OK, so this is a thought exercise, an attempt to funnel life’s complexity into a bookish article, because – surely – no one work deserves the title of The Book That Changed My Life.
That was certainly my conclusion when I tried to shoehorn Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own into the box labelled The Book That Changed My Life for the sake of ticking this blog off my to-do list.
Ms Woolf inspired me, yes. She influenced me, certainly. But in the end I didn’t retreat to a Bloomsbury apartment, with the modern equivalent of 3% net return on capital, to write great literature as a result of reading her oeuvre.
Putting her back on the shelf, I wondered if there was an approximation to be found, a book whose influence was sufficiently profound that I’d be happy to have it quoted back at me.
At first…
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