The Books That Changed Me
There are books you read, enjoy, put back on the shelf, and barely think about again. Then there are books that somehow become part of you.
Those are the books I love.
I’m not necessarily talking about the books critics say everyone should read or the ones that make all the “best books of all time” lists. I mean the books that put words around something you have felt your entire life but never knew how to explain. The ones that make you question something you thought you knew. The ones that make you understand another person differently or show up at exactly the right time in your life.
Sometimes it almost feels like the universe slid a book across the table and said, “Here. You need this one now.”
When I started putting together my Books That Changed Me collection, I noticed there was a thread running through almost every book I chose: faith, meaning, grief, compassion, healing, purpose, and the never-ending process of trying to understand ourselves and everybody else.
Basically, all the shit we spend our lives trying to figure out.
Caroline Myss’s Sacred Contracts changed the “why” for me. I think one of the hardest things about going through painful seasons is the randomness of it all. When something happens that you didn’t ask for, didn’t deserve, and absolutely would not have chosen, your brain automatically starts asking why. Why this? Why now? Why me?
The idea that there may be meaning in our lives beyond what we can see while we are actually living them gave me another way to look at that question. It didn’t suddenly make painful things good. It just made them feel a little less meaningless and, honestly, a little less cruel. Sometimes that tiny shift in perspective is enough to help you keep moving.
The Celestine Prophecy did something different. It made me pay attention.
The random person you meet. The conversation you happen to overhear. The thing you were just thinking about that suddenly appears three different ways in the same week. Maybe some of it is coincidence. I’m sure some of it is. But I also think we move through life half asleep sometimes. We are so busy trying to survive the day that we miss the little nudges, patterns, people, and moments that show up at exactly the right time.
That book made me more curious about synchronicity, intuition, energy, and the possibility that maybe life is communicating with us more often than we realize.
Then there is Have a Little Faith by Mitch Albom. Mitch Albom has this way of taking enormous questions about life and making them feel incredibly human. This book made me think about religion, judgment, community, and what it actually means to live according to what you say you believe.
We get so attached to labels. This religion. That religion. Believer. Nonbeliever. Right. Wrong. Meanwhile, underneath all of that, most of us are asking the same questions. Why are we here? How should we treat people? What happens when we die? What makes a life meaningful?
Sometimes the things connecting us are a hell of a lot bigger than the things separating us.
The Shack also changed the way I thought about God. I think good spiritual books should make you think, not tell you exactly what you are supposed to believe. This one deals with unimaginable grief, anger, forgiveness, and a question almost everyone with faith eventually bumps into: How do you believe in a loving God when terrible things happen?
I don’t have a neat answer to that, and I am suspicious of anyone who claims they do. But The Shack gave me room to imagine that maybe God is bigger, stranger, more compassionate, and much harder to define than whatever version of God we were handed when we were kids.
Sometimes faith needs room.
Not every book on my list is spiritual. Some changed me simply because they forced me to see the world through somebody else’s eyes.
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is one of those books. It is uncomfortable, and it is supposed to be. It asks you to sit with racism, beauty standards, poverty, childhood trauma, rejection, and the devastating things that can happen when a child begins to believe that the cruelty of the world says something about her worth.
One of the greatest things a book can give us is perspective. Not guilt. Not agreement. Perspective. The ability to step outside of our own life long enough to understand that the world has not treated everybody the way it has treated us.
That matters.
Siddhartha has stayed with me for another reason. I have taken something different from it at different points in my life, which is probably how you know a book is worth keeping.
It is a story about searching. Searching for truth, meaning, peace, wisdom, and that one thing we think will finally make everything click into place. A belief system, a teacher, an achievement, some magical answer.
Eventually, though, it asks a question I love: What if certain things cannot be taught to you? What if wisdom has to be lived?
I think we spend a lot of our lives searching for someone else to tell us what to do. A parent, a doctor, a book, a teacher, an expert, a guru. Sometimes we absolutely need teachers. But there are parts of becoming yourself that nobody can do for you.
You have to walk through them.
The Four Agreements gave me one of the most freeing lessons of adulthood: people are not thinking about you nearly as much as you think they are.
They are thinking about themselves.
Their bills. Their problems. Their relationships. Their insecurities. What they looked like walking into the room.
Meanwhile, you are lying in bed replaying some weird sentence you said at 2:14 that afternoon.
Learning not to take everything personally has saved me a whole lot of unnecessary suffering. Somebody’s mood does not automatically mean you did something wrong. Somebody not liking you does not make you unlikeable. Somebody misunderstanding you does not mean you need to spend the next six hours building a defense case in your own head.
Obviously, words and actions matter. We affect one another. But not every reaction deserves to become part of your identity.
That lesson alone was worth the book.
Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom made me think differently about the relationship between our emotional lives and our physical bodies. I don’t believe illness should ever be reduced to mindset, and I certainly don’t believe people can think themselves out of disease. Bodies are complicated. Disease is complicated.
But I also don’t believe our emotional lives exist in a completely separate universe from our physical ones.
Stress lives somewhere. Grief lives somewhere. Fear lives somewhere. Years of swallowing everything and pretending you are fine have an effect on you, even if we do not fully understand all of it yet.
That book opened the door for me to listen to my body differently. Not blame it. Listen to it. There is a huge difference.
Maya Angelou’s Mom & Me & Mom gave me another lesson I wish more women understood: your life does not have to be linear.
Maya Angelou lived. I mean really lived.
She changed directions. Tried things. Worked different jobs. Traveled. Loved people. Lost people. Created. Survived. Wrote. Spoke up. Reinvented herself.
There is this strange idea that by a certain age we are supposed to have figured out who we are and then remain that woman forever.
Absolutely not.
You are allowed to change. You are allowed to become interested in something new. You are allowed to start over. You are allowed to build a completely different life at 40, 50, 60, or 80.
You are not late.
You are still alive.
There is a difference.
One of the books that probably changed me most in terms of how I show up for other people is Megan Devine’s It’s OK That You’re Not OK.
Grief makes everybody uncomfortable, not just the person experiencing it.
The people around them get uncomfortable too, so we reach for something hopeful. Everything happens for a reason. They are in a better place. At least you had the time you had. It will get easier.
We mean well.
But sometimes the kindest thing you can say is much simpler.
This is awful. I’m here.
Not every pain needs to be immediately transformed into some beautiful life lesson. Not everything needs a silver lining while somebody is still bleeding from it.
Sometimes love is sitting beside someone in the dark without turning on a flashlight and demanding that they look at the bright side.
That book made me a better friend.
Then there is The Five People You Meet in Heaven, another Mitch Albom book that has stayed with me for years because of one simple idea: How many lives have we affected without ever knowing it?
A kind thing you said and immediately forgot. A choice that changed somebody else’s path. A stranger you helped. A kid who remembers something you barely remember saying. A moment when you showed up for somebody and had no idea how much they needed it.
We tend to measure the importance of a life by the big things. Careers, money, achievements, titles, awards, followers, and all the things that photograph well.
But I increasingly believe the real measure of a life is hidden inside thousands of tiny interactions, most of which we will never know mattered.
I love that.
When I look at my whole Books That Changed Me list, I can see exactly what I have been searching for most of my life.
Meaning. Connection. Faith without pretending certainty. A better understanding of other people. A better understanding of myself. Some way to make peace with the fact that life can be unbelievably beautiful and completely fucking brutal at exactly the same time.
Maybe that is why I read.
I don’t need somebody else to give me all the answers. I’m not convinced anybody actually has them.
But give me a book that makes me ask a better question?
That can change everything.
And maybe that is part of the whole idea behind Divine Grit too.
We are not strong because nothing hard has ever happened to us.
We become something through it.
Guided by something higher. Built through something harder.
You can find all of these books, along with the ones I keep recommending, rereading, and thinking about years later, on my Books That Changed Me bookshelf.