What was the book you read as a late teen/young adult which spoke to you in a way that perhaps no book ever has since or which you felt was a key part of finding who you were? For me it was ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ because it talked about the conflict between wanting freedom and wanting security and really spoke to me as a sixth form student
by bewildered_83
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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. The entire novel is a letter to the protagonist’s mother. It’s a great book to read if one struggles with their relationship with their own mother. It’s harsh and triggering and breathtakingly beautiful.
Don’t laugh, but *Twilight* taught me in my teens that I love urban fantasy, which is what I write now as a novelist. I’d never read a UF before and discovering it was momentous for me.
Okay so I’m just gonna mention I was born in the 70s…
Johnathan Livingston Seagull and The Runaway’s Diary.
I feel like my personality is partially formed from those two novels.
This is almost certainly very cliche, but *The Bell Jar* by Sylvia Plath. Mental illness runs rampant through my family, but no one ever talked about it, even after we lost my grandpa to suicide when I was 10. I was a teenager when I read it and just coming to terms with the anger I felt toward him, and with my own mental illness. It was the first time I could relate to someone in a book that way.
Vonnegut’s books. I was twenty, read slaughterhouse five, mind was blown, immediately devoured everything else he had written, and it had a profound effect on my worldview. His books are the only ones I have ever read that I would say actually changed me as a person. I was at just the right age, and it was as if I stumbled across him at the exact right time and place. More than a decade later I have not read any of his books ever since because I have been through so much since then and changed so much, that I know they would no longer have the impact on me that they did back then. However, I still think about them often.
For me, its was The Witcher series. One of the most philosophical and emotional books I have ever read to date. I loved how it discussed the thin line between being a hero or a monster, how selfish and monstrous humans can be, and how the innocent are often blamed or killed for the atrocities of others. It also showed me that even in such as dark world (like the one we live in now) there is hope for a better future.
Acts of Faith. Stranger to the Ground.
*The Way of Kings*
This Side of Paradise by F Scott Fitzgerald. Right before I went to college. I don’t know why I read it, maybe the name spoke to the romantic in me. Strangely enough, Gatsby left me cold.
The Necronomicon. . . It literally started to speak to me in an ancient eldritch voice!
one flew over the cuckoo’s nest did it for me. i was heavily interested in LSD mythology /history at that age. once i dug into Kesey a bit i was sold. the backstory to this novel was as interesting as the writing itself for me.
1984, because it justified and cemented what I had already felt and known about society. Edgy perhaps, but I knew something was amiss about our systems…
This may be weird, but Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. His microscopic examination of the mundane is something that really inspired me. He expressed thoughts that I thought only I had ever had. It made me feel just a little bit normal.
A Walk to Remember by Nicolas Sparks. I usually hate contemporary novels, but I ate it up and it wrecked me.
I listen to audiobooks if that’s what you mean.
Happyface, a graphic novel. I can’t remember who the author was, but it was a revelation for me (at 13) to find that others hid their deeper emotions and insecurities as well. Definitely a large part of becoming more sympathetic and understanding as a person
The prophet by kahlil gibran..
On freedom
At the city gate and by your fireside I
have seen you prostrate yourself and worship
your own freedom,
Even as slaves humble themselves before
a tyrant and praise him though he slays
them.
Ay, in the grove of the temple and in
the shadow of the citadel I have seen the
freest among you wear their freedom as a
yoke and a handcuff.
The Haunting Of Hill House did. Eleanor is the sort of person I could just imagine being, I loved reading her thoughts because they seemed so normal for me. Definitely not for other people, but she felt like a real person to, the type I could talk to, get into the head of. I felt awful when she died, but I knew she was a loose cannon like me, and that neither of us would have gone out any other way, or thought the same kinds of things. I love you Eleanor, you are more real to me than most people I know.
Finding Francesca Lia Block’s books as an unmoored, angsty, outsider teenage girl in the early aughts.
“Stone Butch Blues” by Leslie Feinberg. Until I read that book I had no real articulation for the feelings I had with regards to my identity. I just understood that nothing felt “right”. In the main character’s quest to live as authentically as possible, I felt myself yearning to do the same. It was transformative and very helpful– still carry that book in my heart.
Brideshead Revisited. so beautiful, so sad.
**Phantasmagoria by Josh White**. I have a lot of problems with my Mom and the character of Anna really captured how I was feeling/how I was processing things. Honestly I’ve never read a horror novel that hit me in the feelings as much as this one did. Its a pretty amazing meditation on grief, guilt, and moving on, using the horror as a backdrop to explore how people experience those things. It’s definitely a horror novel that even people who don’t like horror will enjoy.
**The Isle of Youth by Laura Van Den Berg**. Her lead characters are amazing in all her short stories. I was going through a rough spot in a relationship when I read “I looked for you, I called your name,” and it blew me away how much I related to the main character.
Walden Two by BF Skinner
1984 by George Orwell
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
I was introduced to world war 1 poetry and political cartoons freshman year of college. I was transfixed!! Everything since then (1991) has been WW1 obsession. My favorite is “Not So Quiet” by Vera Britton.
The Road
Lonesome Dove
The Prince Of Tides
Kite Runner
Pillars of The Earth
Lord of The Rings
Watership Down
A Handmaids Tale
Wizard of Earthsea
Rise and Fall of The Roman Empire ..must read!
“I Know This Much is True” by Wally Lamb. Having grown up in the shadow of mental illness (my mother was BPD) it really spoke directly to me watching the main character go through everything they went through. Absolutely soul gutting for me.
One Day by David Nichols and/or Normal People by Sally Rooney. Both I read during the exact same time periods of life that the stories are written for (early 20 somethings) and they definitely made me feel less alone. Both are written very dry but I love that both books offer accurate representations of what it feels like to be lost.
I’m a 28-year-old, and last year, *Cool for the Summer* by Dahlia Adler really spoke to my own confused feelings about sexuality.
Franz Kafka’s diaries and letters. It’s hard to describe what it did to me, but it was like looking into another person’s soul.
Shiva Trilogy series
1. Immortals of Melhua
2. Secret of Nagas
3. Oath of Vayuputras
Reading Demian by Herman Hesse as a young adult felt like all the excessive existential thoughts in my mind were perfectly articulated, given new life, new understanding of the world around me. Like everything I knew of the world and myself and other people finally made sense.
Even 10 years after first reading it I still quote the book to myself whenever I feel lost. Masterpiece.
An audio book
They’re non-fiction, but *Walden* by Henry David Thoreau and the Taoist work *The Book of Chuang Tzu* really spoke to me. For lack of a better term they were the “punks” of their day.
They looked at the world from the outside, pointed out all its flaws, hypocrisies, absurdities. They made me feel like I wasn’t alone. You can be different, you can think differently, society doesn’t always know best, and at the end of the day, you have to be true to yourself. I wish the world operated more like the way they thought. I feel like we’d be happier and freer.
Stephen King’s collection Night Shift. It changed how I looked at horror and short stories.
Catcher in the Rye. I was having a hard time as 16 / 17-year-old and absorbed the story of a character going through the same thing. I’m 56 and keep a copy in my backpack.
catcher in the rye
All audiobooks speak to me
Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner. I have struggled with weight since about age 9, and reading about someone who went through similar struggles only to realize (after something major happens in her life) that there’s more to life than a number on the scale. The MC realizes that her body issues eclipsed everything else in her life and that she was so hyper-focused on it that she blamed it for everything and let it affect her entire life. The book made me realize that it’s just one aspect of me, not my entire being.