I am incredibly skeptical whenever someone tells me, "This book changed my life," when recommending something for me to read.
Granted, this sentiment is well-intentioned, they enjoyed the book so much and they want to share those good feelings with others for further discussion about a book that made such a positive impact on their life. Their objective is good, but the execution is, frankly, a bit shoddy.
For some background, I work in a library, so I hear this phrase quite a lot, not only when books are recommended to me, but when patrons exclaim as I scan their books through the system, "My friend said this book was life changing" or even "My son's teacher wants them to read a book that will change their life, have any ideas?" But all I can think of whenever this phrase is used is, "Wow, that's an awful lot of pressure to be putting on a single book."
Teachers, unfortunately, are often the worst perpetrators when it comes to using this phrase to promote class readings. Again, I believe that their intentions are good, and they are trying to ignite some spark of incentive for more reluctant students to actually read, but in my own experience, all this does is create an internal stress of sorts. If I read the book and my life is not inherently altered in some drastic fashion, I feel as if I have completely missed the point of the book because simply "enjoying" the novel or "appreciating" the assigned reading is not enough.
Personally, I think this mentality is enforced when a class's reading involves books that are considered to either be "classics" like The Catcher in the Rye or The Great Gatsby (both of which, I did enjoy reading when I was in high school), or more modern works like, Into the Wild (which I found to be a good read about an ultimately tragic true story). Aside from the fact that all three of these happen to be written by the same "brand" of author, and while I will not be getting into the topic of "white guy authors," (at least not in this particular article), what these three books also have in common is that a they were all introduced with, you guessed it, "This book will change your life." And while yes, they all had their respective merits, none of them flipped my life 180°.
But reading more closely into the phrase itself, what exactly does "life changing" mean? Is it not inherently "life changing" to read something that you have not read before? In that case, wouldn't that mean that every book will change your life in some way or another? Even if you end up deciding halfway through a book, "Huh, I'm not a fan of this at all, I'm not going to continue reading," now you have a better idea of what you like to read and what you don't like to read. Of course, different people will naturally interpret different authors differently because none of our brains have been hardwired to think exactly the same way. Sure, I always encourage reading out of your comfort zone, maybe trying out a new genre or reading a translated book that was originally written in a language different from the one(s) that you speak, but the next time you go to recommend a book to a friend maybe lead with, "I think you'd really enjoy this" instead of accidentally insisting that it will change their life.
