How Books Shape Our Lives

Previously, I wrote about 'What's in a Reading Experience?' to find out about how we can recall the experience of reading certain books and that, in turn creates a memory for us. These memories become more important when we return to those books. For example: I have read Cloud Atlas many times and every time I read it, my mind returns to the first experience of doing so - and because it was positive, I enjoy the new reading experience more.

But how do books add to our lives and personalities? Books become important parts of our lives in many different ways. From helpirng us to get through tough times and grievous situations to 'becoming our personality' when we are young and obsessive. It's only later on in our lives that we find that latter one has meant that they keep coming up in our minds when we remember those years of our youth.

I've chosen some books to illustrate this in myself. It's kind of like a reading experience but instead of a memory of reading the book, you remember instead how it added to your life. Perhaps, you're remembering why you read the book and what was going on in your life at the time, or you remember something significant that happened after you read the book. These things help us understand our own lives and personalities.

So yet again we are investigating how important books are in our lives. This time though it's about books that shape our personalities and how they do so. I have a few of my own below. Let's take a quick look at what I'm talking about:

1) All Quiet on the Western Front by E.M Remarque

Oh man, did this book shape my understanding of the First World War more than a lot of others. It was some special day for books which now eludes me, but I think it was something like World Book Day/Night. My English Teacher had obtained several copies of All Quiet on the Western Front to pass around our class to each pre-teen student (please note: I'm privately educated so that means about 12-14 people in total). I think I've told this story before but I was probably the only person who went away and read it because it quite literally kept me up all night.

I read it and re-read it, I was terrified - the horrors of war looked so real and frightening. It came to shape parts of my personality including why I adore reading about the Weimar Era which was born out of World War 1 in Germany. Especially it's cinema, which sought to reflect some of the societal horrors which came out of basically losing the war.

2) Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

I was 16 years' old when I first read Less Than Zero and to tell you that book became my personality would be an understatement. I would go around quoting the text in normal conversation and, when it came to doing a narrative piece of coursework for my first year sixth form creative assignment, I chose to base it on the penultimate scene of the book. Needless to say, I got full marks.

I would talk about the book with my teacher, looking at the series of Bret Easton Ellis novels and how much I had read of him up to that point. I read Imperial Bedrooms at his advice and I was horrified at what Clayton had become. (Imperial Bedrooms is the sequel to Less Than Zero). This book shaped my personality because every time I think about teen novels now, I always think about how enamoured with Less Than Zero I was. It was one of those books which has become so unforgettable to me because I read it cover-to-cover so many times during that year. You will never read a teen novel quite like it.

3) The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough

Have you ever thrown a book across the room? I have. I threw The Thorn Birds across the room at work a long time ago. I was perhaps twenty and it was the weekend, I was reading The Thorn Birds on my break and things were getting very emotional in the book. I just remember this scene where Meggie has apparently fallen in love with the priest (I hope I'm getting that right) and another where something horrifying happens to him. I was so annoyed I ended up lobbing the book clear across the room. I went to pick it up and I finished it by the end of the next day.

I think it was books like The Thorn Birds and Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits which introduced me to the idea that there were other books that could make me cry like Anna Karenina had. It really opened up a lot more possibility for me because up until then, I have to say I was not a very emotional person. Reading Anna Karenina when I was in my teens, made me more emotional about books. And then we have these ones like The Thorn Birds.

4) Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

Oh my gosh, we are going way back to when I was about fourteen. I discovered Interview with the Vampire, both book and film and I honestly cannot remember how I came across it but it probably had something to do with Tom Cruise. I became so obsessed with the book that I actually started to make comic strips out of it in the back of my music exercise book and my music theory book. There were only four people in my music class, so please don't think the teacher did not see me. I was literally right there.

Interview with the Vampire ended up shaping me in more ways than making The Vampire Chronicles a personality trait for me up until this day (it is still my second favourite book of all time and one of my favourite films of all time), it also taught me about how to weave the gothic and the modern together. I loved the idea of the southern gothic already with writers such as William Faulkner being a firm favourite by the time I had read the first three Vampire Chronicles novels. But I started seeing the atmosphere in a different light and began noticing the Old Orleans traits of the text as well. There is something breathless about that atmosphere which hides, like the southern gothic, darkness beyond the exterior. A beauty which regrets that it is beautiful.

5) The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

This is a shorter story: I moved house when I was eleven and I was reading this book off a recommendation from a friend whilst doing so and I didn't sleep for about a week. I half expected to find my clothes covered in blood when I came home and to walk into a room which had Goya paintings in a book somewhere. Needless to say, I loved the book but honestly, I chose a poor time to read it. It's not like the title didn't give anything away on what the book was going to be about.

Since then, I have read, taught and analysed The Haunting of Hill House and many other works by Shirley Jackson. You could almost say that this was my gateway drug to her works. I became obsessed with psychological horror thanks to this book (and I disliked the Netflix version: great aesthetic but it really had nothing to do with the book at all). I think this book was really the very beginning of my horror obsession which I believe to this day, disappoints my mother. Anyways, I ended up studying horror on my degrees and I loved every second of it. From Shakespeare's horrific violence, ghosts and gore to Stephen King's Salem's Lot (which I first read in my teens and scared the daylights out of myself, though it helped me to write about it later on). You have Shirley Jackson to thank for my horror obsession.

Conclusion

Now I turn to you. Which books have made an overall impact on your life? Have they shaped your personality? Have they made you interested in things for the rest of your life? Have they reflected themselves upon you in some meaningful way that now, you cannot escape?

There are these five and probably many more for me. But I will leave this at five.