golden eggs

That question of 'what book or book(s) changed your life?' is one that a lot of people have very clear ideas about, and they can identify particular books that changed their lives or their views, but it's never been a question that I relate to. There is literature that I love, but even the best of it didn't change my life. I don't think that's what literature is for. 

To my mind, only you can change your life. But anyway, just as a matter of fact, all the literature I have loved the most - Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady, Frankenstein, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Emma, The Idiot, The Possessed, A House for Mr Biswas, A Fine Balance, The Story of am African Farm, Such is Life, Jane Eyre, Daniel Deronda, Convenience Store Woman, A Passage to India, A Room with a View, Let the Right One In, Howards End, The Power of One, The World according to Garp, Setting free the Bears, Invisible Man, Brave New World, Dracula, The Secret Garden, To Kill a Mockingbird, Oscar and Lucinda, Leviathan - none of it changed my life or made me think in a dramatically different way about the world. 

It's kind of the same with the really good non-fiction books I've read, and even self-help books. 

Maybe it's just because I have a different definition of 'life-changing' to other people. If I got creative, I could probably think of ways that each of the books that I have cherished changed my life. You can tell by my book collection - both physical and e-books - that I deeply believe that books enrich one's life. 

Self-help books are a special category. The main point of them is to change our lives. We sometimes read them with a sense that they will impart some kind of secret knowledge that will make all the difference. But the reality is that their best use - and some of them are quite good at this - is to give us some knowledge and ideas that we can use to change our own life. There is no 'cheat code' that you're going to discover and then success, well-being, happiness, money - whatever it is that you want or need - will come easily. Geese don't lay golden eggs in real life.