What is the most life-changing book you've ever read?

The Image by Daniel J. Boorstin. I was having a wonderful time writing smart-alecky interviews and events-coverage for the Style section of The Washington Post when this opened my eyes to the fact that what I was observing was not real life, but manufactured characters and situations. I had to overcome the resulting paralysis and go on, but I resolved to find a (comparatively) more honest way to earn a living.

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. Rand said things I’d never heard before. For a young girl who had just spent 12 years at Marymount here I was reading that there was no such thing as original sin! Wow. Rand also said something I have never forgotten: “It’s not the strong people of the world who will kill you. It’s the weak ones.”

The most life-changing books were actually two. When I read Kitty Foyle by Christopher Morley at 16, this catapulted me into wanting to be an independent career woman in a big city. And, I became one. On the other hand, Voltaire! Voltaire! by Guy Endore changed me into a life of trying to imitate Voltaire in many ways. It released me from the narrow-minded prejudices and fears I had from being raised up in the strict confines of Southern Baptist fundamentalism.

But I would guess that actually the Bible has changed more lives than anything else printed. And remember: the New Testament probably helped launch the Renaissance and its transformation of Western Civilization … Just as it launched the Spanish Inquisition. That’s “influencing” a lot, both positively and negatively.

I don’t know if any book has ever changed my life, but the most thrilling reading experience I ever had in my life was when I read War and Peace in my twenties. I read it for hours every night and had dream after dream about it when I slept. I almost wept when it ended. But I have loved many books, and poetry was the great passion of my youth. So all of the reading I’ve done, particularly as a child and a young person, probably affected my life in some way, although it’s impossible to quantify.

Nabokov’s Ada. The summer I was about to turn 20. I hadn’t known that language alone could make an alternative universe.

I’d agree with Joan on War and Peace, which took me an entire summer to wade through as it dealt with all the toughest, most consequential life issues. Such magnificent, vastly ambitious writing. I will always remember the death scene on the battlefield. Also, Madame Bovary resonated with me as with every other woman. And reading The Chronicles of Narnia with my daughter was a great and rich experience.

To Kill a Mockingbird.

Well the bible changed my life as it does all Christians and Jews. Acts of the Apostles, the book in which Jesus has already been killed and the church begins, rocked me when I was in my 40s, and still does. After that, a lot of books changed my life, in I think all the obvious and typical ways. Fitzgerald and Hemingway; life can be so rich, so full of movement. Well written histories; we got through that, we’ll get through this. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France: one of the books that you read and think, ‘That’s exactly it.’ I think I’m forgetting a lot of books that rocked my world. Everything I read from age 10 through 40 rocked my world. A fabulous biography of Dorothy Thompson called American Cassandra reminded me, or re-informed me, that if you don’t get the part with your kids right you won’t feel you got anything right. And you’ll be right.