Friday, August 01, 2008
The Books That Did Not Change My Life
Listening to the monumentally clunky Radio 4 show Open Book while driving yesterday - not wise this, narcolepsy can ensue - I heard someone say a book had 'changed their life'. People say this a lot. Today, for example, I note that Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's curious earthly span was changed by Brideshead Revisited. It happens, I suppose, but I'm sure 99 per cent of these claims are meaningless. I can think of three books that changed my life - The Book of Common Prayer, Macbeth and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The first changed the course of my sublunary journey because it exposed me to great English as a child, the second because, at the age of thirteen, it made me turn against the science and technology legacy of my family and the third because, at seventeen, it thrilled me. (This last influence was partly bad in that it hampered my ability to read different kinds of novels for years to come.) I have read equally great works since, but it would be absurd to say they have altered the character of my stay on this planet. I suspect that, unless there is some simple, direct influence - 'Sir Ranulph Wibbley-Wobbley's book on exploring the outer reaches of Dollis Hll inspired me to take up goat-herding and I have never looked back.' - nobody's material existence is changed by a book after the age of about eighteen. This is a good thing. A fool who kept performing an existential U-turn every time he passed Waterstone's staff picks would be a monster.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Yes it bloody well does, my material existence went into overdrive after I managed, at the age of nineteen, to get my hands on my post office savings book, that one changed my life completely (at least until the dough ran out some weeks later)
ReplyDeleteThe use of the words Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and earthly in the same sentence may possibly be a contradiction.
You leave Laurie alone, he's a neighbour of mine! I've still got his mower. Changed my life, not to mention the lawn...
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure you can really say that a book changes anyone's life while they are still in their teens. They don't yet have much of a life to change. More likely you can say that such and such a book was instrumental in forming the way someone began to look at the world and perhaps still does many years later.
ReplyDeleteA book that changes attitudes which have become set in maturity is a much more powerful thing. I can think of one or two, but none had the raw excitement of discovering, say, Auden in my late teens. Perhaps that's why we look back on our early discoveries so fondly.
'The Boy Looked at Johnny' - it really did change my life.
ReplyDeleteI came to Jane Austen and the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying long after 18. I just can't overstate the power of their influence (though the latter represents more than a book--more a connection to the collective wisdom of several great civilisations).
ReplyDeleteI bet I am an outlier though. You should be getting really worried if every couple of years your life gets radically realigned by your reading material. This does happen--and they should be concerned.
The Dice Man, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, On the Road... just a few of the books that didn't change my life.
ReplyDeleteThe Railway Man by Eric Lomax, an extraordinary story of endurance and forgiveness - Lomax was captured in Singapore and worked on the Burma Railway. In the mid-90s I lent it to a man with whom I had a passionate affair. He dumped me in rather messy circumstances but kept the book and took it to Bosnia where he encountered man's inhumanity to man at first hand. I didn't expect to hear from him again but ten months later I got a package from Bosnia. Of course I knew what was in the package before I had even opened it - my book, plus a letter containing an eloquent apology. I accepted his peace offering and we were married 18 months later. That book really did change my life.
ReplyDeleteWow!
ReplyDeleteGood grief, Sophie! Wotta story
ReplyDelete