This book changed my life

Growing up in the midwest, blue collar family, anything beyond our county borders wasn't even considered. Exotic travel was going to the Grand Canyon on vacation (which my family never did anyway). When I read this book at age 12, it opened my eyes to cultures beyond anything I had imagined. It was a gateway book to other authors and genres, and as my reading list grew, so did my desire to realize a world beyond what I knew around me. Without that book, I would have settled for a nondescript life and not known what I had missed.

I'm a bit disappointed this thread never attracted much participation. I'm reviving it now on the off chance that ILB might find the topic a bit more engaging atm.

Ulysses cured me of depression. The outlook was so comprehensively empathic, covered such a range, it made me excited to be a part of the world again.

i didn't "get" 1/2 of it or more on my first read. i still don't think that is the point with the book. there is a universal dimension that you can grasp no matter who you are. and there is a personal dimension that is really just for joyce and people who care to go further into joyce's world, with its scattered allusions both literary/historical and autobiographical. the rhythms of bloom's thoughts, the harmony between the pulse of consciousness and the pulse of life, i don't get how people wouldn't like that. i've met many who claim to hate this book.

treeship i <3 u but sometimes it's hard not to picture you at 70 looking at some kind of archive of yr ILX posts and saying to yourself "ah, I was wrong there. wrong there too. wrong. wrong again."

xpost that was specifically in response to the claim that Ulysses could cure depression. the other post i pretty much agree with

i feel like it did for me, combined with other things, precisely because it's not the sort of book that is supposed to console the reader. grappling with it was a kind of project, and i was pleasantly surprised at all the sentimental stuff there was in the book to love once you get past the formal difficulties. also i found the formal difficulties hilarious.... like the book was slowly degenerating from "respectable" stream of consciousness type narration to a scene where bloom's sexual anxieties are written out as stage directions.

'Man's Search for Meaning' by Viktor Frankl. Amongst many other things, it stopped me being such an intense dude, taught me the extremely useful technique of paradoxical intention, cured me of insomnia, and showed me that just because I can imagine myself doing something it doesn't mean that I have to do that thing.

thomas mann's buddenbrooks was the first book that gave me the "oceanic feeling".

the claim that Ulysses could cure depression

afaics, the claim treeship made was entirely one of personal experience. If he perceives that he was depressed before reading Ulysses, but through the act of reading it he was pulled out of his depression, then I'm not going to say he was wrong. I'm pretty sure he's right about that.

To be clear, this isn't a thread about the books that you think will change someone else's life, only about the ones that did the trick for you personally. There really is no way to predict when or from what direction that lightning bolt will strike. It's pure chance.

I suspect it often is not some k-classic book that works these changes, but could as easily be some mediocrity. For example, Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac have had an influence on many a young adult, far beyond their talent as writers. Heck, The Joy of Sex has probably changed its share of lives, too.

These didn't change my life exactly but both books gave me incredible comfort during one of the most difficult times in my adult life

Lincoln - Gore Vidal
War for the Oaks - Emma Bull

Perfectly transporting, written so beautifully that it didn't feel so much like reading as being taken away...I am so thankful that they allowed me to escape my reality for those difficult weeks

Imogen Binnie's Nevada was by far the most cathartic thing I read this winter when I was starting to accept being trans (to a lesser degree, Julia Serano's Whipping Girl and James Baldwin's writings also helped). I'm pretty sure I would have come out and transitioned anyway (I'd already started talking about my gender with a couple of friends), but reading that novel occasioned a great number of moments when I felt with a new urgency that I couldn't keep lying to myself.

the claim that Ulysses could cure depression

By this same reasoning, The Bell Jar causes depression. Well, clearly not. But it did coincide really perfectly with when I first experienced it. Not a good one to take to heart.

yeah maybe i should have steered clear of the "cause and effect" language, although i'm really grateful i read ulysses when i did.

i think for some readers, the bell jar could help them cope with depression by reassuring them that other people have experienced things similar to what they are going through. god knows there are many depressing books i feel gratitude toward for this reason.

oh also i should add again that aimless is otm, and i don't think ulysses would work with other people the same way. for me, it just was exciting to love a book that much again, to experience the power of words. the book seemed really joyful in its willingness to exploit every trick in the novelist's toolkit to represent daily experience as comprehensively as possible. also i related to the maximalist, sensory overload dimension and the parts where bloom seems to navigate this psychic environment seemed to model for me a way to find happiness amidst chaos, maybe. fleetingly... june 16th 1904 is a miserable day for him on the whole for sure.

a book that had the opposite affect on me -- that plunged me into misery (not depression. i don't think books can "cause" depression, an illness, but i think books, which can lead to certain thoughts, can totally help alleviate symptoms in the short term) -- is notes from underground. russian literature is one of my passions but i actually kind of despise dostoevsky.

Rasselas did that to me. I couldn't get out of bed for days!

Tobias Wolff changed my life. I went from reading This Boy's Life at 13 because I was in love with Leonardo DiCaprio, to fucking inhaling all of Wolff's work and realising what serious literary fiction was for the first time. Discovering Wolff led me in all sorts of literary directions in high school, made me excited about literature as a pursuit outside of schoolwork. That particular book also really helped me get through high school on a personal level; it was such an honest and sympathetic portrayal, it helped me to see adolescence as a temporary state and to have faith that it would be possible to come out on the other side and be okay.

treeship i <3 u but sometimes it's hard not to picture you at 70 looking at some kind of archive of yr ILX posts and saying to yourself "ah, I was wrong there. wrong there too. wrong. wrong again."

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Sunday, 16 November 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hopefully the upcoming end of the human race will mean that Treeship is saved from having to look at this. Hard enough looking at some of mine from ten years ago.

For me its probably Philip Dick. At one point in my life I didn't know what people got out of reading when there were computer games. It sure wasn't for pleasure! Who could read Shakespeare for pleasure?! He couldn't even write understandable English!

Philip's books made me realise you could be 'creative' in different ways that weren't to do with language. It gave me an 'in'.

Is this you mentioned in the link in this post?

This thread is interesting although have trouble answering it myself.

The link posted by dow doesn't currently work but yes I did go to the William Morris exhibit w/MS. Nice that he has written about it.

The qhole site's down; maybe check back later, but meanwhile I'll tell Mark.
In high school, I read Jeremy Larner's Drive, He Said, which mostly seemed like a fairly typical speedy early 60s picaresque, much influenced by Dr. Strangelove, university unrest, diet pills and grass, but for some reason I was captivated by descriptions of how it felt to play basketball. So I started playing basketball, not just going through the occasional motions in P.E. class. This was about as likely as ramen noodles playing basketball, and may have resembled it, but playing was the thing, my thing. Didn't last, not into college, anyway, but the book and the phase taught me something, or at least showed me something.

I did read Ulysses once through, maybe twice if I count grad school, but these days I skip around and read favorite bits ("Hades" will never get old).

Oh! I was wondering ~just this moment~ if a thread like this existed because something just happened to me,

I was running on a treadmill at the Y this morning, and the treadmill overlooks the swimming pool. There was nobody in the pool except for one swimmer. At first I was paying attention to my run, monitoring my heartbeat, thinking about Leslie Feinberg. Then I started noticing that the woman in the pool was really, really swimming well. She did that backwards backstroke where you propel yourself with your hands only, feet-first. She was doing arms-free butterfly stroke and all kinds of strokes I'd never seen before. Her body was skimming across the top of the pool. I couldn't help but notice the condition of her body, she was fit and beautiful. I looked at her body and wished my body was as beautiful as hers. When she came up for air and faced me, I noticed that she was between the age of 55 and 60. I thought to myself, how could anyone not look at this woman and feel they are experiencing true beauty, the sight of will triumphing over body and over nature?

I remembered that moment in Mishima's Confessions Of A Mask where the narrator has his sexual epiphany. He sees a teenage boy carrying shit and is captivated by his musculature, his masculinity and the baseness of the activity. That moment and its relationship to Mishima's equating of beauty with violence and death, and its effect on queer theory, it formed a stark contrast to my view of the middle-aged woman in the pool. Mishima's books changed my life but always in an inverted way, a text to rail against, live life against.

Amazing! I haven't had any book-life experiences lately.
xpost I checked with Mark, who says
oh cheers, yes, the guy who hosts it (on a laptop in his spare room) sometimes has to reboot :)

For checking later, here's original post/link (from latest Rolling Fantasy etc)
Mark Sinker makes some connections (for inst., between Gothic and Futurist lit) new to me, after viewing the National Gallery's William Morris exhibition: http://dubdobdee.co.uk/2014/11/02/the-wood-beyond-the-world-or-this-bus-has-a-new-destination/

Mark's blog post back online for now; conversation with him posted on new Rolling Fantasy etc

I did read Ulysses once through, maybe twice if I count grad school, but these days I skip around and read favorite bits ("Hades" will never get old).

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 18 November 2014 15:38 (3 hours ago) Permalink

<3. Hades is my favorite. How grand we are this morning!

Keep meaning to ask: for Finnegan's Wake, should I also get a reading companion, like Campbell's A Skeleton Key To? Or just an annotated FW? If so, which one(s)?

i don't think you'll make much progress in terms of "understanding" it without the skeleton key or something similar. also, i've never seen an annotated edition of FW, just whole books of annotations.

another strategy is to just dive into it, pretending that you've lost your mind and this is what books are like to you now.

One that comes to mind is The New Oxford Book of English Verse (1972 edition), which didn't change my life all at once, but over a period of years gave me some orientation in poetry.

Phaedrus by Plato was the first philosophy book I read in university and made a big impression.

When I was 12 or 13 in quick succession an uncle gave me Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings and a cousin gave me Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller; together they blew my mind - "Oh, books are allowed to do stuff like this--wooooooah!"

i had an insight while reading 'the plague' in the midst of an alaskan winter 20 years ago

but then i lost it, and have not found it on rereading

growing up in a very conservative environment, Notes From Underground was a titanic revelation, validating a deeply buried suspicion that there were things that trumped "reason" and "productivity". i remember having to put the book down after every page to just pace around the room, my mind aflame.