Can books change the direction of your life?

Gonna answer that question in the header right now - my answer is maybe, maybe not but they sure as hell can influence your thinking, enhance your experience of living, and take you places you'd never otherwise get to.

It's been joyful to see recent activity on beBee with Bees sharing what they're reading now or offering commentary on books which have been significant in their life. My love of reading started before I really remember being able to read. I loved their heft. The smell of an old book fuelled with thoughts of those who had read it long before me. The waft of newness that emerges from a newly cracked spine. The magic trails one can follow. 

I don't remember the first book I read but it was in the warm confines of the home pictured above.

The first books I remember fondling though were contained in a leather-bound edition of the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. The pages were wafer thin and fragile while being heavy with all of the knowledge man had collected up to that point. I continued to use these tomes until just a few years ago. Granted they didn't help with research into the history of computing but they were brilliant pictures of those who had learned so much.

If I were to attempt to compile a list of books that influenced the direction of my life this post would become a book in itself so I've selected a few that came right of the top of my head.

An admission - I'm not much for non-fiction and biography generally leaves me cold. However, let me dive into the vast array of topics and themes on the fiction front and I will swim for miles.

Here we go in no particular order of magnitude of change, just as they came into my thoughts:

#1. The Fires of Spring by James Michener - This book resonated powerfully for me in my early teens. I was an adoptee who's adoptive mother died when I was 14 years old. David Harper, the story's hero - if he can be called such - somehow gave me hope. 

David Harper was an orphan, lonely and impoverished. But his longing to embrace the world that abandoned him was stronger than the harsh realities. And even though he's a con man and petty thief at a carnival, he still dreams. For it was there that David learned about love and about women--all of whom taught him the riches of himself.
Here is a rich segment of American life--a magic blend of longing and wisdom, saltiness, simplicity, and compassion. The Atlantic

#2. John Irving (almost a Canadian by marital status and a long-time resident of Toronto) is one of the few authors who have influenced me to read every piece of fiction they've written. My first introduction to him was Setting Free the Bears and it remains a favourite. If for no other reason than the chapter about the protagonist's first experience of snow skis you should read this book. 

To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense. 
John Irving

Time just seems to fly away for a boy. That, I s’pose, is why one day you wake up suddenly and you ain’t a boy any longer.
Robert Ruark

#4. The Canterbury Tales blew my mind - so much so that Mediaeval studies became my major at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. Chaucer's brilliant stories of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury remain vibrant and relevant to this day. These 24 stories written in the 14th century provide, to my mind, pretty much everything you need to know about the character of man and even more about corporate culture as it exists to this day. If you've not dipped into this wonderful epistle since college days, do yourself a favour and have a little stroll down the trail. You will be enlightened, entertained, and educated. The Miller's Tale alone should have you howling with laughter. Yup, tremendously NSFW and improper for today's polite society but screamingly funny. 

A berd. A berd. She hath a berd!
The Miller

I've pushed it several times before and it is always on my list of first-to-read recommendations.

Ten years in the writing, a National Book Award finalist, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill”.
Los Angeles Times

#6. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole leaves me speechless in its brilliance so I shall remain speechless only to say - READ THIS BOOK!

"I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one."
Ignatius

#7. Like John Irving although in a completely different genre, I have read every one of James Lee Burke's novels. It's hard to pick a favourite but again it was an early one (published 1993) which really grabbed me and just would not let me go. In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead we continue to travel the sweaty, stinking bayous and swamps of New Iberia, Lousiana (hope that doesn't offend you Gerald Hecht). The protagonist, Dave Robicheaux is a no-nonsense former law man who just can't escape his past. Well beyond the well crafted stories, Burke creates a sense of place that will have beads of perspiration popping up on your upper lip and set you to craving for beignets at Café du Monde.

The story of Ulysses and Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Jesus, of the Good Knight of Chaucer, lives in every one of us.
James Lee Burke

#8. In my book I included a quote from Albert Camus' L'étranger. Camus is not noted for his uplifting commentary on life. In fact his writing can be pretty grim - rather like a foggy February day when the damp seeps into every nook and cranny. The quote?

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
Albert Camus

This book was part of the curriculum back when I attended high school. I don't know if it still is and it would surprise me if it is given that it offers a no-holds-barred perspective on what it means to be unconventional. The title character, Meursault, falls well outside the bounds of what was deemed normal in 1942 North Africa and probably would still be seen as an outlier in extremis today.

'In our society any man who does not weep at his mother's funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.' I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.
Camus on Meursault

This book I have re-read more than any other in my collection. I've now gone digital with it simply because the old dog-eared, note littered copy has been placed in my safekeeping vault. Perhaps my boys will enjoy it in a few years. 

#9. Finally some Canadian content and I'm not doing so out of any sense of obligation. I've been know to enjoy a good 'duster' in my time and when Patrick deWitt published The Sisters Brothers in 2011 I snapped it up. 

It is though, a damn fine read!

#10. As Wakonda is my witness, I did not intend for this to be a top 10 list. That's just the way it turned out and I'm probably concluding the list with what should be #1 - if I was doing this in any sort of hierarchical order of significance. You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe does, in fact, form the keystone of my library. I am in the midst of re-reading it again at this moment. There's a complete separate post calling out to me for this book.

This is man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He grows passionate over ideas, he hurls scorn and mockery at another's work, he finds the one way, the true way, for himself, and calls all others false--yet in the billion books upon the shelves there is not one that can tell him how to draw a single fleeting breath in peace and comfort. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destiny of the nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes.
Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

Books help us learn and perhaps create our own histories. So will they change one's life?

You tell me.