OKAY, TWO BOOKS THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

Everyone who considers himself a reader most likely remembers a handful of books that changed his point-of-view, altered his life perspective, either slightly or monumentally. For each reader, there may be five, ten, twenty, or even fifty books that influenced that person as he or she matured as a person and as a lover of ideas and the written word.

I'm certain there are more than five books that changed my life. But here, in roughly the chronological order that I read them are five books that made me look at my personal, individualized, existential reality a little bit differently than I had before I closed the back cover of the book:





1. Illusions by Richard Bach. Bach's story of reluctant messiah, Donald Shimoda, and his relationship with the messiah-in-training who happens to share the name of the author was given to me by my closest friend when I was sixteen. "Here, read this," she said. The philosophy expounded in its pages--namely that all of life is an "illusion" and that there are greater planes of reality beyond our own and that we create and magnetize things in this current reality--was a mind-blower. And the last page pulled the carpet right out from under me. It was like a punch in the gut. After that, I read everything of Bach's I could get my hands on. Unfortunately, though, I had to come to terms with the fact that, staring with Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Bach wrote the same book ten or fifteen times. Nevertheless, since reading Illusions as a teenager, I've never looked at the world, myself, or life the same way since. My young adult novel Godtalk owes much--maybe everything--to my reading of Bach's little religious (anti-religious?) parable.

2. 1984 by George Orwell. Assigned by my Sophomore Honors English teacher at Grossmont High School in 1978, Orwell's novel of dystopia also changed the way I looked at life and altered my view of the machines of social and political engineering and how they can manipulate you--through language, media, and mental conditioning--into doing what they want. The futuristic devices employed by Orwell--thought police, telescreens, doublespeak,etc.--were not only prophetic, but deeply disturbing to me, even as a teenager. I remember one assignment on the book I turned in that was executed more elaborately than most of my homework. The teacher said to me (I still remember this verbatim), "This book has really had an affect you, hasn't it?" Uh-huh.