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ok 5 life changing books, lets hear them

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Misereatur:

--- Quote from: Daniel on 05 Feb 2007, 12:20 ---I'm not sure I see books as something that should really be life changing.  Ideas maybe, but I think that to be truly life changing you need to experience them.

--- End quote ---

I'm with Dan on this one. However, here are three books that changed my perspective. I can actually see my life as "before reading these books" and "after reading these books":

Naomi Klein - No Logo
Kalle Lasn - Culture Jam (The Uncooling of America)
David Grossman - Yellow Wind

The last one is a collection of articles by Israeli left wing writer David Grossman. It changed my views about the occupation and myself as a left wing.

carpetspaghetti:
ergh i found my parents copy of the joy of sex in an otherwise completely innocent cuboard whilst i was searching for presents one morn. the fact that my dad looks kinda like the bloke really worried my young mind.

i count a book as an experience so i suppose its ok for something to be life changing, anything that can make you think or see something differently can have potential. like i read songs of innocence and experience by Blake recently, i know not really a book as opposed to a poetry collection but still. since really looking into those poems im finding i look at things like politics and establishment differently, much more cynically. its changed my view on life and from that, my life. could just be me though.

Johnny C:

--- Quote from: Misereatur on 05 Feb 2007, 14:16 ---Naomi Klein - No Logo

--- End quote ---

If you liked that, you'll like Alissa Quart's Branded. From Quart's webpage:


--- Quote ---In this chilling and thought-provoking expose, Alissa Quart takes readers on a tour of the unsettling new reality of marketing to teenagers, introducing the disturbingly savvy advertisers who have targeted younger and younger minds and wallets. But beyond the most glaring examples of print ads and commercials, Quart writes, are the quieter yet no less worrisome forms of teen branding: the teen consultants who work for corporations in exchange for product; the teen "memoirists" who consider the selling of their own stories a necessary part of branding themselves; the girls obsessed with cosmetic surgery who will do anything to look like women on TV; the boys who trick themselves up as their favorite brand-covered video-game action heros; and those teens simply obsessed with admission into the name-brand college of their (or their parents') choice. Readers also meet the pockets of kids attempting to turn the tables on the cocksure corporations that cynically strive to manipulate them.

--- End quote ---

(the video game bit is the only one that falters)

tomselleck69:
-blood meridian by cormac mccarthy - absolutely destroys anything else that calls itself a "western"
-tropic of cancer by henry miller - I DONT HAVE TO JUSTIFY MYSELF
-the wind-up bird chronicle by haruki murakami - even though all of his stories are essentially "girl vanishes and small object is the most significant thing in the world for a reason i will not go into," there's something that keeps you coming back. i think this is the best one, and it's probably my favorite.
-gravity's rainbow by thomas pynchon - the effect it had on my vocabulary is rivaled only by calvin & hobbes and bad religion
-lolita by vladimir nabokov - i know that i am truly a grown up, now that i get excited about the concept of "wordplay"

KharBevNor:
You know, I still have to get around to reading 'No Logo'. That said, it's not like I could really hate corporations and advertising any more than I currently do, since I view advertising as something akin to a cross between pollution, mind-control and black magic.

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