person was born into a role that their parents and society saw for them, didn't mean they couldn't change it. (This was a much bigger issue in the 50's than now.)
My doctor said that Go Ask Alice led to her choice of medical school. Several people said The Catcher in the Rye because it expressed the way they felt and validated their struggle.
Many people found it to be a fascinating question and led to an evaluation of the impact of literature in their lives. This is not a question about your favorite book, but a book that changed you.