What’s the most life-changing book you’ve ever read?
I’m building a master list — drop yours below.
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At the summit of wisdom, one finds the child waiting.
The child wants significance; the saint wants enchantment.
He spent half his life becoming an adult and the other half recovering from it.
The soul's ascent is a descent into forgotten wonder.
“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” C. S. Lewis
@SketchesbyBoze At the summit of wisdom, one finds the child waiting.
The child wants significance; the saint wants enchantment.
He spent half his life becoming an adult and the other half recovering from it.
The soul's ascent is a descent into forgotten wonder.
So, I took multiple classes on Moby-Dick as an undergrad & one of the first things you learn is that Ishmael is NOT his name; it’s an allusion to Ishmael from the Book of Genesis (the exiled son of Abraham, of whom it was prophesied, “His hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him”). The narrator imagines himself an outcast, rejected by society & forced to seek his destiny on the high seas. His self-understanding is beautifully transformed during the scene in which he shares a bed with the cannibal harpooner Queequeg, who becomes his bosom friend. As his heart softens, he writes, “I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world.” Love has come to redeem him. He is Ishmael no more.
There is a scene in Moby Dick where the whalers are just chilling in a room with dozens of lamps lit up all around them, and Melville makes the point that until this moment (the early 1800s) only kings & religious figures were able to have as much artficial light shone upon them.
In “The Great War and Modern Memory” Paul Fussell quotes a letter penned by an ordinary soldier in the trenches. It reads like the work of a great poet. Everyday people were once capable of extraordinary eloquence & romance, because they read. We don’t even know what we’ve lost.
@SketchesbyBoze Literature once made common men eloquent… now silence makes us plain.
When we stopped reading deeply, even ordinary lives lost their poetry.
"Whatever the word 'great' means, Dickens was what it means."
~G.K. Chesterton
Happy 214th birthday to the greatest novelist in the English language, Charles Dickens! 🥳🎉🎈🎩🖤
@PaulSkallas I suspect anyone who says he has read more than 100 books in his lifetime.
A good book is read, re-read and still re-read.
And you can't do this with more than a 100 books.