4 Unconventional Books That Changed My Life
By: Elizabeth John
Tags: Self Improvement, Literature, Culture, Reading, Readinglist

Self-improvement, literary, book recommendation

4 Unconventional Books That Changed My Life

Unlikely fiction for changing the way you think about the world

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Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

There are a lot of these lists on medium. Books to read for this or that. This is my own take, four works of fiction that really changed how I think about the world, that left a lasting impression on my mental world, and have become touchstones in my yearly reading list.

These aren’t books that are necessarily on the Classics shelf, (although I think they should make it there!), nor are they books which take a didactic approach to storytelling. It’s not that these books will inform you about a new worldview or help you get a better morning routine. These are books about being. About living and experience. About the ways that time bends, lives intersect, and challenges emerge from a shadowy world just beyond our imagination.

1Q84- Haruki Murakami- Time bending, mesmerizing, meditative.

Trying to describe this book will inevitably render one of the deepest and most thoughtful books into a cringy cliche. Murakami’s masterpiece is a three book series (though now sold as one volume) about a girl and a boy living in an alternative universe very much like are own. I could tell you that it’s about murder, abuse, love, little fairies, time corridors, food and Japan but it isn’t really about any of those things. It’s not about any one thing and that’s why it is a masterpiece.

The book will leave you with dozens of memorable moments, images, and sensations. It will bend your ideas about time and renew faith in the power of love. It’s magical and transformative.

Immortality- Milan Kundera. Philosophical, literary, paradoxical.

Kundera makes a joke in this book that it should have been called The incredible lightness of being. That this book should have been his feted masterpiece. Lesser known than The unbearable lightness of being, which had the misfortune of becoming a favourite of the indie college set during the early noughties, Immortality is about the ways that text transcends the life span, how relationships reverberate for decades, and how closely connected we are.

It’s a novel about the novel, which is terribly meta, but also fascinating and thorough. It’s about paradox, death, afterlives, and the many ways that our lives go on without us when we die.

Read it!

Bonfire of the Vanities- Tom Wolfe. Dense, multiple points of view, cynical and deeply humorous.

New York in the 80s- greed, corruption, race baiting, and illicit affairs. Hailed as one of the Great American novels of the twentieth century, Bonfire of the Vanities has received many accolades and is on many Books to read before you die lists. It’s an obvious literary masterpiece but the potential for it to change your life may seem less obvious.

It’s about vanity, pride, ego, and ambition. You may think that you don’t suffer from the same delusions of grandeur which Wolfe’s characters do, but as you move through the 690 pages you realise that you do indeed have something to connect you to these characters. Every character manipulates and is manipulated, each for their own reasons seeking out glory and adulation from their peers. Their ideas about themselves outstrip reality and as a reader you realise by the end that no one has escaped the allure of their self-idealization. I think you’ll really enjoy the interior monologues, the black humour, and colorful worlds which Wolfe’s characters inhabit. Though the book is usually mentioned as a view into the raucous capitalism of New York in the 80s, its themes are timeless. There is a humorous lilt to Wolfe’s writing which keeps the humanity in his characters, there’s cynicism sure, but also wild hope in the potential of the city and its untapped resources.

The Old Man and the Sea- Ernest Hemingway. Terse, descriptive, meditative.

I know Hemingway is a hate/love kind of author. Personally I read him as a teenager and didn’t get it. I didn’t get what made his short sentences and emotionless writing so celebrated. I re-read this book in my later 20s and loved it. I got it.

I think this is a book for older people. You may get it as a teenager, but probably not. It is a book to be read and re-read, savored and read again. You’ll get something different out of it each time.

There is no one message or meaning to be taken from the simple story. Hemingway himself scoffed at the affectation of literary critics who parsed his story into all of its components and missed the big picture.

“There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.” -Ernest Hemingway