Not my favorite books. Not the best books I've read. The three specific ones that rewired something in me, unexpectedly, at the wrong ages.
I've been keeping a reading journal since I was nineteen. It's in a series of spiral notebooks, now up to eleven volumes, stacked in a shoebox in my closet, containing approximately two thousand entries about books I've read over the course of twenty years. I went through the full archive over Christmas, a slightly obsessive project that took most of two weeks, and I was struck by something I had not quite noticed as I lived it: the books that changed me were almost never the books I was reading to be changed.
I have a list of books I've read specifically in hope of transformation. Big literary novels. Spiritual classics. The canonical self-help titles. Some of them did the work, a little. Most of them did almost nothing. The three books that actually reshaped something in me, the ones where I can look at my journal before I read them and after and see, clearly, the person has changed, came to me by accident, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons. I want to describe them, because the pattern is worth knowing.
The one I read on a bad vacation
The first was a novel I had borrowed from a friend's beach house because the rain had canceled the rest of my trip and I needed something to read for the three days I was going to be stuck inside. I was twenty-three. The book was a mid-career novel by an author I'd never heard of, and I picked it up expecting nothing more than entertainment.
What the novel did, over the course of the three rainy days, was to provide me, without any particular warning, with a framework I had been waiting for without knowing I was waiting. The book was about a woman in her forties who had failed, in the novelist's careful construction of the word, to live the life she'd been preparing for, and who was, when the novel opened, in the early stages of building a different life on the ruins of the preparation. Nothing dramatic happened. The drama was interior. The whole book was interior.
I came out of those three days different. Specifically: I came out with a conviction that the life one is preparing for, at twenty-three, is almost always the wrong life, and that the real life is something else, built later and sometimes very late, on the wreckage of the first one. I did not have the vocabulary for this before the book. I had the vocabulary after. Twelve years later, I am still using it.
The one I read because it was short
The second was a novella, a hundred and sixty pages, including the author's afterword, that I read because I had a four-hour train ride and did not want to commit to a real novel. This was at twenty-seven. I was in a bad period, which I'm not going to get into here, but which was the sort of bad period where you stop being able to read long books because you cannot hold the narrative together for more than about fifteen pages at a time.
The novella, and here I realize I've written another book-changed-my-life piece without naming a single specific title, which is becoming a habit, was about the ordinary durability of small kindnesses. It takes place in a single day, in a single house, between two older women who have known each other for fifty years. One of them is dying. The other is not. Nothing happens in the plot except the day.
It takes place in a single day, in a single house, between two older women who have known each other for fifty years. Nothing happens in the plot except the day.
What the book did to me: it restored, quietly, my sense that small and ordinary things could be meaningful. I had lost this at twenty-seven. I had been operating on the assumption that the only meaningful experiences were the large ones, and that the accumulating ordinary days of adulthood were, fundamentally, a kind of waste. The novella, by spending a hundred and sixty careful pages on a single day between two women who loved each other, corrected this assumption. I have not had to re-correct it since.
The one I read by mistake
The third is the one I'm most reluctant to include. I read it by accident, having picked up the wrong book from a pile at a used bookstore, and I didn't realize I was reading the wrong book until about seventy pages in. I had intended to read a memoir. I was, in fact, reading a novel, by an author who had published one memoir and one novel and whose names on the covers were, in my defense, very similar.
The novel I read by mistake was a book that did something I did not know novels could do. It argued, structurally, through the arrangement of its chapters, through the specific distribution of its narrative attention, that the protagonist's life had been, in ways she did not herself see, shaped by the narratives she had inherited about what women's lives looked like. The book did not state this thesis. The book performed it. By the end, you had experienced, as a reader, the protagonist's slow awakening to the scaffolding of her own assumptions.
What this book did to me was to make me permanently suspicious of the scaffolding of my own assumptions. I was thirty. The suspicion has not left. It has, if anything, deepened, and I now regard it as one of the two or three most useful habits of mind I have. I would not have acquired it without this specific novel. And I would not have read this specific novel if I had not, at a used bookstore in Seattle, confused two books with similar covers.
The pattern
All three books found me when I was not looking for them. All three came to me for reasons having nothing to do with their content, a rainy vacation, a short train ride, a bookstore mistake. All three did their work quickly, within a single reading, without any particular effort on my part. The transformation was, in each case, the book's doing. I was just the recipient.
What I take from this: the books that change you are not the ones you are deliberately reading to be changed. They are the ones that catch you when your defenses are down, which usually means when you are not expecting them. You cannot engineer this. You cannot select for it. What you can do is read widely, from sources you don't entirely control, and trust that some of what you read will do the work.
The algorithm will not do this for you. The algorithm feeds you more of what you've already liked. The books that change you are, almost by definition, not in the set of books the algorithm would have served. They come from borrowed libraries, from wrong-shelf mistakes, from used-bookstore accidents. The old messy routes of discovery are the ones that still work.
I recommend keeping them open. I recommend, specifically, borrowing books from friends, picking up the wrong book at the used store, reading the novel your aunt insisted on sending you for Christmas. The ones you did not choose are, surprisingly often, the ones that do the most.