Basically what the title says: Is there any fiction book you’ve ever read that has emotionally or intellectually connected with you so much it changed the way you viewed the world, changed the way you viewed yourself or changed the way you viewed life (your own or in general)?
If so…
- What book was it?
- Why did it connect so well with you?
- How did it make you feel?
- And how did it change you?
Just to emphasize, I’m solely asking about works of fiction here. So nothing like reading just an academic book on philosophy or a self-help book or something.
Some books that together helped give me a certain orientation to the future and to how human society works/doesn’t work:
The Dispossessed - Ursula le Guin. The greatness, awfulness and simultaneous impossibility of anarchy as a workable system.
Holy Fire - (Bruce Sterling), ie what really happens as the population ages and as people start to believe in medical immortality
Beggars In Spain - (Nancy Kress) What happens when technology enables so much inequality that we essentially get a speciation event. What is due to the losers?
The First Immortal - (James Halperin) Another book about the changes wrought by medical technology and anti-aging research. Amateurish writing, but blasts those ideas out fast and cogently, so I don’t mind so much.
Also, I don’t much like Cory Doctorow’s novels, but holy hell, if you get to listen to him speak on a podcast or something, I’ve rarely ever heard some speak with such cogent clarity on complex topics.
And I’d say The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant changed me in more foundational ways that would be hard for me to articulate, but it has something to do why I reject the idea that anyone is unworthy of compassion.