Issue #170: 17 Books That Completely Changed Me

And how I find time to read so much.

🎥 ‘A Real Pain,’ in theaters: Sweet, affecting, and even funny, this movie (written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg) follows two cousins who were once close, on a “geriatric” tour to Poland, to visit the home and history of their Jewish grandmother, a woman who survived the Holocaust through “a thousand little miracles.” The pain they come face-to-face with is fertile ground for an exploration of how we hold our own and each others’ pain, what we owe to our ancestors (especially those who endured so much), and what makes a legitimate life. The movie is many things, but I found myself walking away with a reminder of how important it is to feel things—the low-lows, as well as the high-highs.

📚 Orbital by Samantha Harvey: This book, which just won the Booker Prize, could have easily found a place in this post, had I read it earlier. More like poetry than a novel, it follows six astronauts over the course of a single day which, at low orbit, includes 16 daily orbits around the earth, in which they lap the planet in light and dark. A slim meditation on exceptionalism, human connection and our relative smallness, politics, and perception.

📺 “Dune: Prophecy” on Max: Set 10,000 B.C. (“Before Chalamet,” that is) this new show delves into the formation of the best part of the book and movie, the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, who work behind the scenes to secure bloodlines and stealthy alliances.

Few things have shaped me, and helped me, like my love of books. When my husband and I broke up, I found solace in myths, memoirs, and poetry by women. I turned to first-hand accounts of sobriety when I wanted to stop drinking and dystopian novels while crafting my own. My coffee table is often obscured by layers of books, which have metastasized alongside my couch and across my piano, completely filling the bookshelf beneath my living room window. Some books, like my collection of Mary Oliver poems, never leave, while others, like yet-to-be published galleys and novels and texts that help to inform my master’s in counseling, are in frequent rotation.

Without fully realizing it, this month became Book Month at Morning Person. We started the Artist’s Way together, I selected our November Book Club pick after spending a day at the Portland Book Festival, and I’m hosting an in-person book swap in a few weeks. All this had me reflecting on the books that have had the greatest (and, in many cases, life-changing) impact on me. Below are 17 books (in no particular order) that completely changed me and future reading suggestions for each.

Read on for the books that:

• guided me through the process of writing my first novel

• helped me through my divorce and moments of grief

• changed the way I see myself, and helped me grow

• expanded my compassion and understanding for others

• inspired, entertained, and fundamentally changed me

P.S. This post is a long one, so you may need to expand it or read it in your browser.

1. The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter

One of the first books I read that opened my eyes to the false promise of chasing “comfort” as a means of achieving happiness. It introduced concepts, like “attention restoration,” that, while now obvious to me, informed my early thesis research and the second-ever Morning Person issue, three years ago.

If you read and enjoyed this, try:

• Stolen Focus by Johann Hari

• Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke

• How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell