A review by rclairel
The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them by Joy Johannessen, Roxanne J. Coady

3.0

Two stars for a meh amount of enjoyment but a third for the books I added to my to-read list. I think I expected the short essays in this little paperback to be poignant and beautiful; they are written mostly by professional writers, after all. As it turns out, writers seem to have just as much trouble expressing how deeply a book as affected them as the rest of us mere readers do. There were a few reviews that made me smile - but that only occurred because they were about books that I love, too, and there's nothing so fun as hearing someone else gush about something you're obsessed with as well. One solitary line struck me with the poignancy I was expecting in every review; Anne Perry wrote of G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who was Thursday, "It makes me feel wonderfully unique, and at the same time part of all mankind." But despite all my griping about what this book was not, I did finish with at least a dozen dog-eared pages, where authors' less-than-dust-jacket-worthy descriptions were still enough to pique my interest in their favorite books. I guess if you're desperate for things to read, you could check this book out at the library (don't bother to buy it). But honestly, there's too many books and too little time already. Also, a question I wondered: how diverse was the group of authors interviewed for this book? Because after a while, I started to wonder if they were all or almost all white.