Let me start:
When I read The Master and Margarita, I was young, slightly lonely, and riddled with minor issues I can't remember now but they seemed huge at the time. After I read the M&M, my self-belief battery was fully charged and I started to see things positively. This is still my favorite book.
The second has to be Before We Were Immigrants; So Long Yugoslavia. After I read it, I realized my relationship was not going anywhere and I broke up with my then-girlfriend of three years (didn't regret it). Some books are entertaining and educational but some are sent as a sign.
by pageunresponsive
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I was 22 in 1992 when I read All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. I had just graduated college the day it came it out and was barely scraping by living in NYC. His prose opened my mind in a way few others had to that point – like Faulkner and Nabokov.
*Siddhartha* by Hermann Hesse came into my life at two starkly contrasting points. It first came into my life when I was 16-17 in my junior year of high school taking IB Lit. Back then, I was pretty utterly disinterested in all things spiritual in any capacity, regardless of the religion. It went in one ear out the other without reaching me in any meaningful way (and I fully admit I made zero effort to try and integrate any of it) and I was glad to be rid of it.
I revisited the novel when I was about 23 after having gone through a rather serious few years of emotional and professional maturation, and I couldn’t have been more moved! In the some 150ish total pages of the novel, Hesse had managed to complete unlock my attitude towards spiritual development. I realized that I had been missing a sense of metaphysical security within the universe, and Siddhartha’s journey set me off on a bit of my own.
I picked up a copy of *Tao Te Ching* by Lao Tzu and was nearly moved to tears by the portrayal of life through the Taoist lens. It resonated strongly within me because at that point I had yet to read a religious text that felt so *grounded*. My perception of spirituality being something rooted in things completely physically intangible (like the Holy Spirit as it was presented to me in church as a kid) was completely uprooted. As I read through *Tao Te Ching*, I was able to relate personal experience and lessons I had learned completely on my own to many of the same lessons written in each passage. And the presentation of the Tao as (more or less) the “ever-flowing life force” presented me with a palatable take on the concept of having faith in something “intangible” that it actually allowed me to appreciate many aspects of theistic religions which I had found utterly unrelatable up until that point.
I still wouldn’t consider myself to be religious by any means, nor do I actively consider myself a Taoist. But I now understand the difference between being religious and being spiritual, and that has given me a very valuable means for empathizing with several demographics whom I’d struggled to relate to in my life until that point.