I’ve always been an almost obsessive reader. As a child, my parents used to complain that they never saw me as I was either out playing in the fields and woods near our home, or in my bedroom reading. Although we were a pretty poor working class family, as a 9/10 year old, I loved Richmal Crompton’s ‘Just William’ novels which appealed greatly to my natural sense of rebellion. The fact that William came from a wealthy middle class family (they had a ‘phone’ for goodness sake - and they had a cook and a car!) never really registered at the time - we were brothers in spirit and that was all that mattered. I soon discovered politics through literature and devoured Jack London, George Orwell and a little later, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. Between them, their books helped me develop my rebellious but cynical approach to politics. Actual experience has only confirmed my youthful prejudices. Nowadays I don’t trust anyone in politics - even those I agree with!
Black Beauty gave me my life long love of horses.
I love to read and get through a book a week or so.
However the only book that actually changed my life was my pension book 
Do people still have pension books, I thought it was all paid directly into one’s bank account these days?
It is…I was speaking metaphorically!
Several books:
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Know your MP - a lovely little tome written by Andre Deutsch.
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Karl Marx’s magnum opus - Das Kapital
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State and Revolution - V.I.Lenin
I’m surprised Mao’s little red book is not in that list UJ.
For me - One Hundred Greatest Racehorses - it recaptured my great love of the sport
Thank you Baxter8. I can’t say that The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist changed my life, it merely confirmed everything I already believed in and has always been the most important book in my life.
I read all the T Lobsang Rampa’s in my early twenties and they turned my thinking upside down.
The same with Zecharia Sitchin
In terms of novels, Anne Rice books sit at the top of a very tall pile. Her books are heavy on prose and utterly enchanting …
Philosophically, on many issues, Plato’s Republic would be among them. But one that speaks to me rather than to all would be Loren C. Eiseley’s The Night Country.
Actually it was a series of books that changed everything for me. Having suffered with anxiety and depression (including panic attacks) periodically throughout my life, and many years of research to find some answers, I stumbled upon a book written by Dr. Wayne Dyer that set the changes into motion. I don’t even recall how I came to pick the book up, but it seemed to me to be an unlikely source for what I had been dealing with almost my entire life.
At first reluctant to read - the more I read the more it all made sense - here it was, in my hands, the reasons and the answers to all of my woes.
The first of his books that I read was titled Your Erroneous Zones, or “error zones”, which led you to focus on your negative thought patterns and how to recognize and then change them. “We are and feel what we think”. It hit home harder than I had ever imagined. So simple, especially to those who tend to overthink.
The second book was titled Pulling Your Own Strings. More of the same, yet a little more advanced than the first book.
I went through life changes I never dreamed possible. And as Dr. Dyer quotes in one of these books, “you will never go back, you simply can’t unknow what you now know”.
Sorry for the long post, once I got on that roll, I couldn’t put on the brakes.
Like others on here, and the person who started this Thread, I have to say that when I read the title of the Thread, the book Ragged Trousered Philanthropists immediately sprang to mind. I was already involved in socialist politics when I read this, but it confirmed everything - and has remained with me since that time. For a film I would cite ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. saw this about same time as I read Tressells book, and this also had such a profound impact on me on the total senslisness of war.
The book that changed my life was, The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
I read it in 2001, on a recommendation from someone who said it had changed his life
I read the book and my life changed in a good way and in a bad way but it was for the best.
The book is well known for changing people’s lives!
I think lots of books have made me aware of things happening to everyday people in the past and present.
I read the Grapes of Wrath in my early 20’s and definitely abolished a romantic idea of how America was.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. I was 21 working in the audio-visual supply section in a public school headquarters. A guy I worked with loaned it to me. I read it on my lunch hour…yeah it’s that short. I learned that I wasn’t just a little country bumpkin with no talent. I learned I could fly. I was miserable in the life I had made for myself. It was because of Richard Bach’s little seagull that I started college a few years later, something I had never been interested in doing before. It set me free to find me. I learned I had value. I now write books, to “pay it forward”. “Each one, teach one.” Years later Richard Bach was responsible for me getting my first literary agent. He walked his talk.
In my case, I’d sat influenced rather than changed.
The book that changed my life came along when I was a child of ten. At that time there were really no usable computers, we had no technology in our schools for blind children, and I read everything in braille. I read braille when I had to, but I did not like to read. I was not what you would call proficient, books did not give me any pleasure. And then we heard on the radio a dramatized adaptation of Watership Down by Richard Adams. My imagination was fired by this story, I dashed to my school library at lunch hour and demanded it from the librarian. He did not want to let me have it, telling me it was in six bulky volumes, and anywayit was too old for me and I would never finish it. I was equally firm that I would.
That night I plunged into the story. Suddenly reading became more than a chore, something you had to do to swat for school. It became a pleasure, an escape into a different world. You could go somewhere else and close the door of reality behind you. Soon my fingers could fly over the pages and I became one of the fastest readers in the school. I’ve never stopped loving the book that opened the magic door to me. I have a copy of it on every reading device I own. Luckily the six volumes of braille are no longer necessary, and each night before I sleep, a quiet voice reads it to me, I slip away to that green place and close the door to reality behind me for a while.
The book that changed my life is called The Bible…
Ouch, don’t hit me…it’s true though, so I just had to say it
I agree, Sue. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and, in particular, Of Mice and Men opened my young mind to a piece of life I hadn’t imagined. I began to understand what compassion meant.