The Book That Changed Me
Spring is book-ended by two celebrations of reading: World Book Day on 2 March, and World Book Night on 23 April. We asked The Skinny team to name the books that changed their minds, views and even lives
Trout Fishing In America by Richard Brautigan
Not many books have truly blown my mind. Trout Fishing In America is an exception. A friend gave me a copy when I was 18, and it taught me so many things about writing – that it can be nonsensical, fractured, experimental and yet comical, satirical and completely game-changing. Richard Brautigan's creativity clearly owes a lot to drugs, but he also proved that a book can be a novel, a character, a narrator, a verb, a noun... and whatever else you interpret it to be. [Claire Francis]
Wild Swans by Jung Chang
I finished reading Jung Chang's Wild Swans when I was in Beijing aged 17. I found it really astonishing to be reading this account of these incredibly brutal acts of such relatively recent history, I think at that stage maybe 25 years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, in a place where they had occurred. It seemed like such a contradiction to be talking to people who had presumably largely had their lives ripped apart or indeed been the people to rip those lives apart, and for them to be getting on with things and not making this the focal point of their existence.
I'd read half the book at home in Glasgow where it had seemed like this dramatic Other, a different world entirely where things like that happen, not like where we are. And then to be there later and realise that actually everywhere is just filled with people, most of whom are alright and just wanting to move forwards in their lives – work, be with their families, go to the cinema. It represented a sort of psychological shift, which in itself ignited this huge fascination with travel and with reading about life in different cultures. [Rosamund West]
Eunoia by Christian Bök
This is a collection of five mini-stories, each limited to one vowel (e.g. chapter A begins, "Awkward grammar appals a craftsman"). It's an absurd display of formalism but it blew my mind when I first read it; I had no idea something like that was even possible, let alone readable. It opened me up to structuralist and experimental literature; stuff that plays with rules and constraints and yet still comes out with a story to tell. [George Sully]
"A kickass tale of female survival that reminds you, when you’re on the verge of giving up: don’t"
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I bought Purple Hibiscus as reading material for a course at university. Unfortunately and predictably, it ended up on the ‘books that I failed to read before the seminar’ pile. It was only a few months into the post-graduation haze that I decided to give it a go.
Purple Hibiscus was essentially my do-or-die to get me back into the habit of continual reading, after failing numerous times to connect with a book. I remember so starkly how refreshing and modern the writing felt. After years of reading dry Medieval verse and doorstop Victorian novels, I immediately responded to Adichie’s talent for characterisation and dialogue and the book remains my key to a realm of new writing. It's also a kickass tale of female survival that reminds you, when you’re on the verge of giving up: don’t. [Holly Rimmer-Tagoe]
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
This was the first beautifully written non-fiction book I'd ever read and it confirmed that I didn't have to write fiction to feel like a creative writer. Also, it covers the science, philosophy, economics and social history of eating meat, and therefore armed me with lots of lovely things to say about vegetarianism for when I'm being patronised by discourse bros at dinner parties. [Kate Pasola]
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
On an emotional level, it's A Little Princess. I read it when I was 9ish and it was the first time a novel took over everything. I lived and died for Sara Crewe, I was on a cycle of A Little Princess, eat, sleep, repeat. It basically made me realise that reading is the best thing ever.
On a more intelligent level, I got into magical realism stuff at uni and read Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie a lot; think I did it four times in my final year. It was totally different to anything I'd read before: hilarious at times, frustrating at times, exploring how history is linked into our lives, plus lots of metaphors about chutney. [Issy Patience]
A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond
Paddington repays re-reading as an adult. While the stories remain the marmalade-laden missteps of a friendly bear in London, there's an undeniable sadness going on beneath the surface.
The 2014 film adaptation made immigration a central theme and arguably offered a fresh and modern perspective. In Bond's original stories it is a little more subtle. To a child, Paddington's friendship with antiques dealer Mr Gruber could be read as an eccentric pairing of opposites. To an adult, it is clearly the mutual experience of disasters in their home countries that binds them. It's mostly off the page, but if the stories overall riotously celebrate the welcoming new life Paddington experiences in London, it is this friendship which reminds us and respects the extent of what both characters have lost. [Ben Venables]
"You'll come away from each chapter with at least ten new records to track down..."
Rip It Up And Start Again by Simon Reynolds
As a slightly too obsessive music hack/fan/nerd, I've read an awful lot of books about various artists, bands and scenes, and it's tempting to nominate various tomes by Kristin Hersh, Stevie Chick and Michael Azerrad as some of the most vital pieces of biography or criticism out there. The one I'm most grateful for having read, however, is Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up And Start Again; a finely detailed, lovingly researched and absolutely fascinating exploration of punk's evolution into post-punk and then again into the vivid colours of 1980s 'new pop'.
It's music journalism as sociological study on one hand, but told with the capacity to intrigue, excite and often even dazzle. You'll be guaranteed to come away from each chapter with at least ten new records to track down or revisit with curiosity renewed and perspectives realigned, and not just about the music either. [Will Fitzpatrick]
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
While trying to come up with something more original, I have to answer truthfully and embrace the male hipster cliche that I am and say On The Road by Jack Kerouac. What he saw in life when it was beautiful and people when they inspired him is what I look for now, and all of my best, unwisest decisions have come from that. [Ross McIndoe]
"Pure storytelling remains the most dazzling and natural gift"
The Harlem Cycle by Chester Himes
While I’ve always valued Scottish writers whose work speaks with a voice that resembles mine (Welsh/Fagan/Kelman), to truly experience the life of others, far from your own, is what makes reading magical.
Payback Press was an imprint of Canongate, which in the late 90s reprinted black American crime fiction. Their list reacquainted me with rebels like Iceberg Slim and Gil Scott Heron, but more importantly introduced overlooked artists such as Herbert Simmons. The jewel in this crown was Chester Himes.
Infamous for If He Hollers Let Him Go, a novel deemed ‘too black and too strong’ for the America of the 40s, Himes converted to crime writing in later life (understanding, before William McIlvanney’s famous maxim, that to introduce the reading public to such themes you must ‘go where the readers are then colonise the genre’). His Harlem Cycle novels taught me that, as with the best genre movies, lurid pulp fiction can balance its weight against furious social commentary; that no matter how well trained and technically masterful a writer may be, pure storytelling remains the most dazzling and natural gift. [Alan Bett]
La vie devant soi (The Life Before Us) by Romain Gary
I must have read this when I was 12-13; a bit too early to understand all of it, but old enough to get it. It's a book that appeals a lot to your senses and your memories of lights, smells and emotions from childhood, while being very grown up and having an almost philosophical perspective on life. I also really enjoyed the intimacy, and reading about things that happen behind closed doors in a cultural and social home that was so different from my background. [Caroline Harleaux]
Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes' intimate sequence of poems Birthday Letters drummed a dose of compassion into me at an impressionable age. As an angsty pre-teen I was already completely obsessed with the writings of Sylvia Plath and absolutely loathed the very existence of Ted Hughes and how his male oppression had contributed both to her suicide and that of his subsequent partner. Reading his intimate snapshots of their relationship, published after 35 years of silence since her death, hit me quite hard as he attempted to preserve her memory with uncharacteristically sensitive, self-searching and honest poetry.
By allowing his work to be presented in such a vulnerable and raw state after carrying the burden of her death for so many years, he has made me question my own thought processes and judgements of others in adult life. [Sarah Donley]
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
I can vividly recall reading Of Mice and Men in Standard Grade English at the ripe old age of 15. We were asked to write a discussion piece on whether we thought Steinbeck’s book was optimistic, pessimistic or realistic and afterwards, to comment on which of these outlooks most closely matched our own. The novel's powerful finale left its mark on me and perhaps even shifted my outlook from one mindset to another. I won’t go into further detail about this transition for fear of spoiling the ending for those who haven’t read it – but those who have can probably guess. [Jonny Sweet]
1984 by George Orwell
The whole way through you feel totally impoverished and powerless. The trust Winston places in a few people with hope for a better future is abused and crushed because Big Brother always wins. A society desensitised to a perpetual state of war and warped by tribal nationalism; a state of hysteria reinforced by images of traitors, enemies of the state and other folk devils; unquestioned leaders and hierarchy... Frighteningly familiar! [James Taylor]
The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt
It was the chance discovery of a slim novel by a name I'd never heard of, in a weird, vast holiday apartment that had no books on its huge shelves apart from titles by this one author, that reaffirmed reading as the central activity of my life after a few years of disinterest post-Uni. I've not come across another voice like Siri Hustvedt: her keyhole explorations of the shackled heart – to relationships, to art, to the past – operate somewhere inside a membrane between body and mind, between physical reality and philosophy. There's this unlocatable eeriness to all of her work that stays with you.
She's also an absolutely badass example of a woman who's managed to pursue an intellectual life at the centre of everything, and I hope I'm as smart, self-possessed and interested in the world as her when I'm 60. [Lauren Strain]
The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
I was peeking at a friend’s bookcase when Terry Pratchett caught my eye. I'd heard of him of course, people rave about Pratchett, but the gaudy illustrations on his books always put me off. I had just completed my MA and a two-year reading list of ‘literary’ books; I was exhausted, yet despite myself I tucked a copy of The Wee Free Men under my arm and, 300 pages later, I knew I'd made one of those rare and wonderful discoveries.
The world of faerie is witty, humorous and always intelligent. Mainstream press will always focus on Pratchett’s ability to satirically take apart our own world. He can make the everyday seem absurd and the absurd perfectly logical. He treats old sayings and clichés on a par with the laws of physics. Yet The Wee Free Men (and all Pratchett I have read since) is much more than wisecracking cleverness. It deals with concepts as wide-ranging as religion, feminism, politics, love, existentialism and the importance of education, and it does so with an extraordinary amount of humanity.
I had spent the last two years evaluating books that help us to understand the human condition. Pratchett simply tells us stories that help us love it… warts and all. [Emma Nuttall]
What was the book that changed you? Tell us in the comments below!