Librarians love to talk about books. LOVE. You’d think we do that all day long, but for some of us, chatting with patrons about books is a rare and cherished perk of the job.
So what happens when you ask an active Facebook group of librarians about the books that have changed their lives?
You get answers. A mind-blowing amount of suggestions, both fiction and nonfiction.
Some of these profound books I’ve read, others are on my never ending TBR list, and at least a dozen I’ve never even heard of and I must discover.
This list’s utter lack of organization is made up for by its richness and diversity. Sorry kids, but I didn’t have time to catalog by Dewey today. This compilation was copied/pasted straight from Facebook, so please forgive duplicates.
The results (in no particular order):
Night by Elie Weisel
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
Bury My Heart at Wounded Kneeby Dee Brown
The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
The Stand by Stephen King
Tam Lin by Pamela Dean
The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism by Naoki Higashida
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Grace in the Wilderness by Aranka Siegel
Winnie the Pooh, The stories of Beatrix Potter, Saint Maybe, Jacob Have I Loved, Beloved, No God But God, A Fine Balance, Wuthering Heights, Zealot, The Art of Loving, Reading Lolita in Tehran
Leaves of Grass be Walt Whitman
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Nausea by Sartre
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
The Dark Is Rising
Just Above My Head
I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
Wind in the Door by Madeline L’Engle
Les Miserables (Victor Hugo), Julian (Gore Vidal) The Truth About Stories (Thomas King), Archive Fever (Jacques Derrida)
Time Enough For Love by Heinlein
Jenny and the Jaws of Life by Jincy Willet
The Likeness by Tana French
Waiting by Ha Jin
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Little, Big by John Crowley
Sandman by Neil Gaiman
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Dandelion Wine and Fahrenheit 451 by Bradbury
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
From the Teeth of Angels and A Child Across the Sky by Jonathan Carroll
The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
The poetry of Pablo Neruda
the entire Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder
I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb
Why Women Want by Caroline Knapp. Also Art and Fear by David Bayles, Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression by Jana Evans Braziel, and The Zen of Creativity by John Daido Loori
Also Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The short stories of Jonathan Carroll
Black Boy, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Immigrant Series by Howard Fast, Love Story by Erich Segal, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, Tell Me Something Happy Before I Go to Sleep by Joyce Dunbar
Catcher in the Rye
Dandelion Wine & Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
Cloud Atlas
The Teacher Who Couldn’t Read
A Field of Buttercups by Joseph Hyams
Little Women
Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon
Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
Stone Fox
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Hawk and the Dove by Penelope Wilcock
The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir
Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
The Outsider, Albert Camus. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad. And a YA novel about schizophrenia called Meeting Rozzy Halfway, by Caroline Leavitt
Things Fall Apart; Siddhartha; The Stranger; Me Talk Pretty One Day
The Horsemasters by Don Stanford
Anthem by Ayn Rand
The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky)
The Diversity of Life (E. O. Wilson)
Bastard Out of Carolina
1984 and Brave New World
Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
The Sneetches. The Witch of Blackbird Pond. The Outsiders. The Stand. The Handmaid’s Tale. Letters of a Woman Homesteader. A People’s History of the United States. A Tree Grows In Brooklyn
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler
Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation by Mary Daly
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
The Same Kind of Different as Me
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry
Positive by Paige Rawls
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
The Front Runner
The Color Purple
The Other Man Was Me
Diving Into the Wreck
Persepolis
Maus
Summer Sisters by Judy Blume
World Enough and Time: on Creativity and Slowing Down by Christian McEwan
Peace is every step, Sherlock Holmes, Istanbul and Snow by Orhan Pamuk
Animal Farm, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451
You Can Save the Animals” by Ingrid Newkirk
Cat’s Eye by Margret Atwood, Eva Luna by Isabell Allende, everything by Tom Robbins, Bruce Chatwin and Terry Pratchett
Gifted Hands
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Last Exit to Brooklyn
The Orphan Master’s Son
Naked In The Promised Land by Lillian Faderman
Assata by Assata Shakur
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
The Bridges of Madison County
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
As a Man Thinketh. The Book of Mormon. Seven habits of highly effective people. Outliers. Bridge to Terrabithia.
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
The Name of the Wind
House of Leaves
Follow My Leader by James Garfield
Man’s Search For Meaning–Victor Frankl
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The Velveteen Rabbit
David Copperfield, the Book of Mormon, and The Book Thief.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut
Infinite Jest
The Wealthy Barber
The Incredible Journey of Edward Tulane
Biography of a face by Lucy Grealy
Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson
Looking for Alaska- John Green
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Rapture Practice by Aaron Hartzler; Faitheist : How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious, by Chris Stedman; Biological Exuberance by Bruce Bagemihl; The Birthday of the World and other stories by Ursula K. Le Guin; The Brothers Lionheart and Ronia the Robbersdaughter – both by Astrid Lindgren
Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier
People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
One by Richard Bach
People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Roots
Wonder
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky
e.e. cummings and David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary.
Toni Morrison, yes to A Handmaid’s Tale, Adrienne Rich, Alice Munro…
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Thank you, ALA Think Tank members, for your amazing suggestions!
Readers: what books changed your view of the world?
I found it disappointing (unless I overlooked it) that nothing by Mark Twain made the cut. Huckleberry Finn is a classic (as are other works by Twain/Clemens). His books had a profound affect on me while growing up. Perhaps Twain’s classics aren’t considered “politically correct” enough to make the list?
I’m sure many books were overlooked on the list. Twain should certainly be considered one of the most influential writers and humorists in literature!
I am absolutely thrilled that my first novel, Meeting Rozzy Halfway (which isn’t a YA as stated, but that’s cool), made this list! Thank you, thank you, thank you all librarians!
Caroline Leavitt
Seems you have done lots of research for this blog. 1-2 greats books are missing. But a great job keeps writing.
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