I just realized how much timing matters with books. I read "The Midnight Library" during a career crisis and it hit completely different than it would have any other time.
Has anyone else had this experience? Either a book that found you at the perfect moment or one you wish you would read earlier/later in life?
by GoodingPooding
13 Comments
I read East of Eden for the first time while going through a divorce in my late 20s and it pulled me out of the worst depression and reminded me of my free will and agency. It honestly changed my life.
I read ‘the invisible child’ by Tove Jansson at a time when i was in treatment for an ED
i read “we were liars” after a big friendship breakup and it wrecked me in the best way possible.. sometimes books just find you exactly when you need them.
The Gift of Fear. It probably saved my life, definitely saved my sanity.
I’m currently re reading The Midnight Library too whilst going through big changes and it hits different! 🩷
Books that changed my life were typically none fiction –
The Body Keeps The Score
Its Not You (Dr Ramani)
The Courage To Be Disliked
I read American Psycho when I was 19 and it made me realise that I wasn’t a narcissist like my father.
“Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” was required for twelfth grade English. I had always been a big reader, but I had become a bit annoyed with required texts. Portrait reminded me that seriously intended works can make your brain explode in that pleasurable way.
I read The Art of Racing in the Rain right after my grandfathers funeral. I don’t think I’ve ever cried so hard from a book. It really gave me the emotional release that I didn’t know I still needed.
My junior year in college for a comparative literature degree, all but one of my professors had me reading existentialist stuff, like Camus, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. I was too young, too unsure of myself. I spiraled, thinking my life had no meaning because I wasn’t doing anything that mattered (at the grand old age of 20.)
Then, on a whim, I picked up *Middlemarch.* I maintain that *Middlemarch* is the antidote to existentialist spiraling, because it argues that you don’t have to do big things to matter. Who you are in your community, how you treat people, that’s what matters. And that remains my personal philosophy to this day.
“The Stand” when I was recovering from meningitis.
I read “Shadow of the Wind” in English from a used copy I picked up at an international bookstore while studying abroad in Madrid. I was deeply lonely (and struggling with my Spanish) and the book gave me so much courage to explore, practice Spanish was strangers, and just try new things. I still own that copy of the book (mumble, mumble years later). I tried re-reading it a couple of years ago…. And it wasn’t the same at all. I definitely read it at the right time!
read Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy as a teen boy
read the Narcissist Next Door at 40
I read Parable of the Sower in December 2020. I spent the next 6 months in a fever dream and trying to convince my loved ones that everyone needed go bags.