What Book(s) Changed Your Life?

I just posted an article here by a prisoner about how books changed his life.

Nearly everyone has had the experience of reading a book that gave them a new perspective, that radically changed their experience of themselves or the world. Many of us have experienced this more than once! Unlike watching television or even reading the news, there is nothing like a great book to change the course of your thinking or even your life.

What one book has changed your life? Perhaps there was a spiritual book that inspired you to begin meditation practice, or a novel that changed your ideas about human nature, or perhaps a book really woke you up to the seriousness of the prison industrial complex.

Please share your book (or books) and how it changed your life in the comments.

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Permalink Reply by Moreland Nicholson on January 27, 2011 at 11:45pm
Im only replying because the last reply was on my birthday
And i feel thay'sauspisiois, so. I'd say what comes to my 
Hrart right now is  The ThingsThey Carrried. By Tim O brien 
Harvard grad student and veit nam foot soldier 
And a warrior for prace and nonagression
Permalink Reply by Paulina Kostruba on February 13, 2009 at 6:45pm
As a bookworm, I can't list one single book - many books have impacted my life in different ways.
If pressed to choose, I'd probably name the first book in the following list:

1. The Master and Margarita
2. The Idiot
3. The Sun Also Rises
4. The Picture of Dorian Grey
5. To Kill a Mockingbird
6. The Color Purple
7. Beloved
8. Underworld
9. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
10.The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Story

"The Alchemist" by P.Coelho left me with a very positive spiritual feeling, and I can see its potential to inspire others, though the actual message wasn't a revelation to me.

Feel free to check out my library - favorite books are rated 4-5 Stars:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/PrincessPaulina
Permalink Reply by Jared Beekman on November 27, 2010 at 11:44pm
"42" and "Sorry for the Inconvenience" are nearly mantras with life starts to go down the crapper for me! If you haven't read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and companion novels, you won't get it but it's worth the effort to read the 900 page omnibus edition for a comical lesson in cause and effect.
Permalink Reply by Mark Maxey on February 14, 2009 at 5:00pm
Chogyam Trungpa's book "Meditation in Action" I read in jail really opened my heart up to transformation. It really was a catalyst not only in my healing but the inner transformation that still is going on within me, some 16 years later. I have recently bought another copy to re-read. It truly is an amazing read that will transform anyone's life!
Permalink Reply by Kate on March 7, 2009 at 9:55pm
A Gradual Awakening, Dharma Punx, A Year to Live, Loving Kindness- the revolutionary art of happiness, Instinct for freedom
Permalink Reply by david grant on March 14, 2009 at 11:48am
Dharma Punx - got me involved in meditation after 11 years of recovery. Changed my life.
Gradual Awakening - Stephen Levine
After the Ecstacy, the Laundry - Jack Kornfield
Crooked Cucumber
The Mindful Way through Depression
Permalink Reply by David F. on March 15, 2009 at 3:35pm
In chronological order since I was born:

Hop on Pop
A German-English Dictionary
David Copperfield or anything else by Dickens
Communist Manifesto and other stuff by Marx & Engels
The Castle by Kafka
Another Roadside Attraction and anything by Vonnegut
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, etc...
Meister Eckhart, Tauler...
The Bible
Dhammapada, and many others
Permalink Reply by john hanbury on September 25, 2009 at 4:08pm
who dies, stephen levine
the experience of insigh goldstein
faith, loving kindness, a heart as wide as the world sharon salzberg
no time to lose pema chodron
the wise heart kornfield
the way of the bodhisattva shantideva by shambala press
anything by dalai lama
cool water alexander
wherever you go, there you are zinn
sitting inside whitney
stumbling towards enlightenment larken
bring me the rhinoceros john tarrant
seeking the heart of wisdom goldstein/kornfield
Permalink Reply by Charlaine on October 8, 2009 at 12:55am
We took a dozen copies of the Sakyong's book - Making the Mind Into an Ally to the prison and the women loved it - one woman, who had spent a year in an Ashram was ecstatic - finally someone explained to her the why and how of meditation. It is a book that has also helped me with ideas of what to discuss with the women, I made mini-talks on each of the chapters. The copies have never been returned to the library - so obviously they mean a lot to the women.
Permalink Reply by Joseph Wolfe on February 20, 2010 at 10:32am
Since early in 2007 the efforts to deliver a message of hope as offered in A Course in Miracles to prisoners have been ongoing. Prisoners have been a pet project for this writer for several reasons.
The first of these reasons might be attributed to the personal experience of having served most of a ten year sentence in prison, but the greater reasons have to do with what occurred while there and later events as a result of certain experiences.

It was 1974 and I was twenty-four years of age at the time. My own history up to that point was one like so many stories of a young street thug, growing up in a working class Chicago neighborhood, discouraged and disillusioned by the mediocrity and grind of what life had to offer.

That there had to be something better was always a predominating thought. So 'better' for me, was the excitement and the radical comradity of our little clique of thugs, always plotting, always stealing, always looking for that thrill. So when those activities resulted in my first arrests, confinement in juvenile punishment facilities and finally in a ten year prison sentence,( the big time), I was brought to a juncture. I would crash and burn. Previously embraced justifications for my anti-social behavior would soon be shattered and all of the glamour of the life of a criminal would cease to contain even a trace of validity. The underlying conviction that there had to be something better still remained but now (after the experience I'll describe below) that something would take on an entirely new and remarkable definition.

So at twenty-four and while wallowing in the misery of prison life this is what occurred that would lead to forever changing the way I would perceive the world:

The real Me...The I...The Essence of Who and Where I AM emerged for just a few short minutes one summer afternoon after an entire sleepless night of worry and immense fear over the possibility that I might be killed the following day. For the first time in many years I turned to the God I perceived and I prayed for deliverance. I begged and prayed for many hours with fever and intensity never before offered. 'He' answered...'He' delivered me. And for a few brief moments 'He' lifted Me from the body and embraced Me as a loving Father does His Son and assured Me once again, that I would be alright.
While the body lay on the prison cell cot below, the awareness of "I" expanded to include every molecule of air around Me... every feature, the sunlight that streamed through the barred window, the trees and grass outside, the room itself...everything was Me. A crescendo of 'sound' accompanied the experience that completely absorbed all sound on earth and played as every instrument in every orchestra all over the world, in perfect harmony. This experience launched my search for the miraculous.

Now, many years later, and after much search, many books, and after the message of Forgiveness as gently prescribed in A Course in Miracles, I came to realize that the 'person' who searched would never find the answers. That person, a product of the same thought system that created him, would seek and never find because he was simply in the way. His beliefs, his concepts and ascribed personage blocked the very awareness of that which he sought. He had to get out of his own way first. He had to surrender his own image of who he thought he was before any Real knowledge could enter. The little self had to be first seen for what it really was, then sacrificed (for lack of a better word) to make room for something much bigger.

The Law of Forgiveness would lend him the means to do just that. In Forgiveness, the little self would fade into the oblivion from which it came and what would emerge is what was there all along. That Essence of the Real Self, that "I" and that assurance that everything would be alright. And from that Essence a Power uncommon in this perceived world would accompany it and everything would change for the better, forever.

Today, almost every day this writer visits the local post office to deliver copies of the original edition of A Course in Miracles [donated by Course in Miracles Society] along with an easy to comprehend introduction to The Course as made available through the text version of Gary R. Renard’s The End of Reincarnation to lists of prisoners who have expressed the desire to learn more about the Course. With the text version is a brief essay describing what is referred to as The Five Signs, five mystical experiences during this life which began at the age of three and culminated with the experience described above. This experience led to adopting a practical application of the spiritual discipline taught in A Course in Miracles.

With the help of people like Jon Mundy and his Miracles Magazine, Regina Dawn Akers and her The Holy Spirit’s Interpretation of the New Testament, Gary R. Renard and Tami Simon, (The End of Reincarnation) and Dov Fishman of The One Mind Foundation and Acim Gather, as well as Beverly Hutchenson, Marrianne Williamson, Robert Perry, and those friends who assist with postage donations, and especially Course In Miracles Society, a new wave of compassion is spreading throughout the populations of prisons all over the country.

For many of these prisoners, long forgotten by family or friends, this new avenue of communication brings welcome relief and a gentle, warm and loving response to their cry for help. It brings Hope where apathy, despair and grief make their home. It delivers Love where blame, guilt and punishment saturate the atmosphere. It brings the possibility of the Peace of God to a ‘place’ where the egos appetite for misery, pain and hopelessness can now move aside to welcome a glimmer of Light.

May the Love, Light and Peace of God be experienced by them, and with every second feel another moment spent in His Endless Embrace.
Joe Wolfe, Spirit Light Outreach
Permalink Reply by Bevan Suits on December 8, 2010 at 8:01am
Your experience as a kid in Chicago is similar to mine in southern Wisconsin in the early 70's but I never got further into prison than one day. It was enough, but with the help of LSD I had a breakthrough as you did in your cell when you stayed up all night. BOOKS! They only go so far, guideposts, but not substance, like staying up all night preparing to meet thy maker. It's interesting what you say about compassion in prison across the country, is that really true or are you projecting your desire?
Permalink Reply by Bevan Suits on October 24, 2010 at 11:51am
Many books have "changed my life", as they appeared at a time when I was ready to hear the message. The first was Be Here Now. Then, early on in the seventies, I started to read Zen Mind Beginners Mind. It made me uncomfortable because it requires doing zazen as a point of reference to understanding it, which at the time I was not doing. I guess a good book is one that makes you uncomfortable sometimes and you don't know why, yet something pulls you into it. Most recently the book True Love by Thich Nhat Han is helpful and does not make me uncomfortable, but his simple language and concepts, never really mentioning Zen concepts, just things like "be there for people".

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