BooksThatChangedMyLife

Here's an exercise, a kind of parlor game for parties where intellectual matters are thought to be in the spirit of the gathering: Challenge your friends to list five books that changed their lives.  People are to take turns, 1-book at a time, going around the gathering.  Each person states the title, author and an explanation of how the book made a difference in their life.  What it means to "make a difference" or "changed my life" is up to the individual.  It might be that a book gave the person an insight, or even changed their belief system; or it might be that a book enabled a career change; or that a book helped the person get out of a jam.

Here's my list, more or less in the chronological order they had their effect:

• Uses of the Past, by Herbert Muller. 

I was forced to read this book in my freshman year at college.  I hated it, found it extremely difficult reading, was indignant that I was obliged to take time away from my engineering courses for an "elective" that was assigned to all freshman in the college of technology.  But it changed my belief system by recounting the early history of the Christian Church, i.e. the Church of Rome.  In hindsight it was not revolutionary, just a serious search for the historic Jesus.  I presented all my resulting doubts to my mother, who took the book and underlined passage and wrote in the margin in red pencil "Blasphemy."  She got that right.  I was never the same after reading this book. By age 25 I fit the description of an atheist, though I still shy away from the term, perhaps in deference to the memory of my mother.

• Towards an Historiography of Science,  by Joseph Agassi. 

This monograph, published in a scholarly series, was my introduction to the man I call "Joske," a Yiddish diminutive for Joseph.   The book presents a criticism of the way inductivists write history of science.  I was a graduate student in history of science at Yale when I read it and it showed me there was another way to understand how science evolves from the way my professors taught me to believe.  Some called the book an "antidote to Kuhn".  When my career at Yale was summarily cut short by an accumulation of differences with my professors, I managed an introduction to Agassi and became his student, first formally at Boston University, then informally thereafter. In 1966 Joske and I began a conversation that continued until his death in January, 2023.  [See my contribution to the Festschrift in his honor "Drive Around The Block".] With his guidance I learned to write, learned to photograph, and learned to live a full life.

• Of Human Bondage, by Somerset Maugham.

I read this book when I was at a critical juncture in my life, trying to find my way as a person and as an artist.  The book famously presents the saga of a seeker, a man searching for himself, searching for a code to live by in the void of lost religious belief.  It gave me the courage to take risks in career and love.  Reading it now I find it very dated, the prose rather on the purple side, but the grace of Maugham's narrative is undeniable.

• Henri Cartier-Bresson Photographs.  

In 1966 a friend put a copy of this slim volume of Cartier-Bresson's work in my hands.   Some of the photographs made obvious sense, others were evocative but enigmatic, and some were just damned peculiar in that neither the subject nor the image was out of the ordinary. It was obvious to me why one would photograph Mahatma Gandi’s funeral pyre, for instance, but why photograph a half cleared wood lot or a fruit vendor’s display box? It mattered, too, that my friend put his Nikon 35-mm camera in my hand the same evening he showed me the photo book. This book started me on a journey in photography, which continues, though intermittently, until today. 

• The C Progamming Language and Programming in the Unix Environment, by Brian Kernighan

These two books made me a software engineer in 1983-84.  Fourteen months after I sat down at a computer for the first time, I got a job teaching C and Unix at a major computer company.  These two clearly written books had a lot to do with getting me started.

Of course, the exercise is arbitrary, and it presumes that a person's life can  be changed by reading books, which is surely not true for anyone who is not a reader.  But it can evoke stories that are exciting and revealing.