For someone rather renowned for his book collection (considering I don’t have floor to ceiling shelving for books I have rather a lot of them) this is easy. The Giver by Lois Lowry, Night by Elie Wiesel, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
The Giver by Lois Lowry is one the earliest knock me on my ass books that I read. Written about a utopian society and what being different can mean it made me feel all the things I was already feeling being the different one. I read it for the first time in the fifth grade and have probably read it a half dozen times since then. Each and every time I get something different out of it. A book that’s so transformative ought be on everyone’s list of impactful books.
Next up is Night by Elie Wiesel, another book that changed my world view. Written by a Holocaust survivor about his time in a concentration camp it’s a bald faced look at what those concentration camps were like. I read this for the first time in eighth grade and it was an introduction to the horrors humans can exact on other humans.
Rounding out my list is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I picked this up freshman year of high school because it was short and the back cover reminded me of Night. This is where my obsession with Soviet Russian history started. It was remarkable to me that there was this whole other country doing the same thing to their citizenry that Germany was doing to theirs. Somehow it was a different nightmare though. Hence I spent the next 10 years reading deeply into Soviet Russian history.
Sometimes we gloss over the impact books can have on our lives. We read them once and move on to the next. But some books are bigger than that. The three books I listed changed my world view and change my world view every time I read them. There’s no way my view can be static without expanding my world view beyond my front porch. I’m never going to be able to effect change if I don’t leave the porch. I need to journey forth more often. I don’t want to read a book written by a generational peer that is short and has a similar back to Night. And we’re shading closer and closer to that every day.
my inner journeys 