Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books That Changed My Life

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created by the team at The Broke and the Bookish. This week is Thanksgiving-themed, so I’m going to feature ten books that have made a difference in my life and I’m thankful to have read.

1. All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

This wouldn’t be a Top Ten Tuesday if this amazing book wasn’t in it. This is my favourite book of all time and I still don’t really know how it changed my life but I remember putting the book down and feeling like I was a different person to who I was before I read it. I think I even wrote in my review something along the lines of “I don’t know how but this book has changed my life”. This might sound a little bit strange but, in a way, I felt enlightened? I kind of felt like I’d had some sort of mental cleanse and there was a moment of absolute freedom and clarity. I’m probably sounding like a crazy person right now.

2. Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling

I probably don’t need to explain this one. The Harry Potter series was my obsession from when I was about 10 years old until I was about 17? I read Harry Potter fanfiction all the time and my whole life was about Harry Potter.

3. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I had to read this book for school when I was in Year 8. It had come out the previous year in Australia and our teachers made us read it for English class because it was getting a lot of recognition worldwide that year. The Book Thief was the first required reading that I remember enjoying immensely. It was probably also the book that ignited my love for WWII historical fiction.

4. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

TFIOS was the book that got me back into reading YA. I read it a couple of months before the movie came out and that slowly got me back into YA and fiction in general. Before that I was reading a lot of non-fiction and psychology related self-help books.

5. Rurouni Kenshin by Nobuhiro Watsuki

This is my favourite manga of all time (also my favourite anime and live action movie) and it was the first manga series that I remember reading. After reading Rurouni Kenshin, I fell in love with manga and I still read a lot of manga to this day.

6. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

This was another book that I had to read for English class in high school and it was another one that I really loved. This book is a Man Booker Prize winner and it really made me aware of literary prizes. I love reading prize winners now and I follow the Man Booker Prize really closely.

7. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

This is my favourite classic of all time and it was the first one that I read independently of class and loved. It’s such a great story with some really complex characters. It made me fall in love with Oscar Wilde and I’ve loved everything of his that I’ve read so far. This book pushed me to read more classic literature outside of class.

8. The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton

I featured this one recently in a book tag so this might sound repetitive… but The Magic Faraway Tree was one of the first books that I read by myself as a kid. It was read to me in school when I was about 6 years old and I loved it so much that I made my parents buy it for me so that I could read it again by myself. This led to me being obsessed with Enid Blyton and at one point I owned almost everything she’d ever written.

9. I’ll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson

This novel is my favourite YA novel of all time, but that’s not why I’m featuring it today. This book was one of the first LGBTQ+ books that I read after getting back into reading. And it made me realize how much I love books that feature LGBTQ+ characters and explore sexuality. So I guess it opened my eyes to the whole #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement.

10. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

This is another strange one but this was the first Shakespearean play that I read from start to finish. It made me see that 16th century English in iambic pentameter isn’t as intimidating as I thought it was… which was a good thing because we had to study one of Shakespeare’s plays each year.

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What are some books that have made a difference in your life or have shaped you into the reader you are today?