Everyday Canvas

On Reading

Prompt; Books affect us in profound ways, don't you agree? Tell us about a book that struck a chord with you, was it in a good way or a not so good way?

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Lots of books affect me, all the time, even more so than people. So much so that my mother used to be jealous of my reading, and later it was my hubby, but over the years, he has learned to live with it.

The first book that had a lifelong effect on me was Saint Exupery’s Little Prince. After that, countless books emerged that I loved, that made me think, and that kept me under their influence for days, weeks, and months. Next to Little Prince are Poems of Rumi, Masnavi, and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Then there are the authors like Richard Bach and Paulo Coelho who always leave something with me. There are also a few books I've read in other languages that are not translated into English. Those, I'm letting be.

Of the rest of them that impressed me deeply --at least at the time that I read them— what comes to mind right now are: The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton, The Idiot, Tales from the Underground, and The Brothers Karamazov, The Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Les Misérables, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, Anthem, Rebecca, The Call of the Wild, The Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451, André Gide’s Journals, The Good Earth, A Separate Peace, The Storyteller, Resistance, Room, Electra (Yes, I sometimes read stage plays, too), King Lear, A Doll’s House, The Miser, etc.

The list goes on and on. The way a book impresses me shows itself with passages, scenes, or snippets that make me think. They play over and over inside my head, leaving back a stunned feeling. My overall reading throughout my lifetime has shown me acceptable behavior, what not to do, and freedom in thinking, and I hope it has also given me a bit of a literary taste.

I was never negatively impressed by a book. If I don’t like it, I forget about it or if I don’t like it because of too many grammatical mistakes or constructional holes, the name of the author goes on my Do not Read list.