Books that changed your life

[Tommy4ever]

Every now and again we might come across a book that totally changes an aspect of our life.

For the most part, after we read a good book me might think that it was entertaining or thought provoking or simply interesting. But sometimes we come across one that really, deeply, effects us. It might introduce us to new ideas that change the way we view the world around us (I'm sure the Communist Manifesto did this for many of us) or it might change the way we view life itself.

Post books that changed your life, mention what aspect and why.

:)

[Kenco Smooth]

I think a big point in me moving towards more radical politics from a pretty bog standard liberal attitude before that would have been Orwell's (no doubt rose tinted) accounts of anarchist barcelona and the socialist achievements throughout that area of Spain in Homage to Catalonia. Definitely would have helped me break through that initial barrier of "well it sure sounds like a nice idea but it'll never happen".

[W1N5T0N]

As i posted on the other thread, Media Control by Chomsky. Got me into politics when i read it, and a will to change it.

[Born in the USSR]

ABC-book! :)

[caramelpence]

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

[Sasha]

"the true confessions of an albino terrorists" by breyten breytenbach,
reconciled me wanting to be an artist with radical politics

[Old Mole]

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson and Froth on the Daydream by Boris Vian because they were the first two books I read that I felt totally absorbed in, so they have probably changed my worldview forever. And of course the Communist Manifesto, no other book can even compare with the influence it has had on me. I should also mention the Bible since it was re-reading it that allowed me to break with my Christian background.

[Red Future]

ABC-book! :)

Most important book of all tbh

[Red Future]

Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

[Tim Finnegan]

I think a big point in me moving towards more radical politics from a pretty bog standard liberal attitude before that would have been Orwell's (no doubt rose tinted) accounts of anarchist barcelona and the socialist achievements throughout that area of Spain in Homage to Catalonia. Definitely would have helped me break through that initial barrier of "well it sure sounds like a nice idea but it'll never happen".
That and Ten Days That Shook the World for me. I read those two back to back, and you can't really come away from that unaffected.


The old workman who drove held the wheel in one hand, while with the other he swept the far-gleaming capital in an exultant gesture - “Mine!” he cried, his face all alight. “All mine now! My Petrograd!”’
:thumbup1:

[Kenco Smooth]

That and Ten Days That Shook the World for me. I read those two back to back, and you can't really come away from that unaffected.


Really, really meaning to read that some time. Stuff just keeps getting in the way as usual though. :(

I think for all the flaws one can find in Orwell's ideological position/actions throughout his life he casts socialism in a light that is very positive to left-leaning liberals. Hell the guy's practically a stamp of approval amongst non communists due to the endless praise and high school reading of 1984.

[CommieTroll]

Catcher In The Rye by J.D Stalinger changed my view of western culture, its a revolutionary book if you ask me and should be mandatory reading to all:thumbup1:

[Rakhmetov]

The State and Revolution by V.I. Lenin

Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism by Dr. Parenti

[Magón]

Conquest of Bread was probably the book that influenced me the most, out of all the Anarchist books I was reading, in my choice in standing along Anarchist theory.

[graymouser]

Well, over time there have been a few.

Back when I was in high school, I read 1984 quite a bit. Out of context its value is somewhat diminished, but it was a big thing for me. In college I was actually fairly Christian, so you can say the Bible; but after college I read, of all things, a little pamphlet from BuddhaNet called "Beyond Belief" that critiqued religion which I was finding stale and useless. I tried Buddhism for about 2 months but it didn't stick with me.

After that I started becoming more of a radical; a lot of things lined up when I actually read The Communist Manifesto. The ideas seemed like pure common sense to me. Then I read a lot of Chomsky for a while, which had me going off in a vague anarchist direction a while, but Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution? put me back onto Marxism. After that I read Lenin's State and Revolution and instantly, I began to consider myself a Leninist. Then Trotsky's In Defense of Marxism made me an orthodox Trotskyist.

There have been other things but those are among the biggest game-changers for me.

[Summerspeaker]

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn - Before I read this as a teenager, I had no interest in history past the Middle Ages. Zinn showed me how the recent past actually mattered and introduced me to radical political thought.

The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone - This provided a revolutionary vision of employing technology to simultaneously abolish the sex distinction and economic oppression that continues inspire and guide my life.

Beyond that, most books have reinforced and refined my beliefs more than transformed them. Personal discussions, practice, and online resources defined my politics.

[caramelpence]

I really find it hard to believe that people's most life-changing books include political pamphlets like State and Revolution. Or Parenti. It's like the people who say that their heroes are Marx and Lenin. The books that change your life are surely those that touch you to your soul or throw light on an important aspect of the human condition, not agitational texts.

[Tommy4ever]

I really find it hard to believe that people's most life-changing books include political pamphlets like State and Revolution. Or Parenti. It's like the people who say that their heroes are Marx and Lenin. The books that change your life are surely those that touch you to your soul or throw light on an important aspect of the human condition, not agitational texts.

Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but reading the Communist Manifesto did actually really change me. The change wasn't sudden but it sort of opened my mind to socialist thought and over the course of a few months the way a viewed the world around me had changed significantly.

There are many ways in which a book can change your life, altering the way you look at society, economics, politics etc is a change in your life.

[Proukunin]

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
The Little Red Book by Mao Zedong
Howl by Allen Ginsberg

[Summerspeaker]

The books that change your life are surely those that touch you to your soul or throw light on an important aspect of the human condition, not agitational texts.

These aspects can all go together. There's plenty of emotion in the two political books I mentioned, for example.

[Proukunin]

I tried running away to California as soon as I turned 18 because of the book On the Road. I made it to San Antonio and the cops found me when I had a missing persons report on me.

Before I read the communist manifesto I was a hardline Obama supporter and a pacifist hippie. So there goes the reason why it changed my life in so many ways.

Although i'm not a Maoist, the little red book helped form my ideas of communism.

And Howl is just a great book of poems that stood trial for obscenity charges and won in the 1950's

[Rakhmetov]

I really find it hard to believe that people's most life-changing books include political pamphlets like State and Revolution. Or Parenti. It's like the people who say that their heroes are Marx and Lenin. The books that change your life are surely those that touch you to your soul or throw light on an important aspect of the human condition, not agitational texts.

Oh, that's a lot of cant!!! You have some temerity by making such an assertion! I have been bombarded all my life by so much propaganda emanating from the airwaves, newspapers, internet, schools, universities, friends, relatives, etc., that reading Lenin and Parenti was a life-changing, earth-shattering experience. Maybe you are a spoiled, red diaper baby and have been fed your Lenin with your mother's milk but for those of us who have seen the light during our adulthood books like State and Revolution & Blackshirts and Reds are books that "touch you to your soul or throw light on an important aspect of the human condition." Thank you. :rolleyes:

[NoOneIsIllegal]

"A Power Governments Cannot Suppress" - Howard Zinn
It's a collection of essays and articles by Howard Zinn on different subjects. I hadn't really read any Leftist books, my friend had simply introduced some ideas and thoughts into my head. One day he came by and handed me this book. I thought it was a crazy idea, because I didn't even enjoy reading books. Once I started, I was hooked. It made me start thinking about stuff differently, and afterword I made sure to read A People's History of the World. If you're going to read any other Zinn book besides A People's History, make sure it's this and The Zinn Reader. You'll have enough to last you a lifetime.

[graymouser]

I really find it hard to believe that people's most life-changing books include political pamphlets like State and Revolution. Or Parenti. It's like the people who say that their heroes are Marx and Lenin. The books that change your life are surely those that touch you to your soul or throw light on an important aspect of the human condition, not agitational texts.
Books should "touch you to your soul"? What's that even mean? That we should be listing books we had a strong emotional reaction to instead of books that drove us to action in our lives?

The State and Revolution is theoretical, not agitational. And it won me over to Leninism, which is a major impact on my life. And I've been as moved by the light thrown on the "human condition" by Capital volume 1 as by many other books that purport to be literature; and I learned something while I was at it. After The State and Revolution, I had a clear picture on what the state is and how it can be overcome. How could an emotional reaction be more life-changing than that?

[SacRedMan]

The Communist Manifest

[Lunatic Concept]

Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

Damn i was going to say that :thumbup1:

[Lacrimi de Chiciură]

OK this might sound weird but... World Book Encyclopedia. I think it was the 1992 edition my dad had a set of. Although some of the articles are quite biased, it was really one of the starting points for me for everything from politics, geography, history, art, to sexuality, anatomy, reproduction; essentially everything else it would have been awkward to ask my parents about. I would read it a lot during elementary school.

[caramelpence]

Books should "touch you to your soul"? What's that even mean? That we should be listing books we had a strong emotional reaction to instead of books that drove us to action in our lives?

It's called artistic license, and I'm surprised that you've never encountered the expression "to touch someone's soul" before - but I think that's an accurate way of conveying just how much of an impact certain books and even certain passages can have on our emotions and the way we understand not only the world around us but more importantly ourselves. All I'm saying is that I find it difficult to believe that the most emotionally influential books that people have read are works of politics and propaganda like State and Revolution, and that if this is actually the case, I can only imagine that you and others haven't come into contact with the best that mankind's literary corpus has to offer. Read Love in the Time of Cholera through from beginning to end and then tell me that the last sentence of the book doesn't emotionally impact you more than reading through long quotes from Engels' The Housing Question in State and Revolution. In any case, State and Revolution was a propagandistic work, it was written as a direct response to other socialists and Marxists who believed that socialism could be compatible with the parliamentary state, and as interesting as it might be as a text and as an indication of Lenin's political development as an individual, I would argue that it does not actually convey Marx's most original insights on why the communist revolution is necessarily a revolution against the state, in that it does not discuss the relationship between the state and alienation, and it neglects the structural pressures that make the state function as a mechanism for the continuation of bourgeois rule, as opposed to the bribing of individual state officials.

I make this point not to be obnoxious or patronizing but because until a few years ago I was under the illusion that man could survive on non-fiction alone and that it was essentially useless to read novels and poems and so on because they don't necessarily contain strictly factual information about history or politics - only to realize that fiction is almost always a far more effective way of learning about yourself and others than any political or philosophical text.

[Sam_b]

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.

[Lumpen Bourgeois]

The 7: Seven Wonders That Will Change Your Life (http://www.borders.com/online/store/TitleDetail?sku=1451625510)


The title says it all really.

It's one of those books that touches the soul, among other things.

[Summerspeaker]

I make this point not to be obnoxious or patronizing but because until a few years ago I was under the illusion that man could survive on non-fiction alone and that it was essentially useless to read novels and poems and so on because they don't necessarily contain strictly factual information about history or politics - only to realize that fiction is almost always a far more effective way of learning about yourself and others than any political or philosophical text.

I think you may have swung from one extreme to the other. Be careful with such blanket claims. Experiences differ.

[Comrade_Oscar]

The communist manifesto and the bible, quran, and torah (these books made more 100% that there is NO GOD)

[Ocean Seal]

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque made me question nationalism which lead me to question why communism was seen as evil. So I found out what communism was, and thus became a communist.

[Chimurenga.]

The Jungle was the first progressive book that I can remember reading. I had been previously interested in veganism and animal rights which is how I was introduced to the book in the first place. Then I realized the point of the novel was not the toll on animals but on the workers. This somewhat sparked the beginning of my political consciousness as far as I can remember.

Afterwards, along with reading some other things, I considered myself an Anarchist for a while. Then I got my hands on a copy of The Communist Manifesto which spoke to me more than anything I had read by progressives and anarchists.

Other books like Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, for example, had a similar effect on me as well.

By the way, there is nothing wrong with State and Revolution and anything by Michael Parenti. All great stuff there. I can definitely see how those books can influence a young Leftist.

[Rakhmetov]

It's called artistic license, and I'm surprised that you've never encountered the expression "to touch someone's soul" before - but I think that's an accurate way of conveying just how much of an impact certain books and even certain passages can have on our emotions and the way we understand not only the world around us but more importantly ourselves. All I'm saying is that I find it difficult to believe that the most emotionally influential books that people have read are works of politics and propaganda like State and Revolution, and that if this is actually the case, I can only imagine that you and others haven't come into contact with the best that mankind's literary corpus has to offer. Read Love in the Time of Cholera through from beginning to end and then tell me that the last sentence of the book doesn't emotionally impact you more than reading through long quotes from Engels' The Housing Question in State and Revolution. In any case, State and Revolution was a propagandistic work, it was written as a direct response to other socialists and Marxists who believed that socialism could be compatible with the parliamentary state, and as interesting as it might be as a text and as an indication of Lenin's political development as an individual, I would argue that it does not actually convey Marx's most original insights on why the communist revolution is necessarily a revolution against the state, in that it does not discuss the relationship between the state and alienation, and it neglects the structural pressures that make the state function as a mechanism for the continuation of bourgeois rule, as opposed to the bribing of individual state officials.

I make this point not to be obnoxious or patronizing but because until a few years ago I was under the illusion that man could survive on non-fiction alone and that it was essentially useless to read novels and poems and so on because they don't necessarily contain strictly factual information about history or politics - only to realize that fiction is almost always a far more effective way of learning about yourself and others than any political or philosophical text.


You're such a nag. The question of the OP was a general one: Books That changed your life. Why don't you start a new thread and call it Non-Political Literary Works That Changed Your Life? Then I can post, "Oh, I loved Voltaire's Candide or De Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses, or D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover or Shakespeare's Hamlet." :rolleyes:

[Kuppo Shakur]

The Armchair Revolutionary's Guide Series. Coming to a half price books near you, 2016.

But seriously, I was definitely affected by most of Kurt Vonnegut's novels, especially Bluebeard and Breakfast of Champions.

[black magick hustla]

revolution of everyday life - vaneigem

[Os Cangaceiros]

The BFG by Roald Dahl - The book that made me love reading. I must've read that book, like, ten times at least. Roald Dahl was my favorite author from ages 7 to around 11 or 12. I've read almost all of his books, including his adult-oriented works. Great author IMO.

The Stand by Stephen King - Still probably my favorite work of fiction. It's pulpy and not exactly "high art" as far as literature is concerned, but I read all 1,000+ pages in about three or four days.

Civil Disobediance by Thoreau - This was the first piece of writing that made me stop and think about power and the individual. Perhaps my entire political awareness can ultimately be traced back to this.

Black Flame by Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt - Really made me give a re-appraisal of anarchism. One of the best books about anarchism ever written IMO.

When Insurrections Die by Gilles Dauve - Another work that made me reconsider a lot of political viewpoints, simply because I had never previously viewed them in the way that Dauve lays out. Some of the quotes in that are really good, and serve as a good counterpoint to numerous political tendencies, from Maoism to "anti-fascism".

to tell you the truth, none of these books really "changed my life", but all of them stand out from all the other books I've read.

[Sixiang]

Animal Farm got me interested in history in general as an academic interest and pursuit as well as got me interested in the history of the USSR and communism. It was also the first novel I ever really liked and got me interested in reading and made me start to write.

1984 made my doubts about organized religion more fermented and helped me to become an Atheist. It also caused me to question and look at all the authority figures in my life with a suspicious eye (my parents, teachers, and the priests). Basically, it freed my closed mind from 7 years of Roman Catholic schooling.

Black Boy made me more interested in Communism and made me want to read Marx specifically.

The Road to Wigan Pier made me a socialist. I was convinced of the atrocities of capitalism and the resulting poverty.

The Communist Manifesto didn't make sense to me the first time I read it. Then I tried Capital. Then I read the Communist Manifesto again and it made more sense. Then I read a probably a dozen books by Marx and Engels and the Communist Manifesto made perfect sense to me. So I can't really pinpoint a specific work by Marx or Engels because they all impacted me in their own way. I would say that around the time I was reading The Civil War in France, Wage Labour and Capital, and Value, Price, and Profit I was calling myself confidently a Marxist.

The past three months for me have been a barrage of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and have been an important time of learning for me.

[x359594]

Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley. Vietnam: the Logic of Withdrawal by Howard Zinn. On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Howl by Allen Ginsberg. Earth Household by Gary Snyder. Sisterhood is Powerful edited by Robin Morgan.

[Red_Devotchka]

Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder in my childhood

[Red Commissar]

I didn't really have a socialist-themed book that "changed" my life.

What really changed my life was when I read Les Miserables by Victor Hugo when I was 17- maybe 4-5 years ago now. It was really an interesting book to me at the time- particularly the way Hugo illustrated the plight of the poor, the desire for change, and the issues Jean Valjean faced. Even though it was a dense read, I really enjoyed it and got a taste for "social justice" so to speak (there is a political part where Hugo concerns himself about economics, and about socialism and capitalism in particular. The conclusion he reaches would probably place him among who we call Social Democrats nowadays). Before then I hadn't really thought much about poverty, mostly buying into the "deserving poor" bullshit. I mean just some of the stuff in there, just like the bit with the mother (Fantine) prostituting herself to care for her child (Cosette)- after being impregnated by a manipulative rich boy- made me think of how in some ways little has changed since he wrote that novel.

The book led me down the path of other "progressive" novels such as Sinclair's Jungle or Zola's Germinal, and even ones like Jack London's The Iron Heel which eventually got me into reading Marx and Engels.

If you want more sad, I'd even throw Harry Potter up there because it actually got me reading books when I first read it at 11. Were it not for that I would have probably never read books beyond what the schools forced me to do.

[RedRise]

This will sound silly, but about a year ago my English class had to read Northern Lights, by Phillip Pullman. I enjoyed it so much I read the too sequels and by the end of the trilogy, I had a different view on God, science and the makeup of the universe. There is an incredibly slim chance that its what set me on a road towards conversion.