by Taylor Berry 

You’re never going to do more reading than you will in your four years of university, but let’s face it, that textbook on Chemistry of Food is not going to feed your mind or your soul what it needs.  You’re in the middle of becoming who you are, you need literature full of the good stuff that will inspire you, make you cry, make you realize your own values.

Yet, I feel some anxiety over picking which books to recommend; after all, just because something is life changing to me doesn’t mean it will have the same impact on you.  So, I present you with my list of life-changing books.  I can’t guarantee that they will change your life too, but at the very least they will make you think.   

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Kerouac’s On the Road follows Sal Paradise, a writer, and his somewhat-mad friend Dean Moriarty as they travel the United States, running into sex, drugs and jazz.  When I started reading On the Road it immediately had a huge impact on me.  I wanted nothing more than to road trip, go to California, be young, meet new people and experience all that the world had to offer.  My boyfriend at the time said he didn’t like the person the book was making me, and told me he didn’t want to see it in our apartment.  Not wanting to cause trouble, I hid it away between some course packs.  You know a book is life-changing if your controlling boyfriend forbids it–needless to say he is my ex, and I took my long-desired road trip to the South.  

Quote: “Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”

-Sal Paradise 

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

This beautifully-written book by Czech author Milan Kundera taught me about relationships in a huge way.  It’s about two couples: the first is a woman in love with a hopeless womanizer, and the second is the man’s mistress and her hopelessly faithful lover. I found the book’s portrayal of weight in relationships really thought-provoking: is love necessarily heavy or do we just make it so?   And are affairs necessarily light, and weightless, without any substance?  Part of the book is a “Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words”, where you can see how differently two people can see even the most basic of concepts, like fidelity, light and dark, and music.   

Quote:  “She had left a man because she felt like leaving him.  Had he persecuted her?  Had he tried to take revenge on her?  No.  Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness.  What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.”

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

I first read Song of Solomon in high school, and I go back to read over my favourite parts a few times a year.  Nobel-Prize winner Toni Morrison is a soulful writer, and reading her fiction is, to me, like comfort food, with as much heart as your grandmother’s matzo ball soup.  Song of Solomon is a coming-of-age story about a guy most people call Milkman, who goes to learn more about his grandfather’s roots in slavery in the American age of civil rights.  When he visits his grandfather’s home town, he hears a legend that his grandfather literally flew away from the plantation that he worked on.  This is a novel about coming to understand who you are, and how to make yourself better, and free.   

Quote: “Too much tail.  All that jewelry weighs it down.   Like vanity.  Can’t nobody fly with all that shit.  Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”

-Guitar, on peacocks, and flight.   

Anna Quindlen, A Short Guide to a Happy Life

My grandmother gave me Anna Quindlen’s A Short Guide to a Happy Life after I graduated from university; she told me she had always wanted to give it to me.  The book is a transcription of a graduation speech by Quindlen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author.  But the speech isn’t about how she achieved her literary success, it’s about how to ultimately lead a successful life that you can feel satisfied with, given that you have only one.  Quindlen lost her mother when she was only 19, and this gave her a keen sense of life’s fleeting nature and the importance of always remembering its beauty.  My grandmother rereads this every few months, and suggested that I do the same. 

Quote: “Life is made of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement.  It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen.  We have to teach ourselves how to live, really live . . . to love the journey, not the destination.” 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

If I were to write a short guide to a happy life, I would probably include One Hundred Years of Solitude as necessary reading before you die.  I would do anything to be able to go back and read this book again for the first time–it’s one of those novels you finish only to feel sad that it’s over.  It’s a family epic following generations of the Buendía family, and it is the most magical fucking thing I’ve ever read.  Magic realism, which has its roots in Latin American literature, fills the novel with a fantastic quality reminiscent of a fairy tale or a myth.  The story of the make-believe town of Macondo and the Buendía family is a world you won’t want to leave: a 145 year-old prostitute tells the future, Colonel Buendía has 17 sons named Aureliano by 17 different women, and the patriarch of the family goes mad searching for the Philosopher’s stone and is tied to a chestnut tree by his wife as he garbles in Latin.  This is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read.   

Quote: “It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía with impatience and made him wander all through the house even in broad daylight.”