Ride TheoryOn Alan Alda's podcast, he always ends with the same seven questions, one of which is, "What book changed your life," and I realized my answer would have to be: on some level, every book you read changes your life. The more books you read, the more your life changes. That's the whole point of reading.
jack the nonabrasive@ridetheory I'm not sure that a lot of folks read books to change their lives, or that a lot of genre fiction is written to change lives. Sometimes, it's written to comfort. I refer you to Amy Rigby's immortal, The Good Girls. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksmVkTnED-M
Amy Rigby - The Good Girls
@karabaic Well, I know his question is really "Is there one single book that significantly changed the course of your life?"
But I'll stick to my guns; even if a piece of genre fiction only changes your mood, that is still a change to your life. I read the occasional silly potboiler, and the changes it effects on my life may be tiny, but they're still present.
@ridetheory I would say that's ignoring the understood "significant" modifier to "change" in his question. Unless you're going to go all #ItsAWonderfulLife and when I read this book I felt so good I was confident enough to stop Mr Gower from poisoning that kid....
@ridetheory Compare that to my sister doing me the favor of having me read #UrsulaLeGuin's #TheDispossessed, which both lessened the inflammation created by #RobertHeinlein's #TheMoonIsAHarshMistress and immunized me against #AynRand's work.
That changed my life for good, and prevented me from taking that crap seriously.