Books That Made A Difference

Without even looking at your bookshelf, I'm sure that you can think of three or four books that made a difference in your life, probably books you wanted to go back to and re-read to see if you could remember why they impacted you the way they did.  I would love to hear what those books are!

One of my all-time favorites was Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Estes Pinkola.  When it first came out and was given to me as a gift, I put it aside for a while before reading it.  It seemed too wordy, too complex--and I just wasn't in the mood to tackle it at the time. It's a tome, this book, and not one to read through in a hurry.

Many years ago--about 18, I think--a group of us went to La Madeleines once a month to discuss a chapter, working through the whole book.  What the author does is to illuminate fairy tales and folk tales in psychological terms.  As a Jungian therapist, she takes each tale apart to describe certain features in the development of the psyches of women.

I hadn't read the book in many years, but when I found my copy last night it was falling apart and there were so many underlinings and notes in the margin that it took me back to the time when I read it, right after my divorce.  Luckily, I have a second copy that's not falling apart so much, and I'm reading the fresh un-annotated copy now.

Thanks to the fullness of the moon, I'm wide awake at one in the morning and the wordiness can indeed induce sleep if you let it.  It will take weeks, maybe months, to read it all the way through; it's more like studying than pleasure reading--but it speaks to me now in new ways.

While I also read a lot of fiction (probably a novel every other week or so), the books that made the most difference to me, that stayed with me longest, are often nonfiction books, including memoirs: May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude; Ann Morrow Lindberg's Gift From the Sea; memoirs by Nancy Mairs; Alice Koller's An Unknown Woman; Etty Hillesum's An Interrupted Life--and so many other books in which women told the truths about their own lives.

I'm not sure why--but I'm drawn right now to re-reading all of them.  They are all lying beside my bed in various stages of openness, along with Terry Tempest Williams' When Women Were Birds and Phillip Lopate's A Portrait Inside My Head.