100 books to change your life

Some of the books that have changed lives
Some of the books that have changed lives

We all have memories of books that have ignited our imaginations but is there one special book that has changed your life?

That's the premise behind a fascinating new collection of essays featuring contributions from writers, politicians and actors, who discuss the book that holds a special place in their hearts. Among the contributors are Sofia Coppola, Margaret Atwood, Dave Eggers and Jodi Picoult.

The entry I particularly liked was from the country music singer and songwriter Rosanne Cash, who seemed to capture what Marcel Proust said about there being no days of our childhood we live so fully as those we spend with a favourite book.

Margaret Atwood
"Do I read anything life-changing now? I'm too old," said author Margaret Atwood, who was born in 1939 Credit: Rex Features

 

Cash, who is now 60, chose the Laura Ingalls Wilder novel Little House on the Prairie but what was so touching about her essay was the honesty about what reading had meant to her as a child.  Cash wrote:

At 10, I was a shy, chubby, non-athletic child with a very intense inner life. I asked my mom to drop me at the library on Saturdays, rather than find friends to play with.

On one of those Saturdays I discovered the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder and it was one of the greatest things ever to happen to me. I entered a world where things were ordered, simple and predictable... these things soothed me. My childhood was so fantastically chaotic and unpredictable, with the complicating factors of drug addiction and fame in my father, and utter misery and sometimes hysteria in my mother.

When Wilder wrote about Ma setting the table for dinner and how the light looked when it came through the window from the prairie, and how Pa played the fiddle in the evenings – it gave me the courage to face my own life and my own family. It gave me peace and a template for the future.

 

Rosanne Cash
Rosanne Cash singing and seen with her family (John Carter Cash, Rosanne Cash, Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash and Carlene Carter) on the 1971 Johnny Cash Christmas Show Credit: Rex Features/Reuters

 

Margaret Atwood, whose own splendid novels such as The Edible Woman and The Handmaid's Tale, have inspired numerous readers, picked out Grimm's Fairy Tales, saying: "I had a reading mother. It's the best thing... you have to go back to a person's youth to unearth the books that changed them."

Among the other pickers are actor Keith Carradine (The Book of Daniel by EL Doctorow); film producer Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides); writer Dave Eggers (Herzog by Saul Bellow); Orange is the New Black author Piper Kerman (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll); and Monty Python's Eric Idle, who declines to pick one book because "my life is changed by different books. On a daily basis". Fay Weldon says she was "more changed by the books I wrote".

Piper Kierman
Author Piper Kierman with Taylor Schilling (right) the star of the TV adaptation of her novel Orange is the New Black. Kierman's book choice was Alice's Adevntures in Wonderland Credit: Rex Features

 

The list is full of classics: Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, the Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies;  James Joyce's Ulysses; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake; A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf; Animal Farm by George Orwell; The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath; Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett; Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut; Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee – but there are surprises, too, as with Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn choosing the YA novel The Westing Game. American great Richard Russo is both chooser and chosen.

 

The collection also shows again that people will open up when they are talking about literature (give a man a mask and all that), for example Tommy Hilfiger talking about his difficulties reading and his dyslexia; about how the world of books and imagination is such an escape when you believe you are a misfit. Also, of course, in shows again the marvellous role librarians play in recommending good reading.

Sofia Coppola
"I do love an obsessive love story," says film director Sofia Coppola Credit: Reuters

 

Incidentally, the publishers Regan Arts teamed up with the literary charity 826National, which will receive a portion of the book’s proceeds to provide students aged six to 18 with opportunities to  improve their writing skills.

Let us know on our Twitter books account –@TelegraphBooks – the book that has changed your life. 

The Books That Changed My Life, edited by Bethanne Patrick, is published by Regan Arts
The Books That Changed My Life, edited by Bethanne Patrick, is published by Regan Arts Credit: Regan Arts

Find the books to change your life at the Telegraph Bookshop, with free P&P when you spend over £20.

License this content