Following on from my Fiction Uncovered article about how I’ve changed as a reader in recent years, I thought I would open the subject to you. Please leave a comment and tell me about a book that changed the way you read. Is there a book that put you on to a different kind of (non-)fiction? One that you returned to after abandoning and that suddenly ‘clicked’? Something else? Let me know!
10th August 2014 at 7:17 pm
So many books have changed me. One of the first big changes was reading The Stranger Beside Me. It changed me psychologically, as a person, in several ways. For one thing, I realized that people can be very evil while appearing very nice. It also made me a fan of true crime.
10th August 2014 at 9:17 pm
‘The Road’ – I tried to get into this one many times, and finally, decided to give it a final go… on a long flight. I couldn’t stop reading – read it cover to cover in two sittings. How did it change me as a reader – not sure, to be honest – to have more faith perhaps, more open to the experience the writer makes for me? To appreciate real skill. Something like what happened whn I read Austerlitz, which turned me into a writer. Maybe to be a better writer, I had to learn to read better? Maybe The Road continued the process.
11th August 2014 at 10:11 am
I joined a book club around 10 years ago. Before that I read quite a bit, but mainly focussed on popular fiction. I read “Middlesex” by Jeffrey Eugenides as a book club book and this opened up the door to literary fiction for me. I now read a lot of literary fiction, sprinkled with a little popular fiction and non-fiction. I can’t thank my book club enough for expanding my reading horizons – we are still going strong.
11th August 2014 at 2:11 pm
When I was around fifteen I read Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell – that really opened my eyes top the possibilities of literature which I really didn’t know anything about at the time. A couple of years ago I spent a year reading ‘experimental’ novels and, although they weren’t all for me, that opened my eyes a second time.
11th August 2014 at 5:11 pm
Years ago, I used to read classics and fantasy and very little else. It was almost exclusively a diet of Hardy and Pratchett – and I was getting bored. Then I joined one of those back-of-the-Sunday-supplement book clubs. You remember the ones – you bought six books for about 25p each and committed to buying another 3 over the rest of the year.
One of the books I chose was The God of Small Things. And it was a revelation to me. I hadn’t realised (rather stupidly) that there were loads of contemporary novelists out there, writing quality stuff that I would enjoy, about subjects that interested me.
So that one book started me on a reading journey of what I now know is called literary fiction.