BOOK BLOGGER HOP | A BOOK THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

This Week’s Prompt: Name a book that changed your life.

This is a hard one, because I feel like there are so many books that have deeply affected me, and that have changed some part of how I view the world. So I’m going to go with probably the first book that had a really massive impact on me: The Diary of A Young Girl by Anne Frank.

I read this when I was around twelve years old – not too much younger than Anne was when she started keeping her diary. Before reading this book I knew very little about the holocaust – or about the second world war. I loved Anne, while reading I felt like she became one of my best literary friends. So learning about such a horrible time in history through her eyes made it feel much more real to me than it would have been if I’d learned about it from a dry historical text.

In addition to being an important history lesson, it was also the first time I truly grasped what human beings can be capable of doing to one another. That new knowledge deeply affected me, and it changed how I looked at the world. Anne’s ability to keep her faith in humanity and hope alive through years of being in hiding, living in a room the size of a closet, was also an important lesson to me about resilience and love. To say that she was inspiring is an understatement.

I was lucky enough to visit the Anne Frank Museum when I was in Amsterdam as a teenager, and walking through the tiny rooms she wrote her diary from was one of the most emotionally overwhelming experiences of my life. It had a physical impact on me and left me in tears. Anne is one of my favourite writers, but more importantly, she is one of my greatest role models. Every difficult experience I’ve had in life has been made easier by reaching for my memories of reading this book, and remembering that however difficult I feel my circumstances to be, Anne was able to get through worse, and to do so with an open heart and hopeful outlook. She has been walking beside me since the first time I read this book, and I know she will continue to do so throughout my life.

What about you? Have you read this book? Which book (or books!) changed your life? I’d love to hear in the comments!

The Book Blogger Hop is a weekly meme hosted on Ramblings of a Coffee-Addicted Writer (originally created by Jennifer at Crazy-For-Books). It runs Friday-Thursday, and each week it gives bloggers a book-related prompt they can respond to, and an opportunity to join in the link up and visit some new blogs, make blogger friends and get some new visitors!