Ten Books That Changed My Life
Your mileage may vary
Recently I’ve thought that my writing on Medium has seen far too few narcissistic self-indulgent listicles. This piece aims to remedy that shortfall.
Below are some books I first read between my early teens and mid-twenties which affected my worldview or my philosophy or the way I string a sentence together. I’ve included a pertinent quote from each book to give a flavour of the thing.
Note: the authors in this list are mostly cis-het-white-male and disproportionately English. I make no apologies, that’s what was fed to me in my youth and I wasn’t wise enough to consciously diversify until much later in life.
1. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
I read a lot of Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl as a kid, so I was the only eleven-year-old in London, Ontario who used expressions like “Jolly good, old chap” on the playground. I‘ve remained a literary Anglophile to this day, and one of the books which secured that predilection was Lucky Jim.
Kingsley Amis's first novel is the hilarious and insightful story of a young professor in post-WWII Britain. Some of the attitudes wouldn’t fly today, but it’s surprisingly forward-thinking given the time and place.
He disliked this girl and her boyfriend so much…
