For me, it was a book called ‘The Outsiders’ by S.E Hinton. It is known as a literary classic these days, but it was quite hard hitting when it was released back in the 1960s.
In a nut shell; It is about a group of semi-impoverished greaser friends growing up in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma, and all the life challenges they face, and how they react to prejudice against them whilst coping with family issues.
It was the first book that made me realise that some people in society don’t get it easy growing up, and I discovered what it meant to live on the ‘wrong side of town’ and what societal prejudice was. The outsiders was the first novel I read that brought up hard subjects like; domestic violence, alcoholism, street gang violence etc.
It was the first book to shatter my naive way of thinking about the world, at 13 years old! It is still one of my favourite stories to this day, and for all its slightly dark themes, I love the compassionate friendship and brotherhood that is displayed in this book!
Night, by Elie Wiesel. When you’re still a kid you’re living in a little bubble of innocence and even when we had our lessons on the Holocaust, I treated it as just some vague history lesson, same as everything else. Oh, some bad people did some bad things back a hundred years ago or whatever. Sure.
But then I read Night and it completely pulverized that bubble. I read it at the same age Elie was when he went through it and placing myself in his shoes shook me to my core. Holy shit, this was a real thing and it happened to real people. To kids, just like me. That was the first moment that not just the Holocaust, but ALL of history became ‘real’ to me. Not just stories you read in a textbook.
I had this for summer reading, before 9th grade.
There I was reading this book on a beautiful summers day, lounging on my yard in suburbia next to the pool and I got to that scene on the train when the guard throws the bread in. That was the moment things changed for me.