Of making many books

j4 is generally brilliant, but she's surpassed even her own standards recently. And I've been meaning to link to her for a while, but have been too busy to collect my own responses together. For a start, her essay entitled She goes on (I'm fond of that song myself) is really lovely.

But the main point of this post is to link to j4's post talking about World book day. Lists of Great Books are always easy blog fodder, but j4 has a take on this particular bit of manufactured non-news which is hilariously snarky and makes interesting points at the same time.

j4 ends her post by making a list of books first read while still in full-time education and which I believe significantly changed the way I think. I can't manage a response at the level of her original post, but I can make lists, and this seems an interesting exercise.

I posted on a similar subject last year, so I'll pick a different set this time round. I'm not sure about picking books that have changed the way I think; to some extent, every book I read changes the way I think, just like all my experiences. As a teenager I made a concerted effort to read through every single title on whatever list of a hundred classics was circulating at the time, and I found some decent stuff that way as well as a lot I might just as well not have bothered with. Also rysmiel suggested in the discussion of j4's post that the list should exclude books that change one's thinking about books, which seems fair enough, but that is the main effect most books have on my thinking.

( list )

There's probably more, but those are the ones that came to mind when I thought of this post.