Life-Changing Books

[lydamorehouse]

 On social media the other day, I came across someone asking their friends a sort of ubiquitous question, which is: "What book changed your life?"

I've been thinking about that, as you do, over the last few days.  There are a lot of books I've loved throughout my life, but life-changing? That's a pretty tall order, don't you think?  A short story made me gay. Or rather, "A World Well Lost" by Theodore Sturgeon made me consider the fact that maybe gay was another possibility and then, you know, nature did the rest.  But, a life-changing book?

Today, I decided my answer would be Beard on Bread by James Beard. I can say for a fact that after reading that book, my life profoundly changed.  Before I read Beard on Bread, all my yeast breads sucked so much that my family used to call them "Lyda's lead bread." That book was magical. I don't even know that it had anything all that profound to say, but once I read it, I totally understood how yeast was supposed to work (and how to tell if it wasn't working.)

So there you go. My life-changer.  How about you? Do you have a book that changed your life?

Comments

[offcntr]

I can think of two: Robert Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo, which I read in the second grade, that put me on the road to Science Fiction--leading me to meet folks like you and Denise--and Michael Cardew's Pioneer Pottery, which helped steer me onto the path that led to me making pottery for a living.

[offcntr]

Also: just reserved Beard on Bread from the local library.

[lydamorehouse]

I hope I haven't steered you wrong!

Yeah, I mean, I wish I could say that I discovered science fiction the way you did. For me, a movie got me into science fiction (Star Wars) and from there, after having exhausted the LaCrosse North Branch Library's Star Wars related fiction, I started reading short stories... so that's a long way 'round.

[bibliofile]

Excellent question [buying time to come up with an interesting answer]. Well, there was that Women's reality by Anne Wilson Schaef (1980s edition). She presented the idea that we all live in the predominant culture plus our own personal subcultures, in sort of layers. So everyone tends to have a sense of the predominant culture (white, male, and middle-ish class, here in the US). But then a PoC would have their own experience of being a PoC, and a WoC would also have their own experience of being not-male [my current interpretation].

It's not a perfect Theory of Everything, certainly. But the way she worded it, how we all live in sort of multiple, overlapping realities, somehow made tons of sense to me.

[bibliofile]

I can see how understanding yeast would certainly make for (consistently!) better yeast breads. But "Theodore Sturgeon made me a lesbian" would work much better as a headline for the National Enquirer story about your life.

[lydamorehouse]

I love to say at SF/F conventions when I'm on panels on the subject of GLBTQIA+ issues, "Science Fiction made me gay." But, as I said, my problem is that I can think of a book that introduced me to the idea, but Sturgeon's short story came first.

I have been holding in reserve the phrase "Weird, But Compelling" (how my first agent apparently described my work) as the title for my autobiography/biography/exposé of my life. :-)