Cover your eyes, guys

I've just stumbled across an interesting article published last September in The Independent. Four hundred women were asked to name the books that had changed their lives:

While works by Jane Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot are only to be expected on a list of essential female novels, the inclusion of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comes as something of a surprise. [Hey! Brenda says. What's surprising about it?] But a survey of 400 women from academia, the arts and publishing shows that women are as likely to cite Douglas Adams's comedy as the book that made a difference to their life as a novel by the feminist icon, Virginia Woolf. [Darn right, Brenda says. Sounds like some truly intelligent women were polled.]

The women were asked which novels had most changed the way they viewed themselves by the team behind the Orange Prize for Fiction, which celebrates women writers.

When I stopped to think about what I might have contributed to that list, I had to laugh. My life was materially changed by a novel I read only once and then threw out. It was awful, but Reeking Romance by Helena Handbasket* was an inspirational romance, and until that time I had no idea such things existed. I was so intrigued by my discovery that I read the book all the way through, then immediately sat down at my computer and started an inspirational romance novel of my own. I've read other books--good books--that changed my life, but none to the degree this seriously bad book did.

Go read the list of oft-cited books and then report back here and tell us all what novel changed your life. And since I'm sure the guys have been reading this even though I hinted it was a "women only" post, I guess we might as well let them participate, too.


*The book title and the author's name have been changed, obvs.