Which books changed your life or mind?

[LesFex]

"More than any other book, Marian Wright Edelman's The Measure of Our Success inspired me," The book is part autobiography but also contains great life lessons.

I remember a popular opinion poll - "You are the books you read". Rather, the way you think can be shaped by what you read.

[tracyreese]

Try A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. It will leave you breathless.

[BarrieReader]

Johnathan Livinstone Seagull. Read it as a young teenager and it was just so different than anything else I'd ever read. It really encouraged me to expand my reading list.

[sharon.gmc]

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom.

Makes me remember the most important things in life.

[Sheila]

I first read the Phanthom Toll Booth when I was seventeen or sixteen, because my boyfriend at the time told me it was the best children's book of all time. And that reminded me to always look at the world with the eyes of a child.

[loladarling]

The world according to Garp, though I think it changed my life because I was all of 12 when I read it the first time, now its not the greatest book and certainly not Irving's best but it made me look at the world and literature in a very different way and was the first of many battles over books I has w/ my mother (she still wont let me recommend books to my little sister for fear of her turning out "weird like me") But w/o Garp I wouldn't have appreciated the rest of Irving's novels or started w/ Palahniuk or Vonnegut who are my favorite authors.

[Alsbury]

When I was young, Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic got me hooked on wordplay.

The DragonLance novel Wanderlust got me into reading on the "adult" level.

Dante's Divine Comedy helped me through a rough time. The passage through Purgatory gave me hope for redemption.

Confucius' Analects helped define the sage in me.

[mplwdscribe]

The World According to Garp - John Irving

Love in the time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

[Perrywinkle47]

The namesake by Jhumpa Lihiri.. It really connects to my life...

[Fran]

Just finished reading a very unusual book (unusual for me anyway) called 'Animals in Translation' by Temple Grandin & Catherine Johnson. I'd recommend it to anyone who has any interested in human psychology or animal behaviour or indeed anyone who ever wondered about the relationship between us humans and the animals who inhabit the planet with us. The final chapter titled 'Dogs make us Human' sums up better than anything I could write the extraordinary insight of this woman.
The most thought provoking book I have read in sometime.

[Runslikesnail]

I know there have been several ... but the one that comes to mind first is "A Suitable Boy" by Vikram Seth. I read it while riding the ferry back and forth to work and missed it terribly when it was over (all 1400 pages of it). In the end, it sent me on a 4-month odyssey to India, which changed my life.

[B-fly]

The Little Prince - every time I read it I understand it in a different way

[patrickt]

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

[Morrosseth]

The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice.
Made me view Christianity in a completley different way.

[Career Novelist]

From a writer's standpoint, I loved reading Nicholas Sparks first book, The Notebook, since it was such a simple, yet poignant novel--and it earned Sparks a million dollar advance and a movie contract. It's always refreshing to read something the publishers in NY are willing to pay big money for, just to know what their standards are. Plus, at only two hundred and some pages, The Notebook was easy to read it in a night. I loved Ken Follet's The Third Twin. I started it at 10 pm wanting to get in a few chapters but ended up reading the entire book in one sitting, finishing up right around 4:30 that morning. And Fight Club was a truly incredible novel--some of the very best writing I've ever seen. Read that one in a single sitting, too. For a similar read, Jay McInerney wrote Bright Lights, Big City and the writing is also just spectacular and entertaining.