Which Books Changed You?

Inspired by a link provided by my friend George Aranda of Science Book a Day and the World Book Day, I thought I'd catch up, in the spirit of their 10 books that influenced your life project.

How to pick your most influential books? Do you go by life events? Or by ideas that shaped who you were, who you are, and who you would become?

Or, is a book influential by virtue of how much you enjoyed it?

I tend to think that at any given point in your life (perhaps this is the cynic in me) you will have different “most influential” books. For two reasons – one, as life gets longer, new things happen, and this throws a different perspective on what has come before. Two, our memories are fallible, so, who knows what really triggered that change and created that inspiration at the time? Time is the ineffable destroyer and creator, with only Entropy as its final guide.

I am a writer by trade these days (you must forgive the fusillade of commas in the previous paragraph). This is both personal and professional. Equally, almost none of these have writing as a subject. Yes, I have read many books on writing and the English language—it is a passion of mine—but rarely have they changed me.

I have gone for a short list of books where I can honestly say they influenced my life. This is an introductory 6.

Without further ado, here goes, in no particular order:

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Little need be said by way of introduction. I was introduced in high school to this masterpiece, and despite being taught it as a compulsory text, I fell in love. It was probably the first book where I appreciated the actual language. Fitzgerald’s prose is sublime, and it stands out, for me, as an example of beautiful writing to which anyone may rightfully aspire. Further readings have emphasized that he not only mastered language, but story structure as well. In fact, key beats of the story happen at precise points in the story that can be measured by their page number. None of that matters, though, because his words carry us gracefully, languidly, like words in a current…

The Abyss of Time: Changing Conceptions of the Earth’s Antiquity After the Sixteenth Century

Claude C. Albritton Jnr.

If you’ve never heard of this, I forgive you. It’s not on the bestseller’s list, anywhere, as far as I know. Yet, it captures our historical obsession with time and its measurement so well. The Earth has been around for about four and a half billion years. That’s mind boggling enough, but then just think what we had to do to come to know that! If you’ve ever wondered about weirdo conceptions like the Creation Research Society and ideas like biblical time, then take a look at the strange route by which scientific time has taken to evolve. Fascinating and something that took me to honours-level research in geology and geochronology.

The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins

I struggled mightily with my library of Dawkins’s books here. Which is most significant? I will state here that I regard “The Selfish Gene” as one of the most important scientific literary works of the 20^th century and of modern science generally. Its follow up, “The Extended Phenotype” is equally remarkable and it’s extremely difficult, in the face of such might, to push them out of the top 10 for me. However, they have been, for one simple reason. I did not come to Dawkins’s ideas through school or any other means. I read these works after reading The God Delusion. So, if I am to be honest, The God Delusion must take precedence.

I was already an atheist when I read it, so there’s nothing in that, and, I am a geologist by scientific training, so deep time and scientific thought was no stranger to me, but biology had not been in my background. Dawkins’s book started me on a wild ride through evolutionary thought, in his multitude of fabulous science books and into the general real of evolutionary science and philosophy through such amazing writers as Daniel C Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. It started me on an intellectual journey that is still in the making.

Many criticize Dawkins for an inflammatory style, but for me, that criticism has always been political correctness of the bad kind, the kind that seeks to stamp out merely opposing views, as opposed to political correctness of the good kind, the one that stamps out cruel and harmful opinions. Dawkins became somewhat of a hero to me, if a slightly tinged one!

What is this thing called Science?

A.F. Chalmers

Later, I discovered the serious business of the Philosophy of Science. And it was in large part due to this wonderful book by Chalmers, that stands as the best introduction and discussion of what science is all about that I have ever read. It started me out on Popper and Feyerabend and Kuhn: icons of the philosophy of science. It also has a lovely grinning (smirking) cat on the cover. Hard to argue with that.

Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them

John Yorke

So many books have been written about “STORY”. Storytelling, narrative, these are like awful buzzwords that swarm about you and create hives of “creatives” and queen bees that bite you. No, that’s off-metaphor. Anyway, Yorke’s book came out of the blue to me, and started me really putting down complete ideas in narratives, even after years of writing in various forms. Yorke sent me down this creative path and he deserves credit therefore. It is a stunning book. Worth reading if you haven’t yet read the other three thousand six hundred and eighty-seven books on the subject (ok that might not be an exact number).

Three Dollars

Elliot Perlman

As Penguin (publisher) says, this is about “an honest, compassionate man who finds himself, at the age of 38, with a wife, a child and three dollars. How did he get that way? And who is Amanda?”

I was about 20 years old when I read this and the protagonist’s views on the world, the environment, his love of science and the reasons he became a scientist/engineer were the reasons I went back to university and studied geology. The notion of living life without doing what is important to you was horrifying - and that impulse made me reassess my life. I should probably read it again!

I can say that with some certainty – I had this book in mind when I applied for and enrolled in my geology degree. I don’t know, now, if that was sensible in any way, shape or form, but I can put my hand on my heart and say this is probably one of the most influential books in my life, even if the book may, on face value, be a little prosaic. It’s just beautiful. It’s so powerful that I sometimes actually wonder what I would have done with my life had I not read it. That’s a pretty powerful test, if you ask me.

There are more, books that don't come to mind right now, and I will share when they do... for now, how about yours? Tell me...