This morning I was just stumbling out of bed and toward the kitchen when I heard “ALL A’S BITCHES!” roared from my living room.

Will’s grades came out today and he got a 4.0 for this term!  Every day I’m given another reason to be proud of that guy.  I didn’t even laugh much as he trotted through our apartment, pumping his fists and chanting “ALL A’S BITCHES!” over and over again. Honestly, it was a pretty good way to start our morning.

Another good way to start the morning is with blog work.  I’ve given myself an hour or so to work on this site, get caught up with e-mails and twitter messages and just generally keep up momentum.  I discovered yesterday that there is a big quote from my w00tstock post on the w00tstock site (I knew the link was there but didn’t know about the pulled quote) so that has me super jazzed.  Thanks Powers-That-Be at the w00tstock site!

Now let’s get on with the post!

If you were playing around on Twitter at all last night (and let’s face it, you probably were) you probably saw the #booksthatchangedmyworld trending topic.  I watched it for a while and noticed, at least with the people I follow, that the books fell into one of two categories.  There were the traditional “smart” books–stuff by Hemmingway, Steinbeck. Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, people we all studied in lit classes.   There were also the “lemme prove my geek/hipster cred” listings: Douglas Adams, Orson Scott Card, Chuck Palahniuk and Hunter S Thompson were all well represented.

I’m not saying that any of these people were being poseurs.  It is likely that all of these books and authors really did change the readers’ worlds in some way.  I remember reading Ender’s Game for the first time and being blown away by it.  I remember what it was like to fall in love with Shakespeare and the language of Austen and Dickens.  I remember appreciating Virginia Woolf (oh! There is a doggie daycare chain here in PDX called Virginia Woof and every time I see one of their locations I launch into a diatribe about how totally and completely horrible and inappropriate the name is.  Seriously: do these people not know Virginia Woolf’s story? Gah! Oh look–I’m doing it again).  So all of these claims are more than likely totally legitimate.  After all, Twitter is a diverse universe.

At the same time I kept thinking “what about all of the regular stuff?”  So I listed a few of the books that changed my world: On Writing, Bright Lights Big Ass, We Thought You’d Be Prettier and The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles.

I know that Jen Lancaster and Laurie Notaro are, by most, considered to be “light and fluffy” but you know what?  They were the first real humor-for-humor’s sake books I read.  Sure I’ve skimmed some Dave Barry in my time but until I read We Thought You’d Be Prettier by Laurie Notaro I had no idea that publishers would publish funny essays as they were.  Until then, I’d thought that all books–even funny memoirs–had to follow a theme or tell a story.  We Thought You’d Be Prettier blew my mind because it is exactly the kind of book I’d like to put together myself someday but hadn’t known was possible.  Bright Lights Big Ass gets a nod because it never fails to make me laugh.  I’d never had a book that I could pick up, open to any page and find something to laugh or smile about before.  I’ve now read that book so many times it is very nearly falling apart.

The other two books I listed, Stephen King’s On Writing and The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Edwards (you might know her as Julie Andrews) got listed simply because they changed the way I think about things.

On Writing is the only Stephen King book that I have read all the way through.  I learned more about writing and being a writer from this book than I learned in all of my schooling put together.  I read that book for the first time in 2004 and I still get twitchy when I use an adverb (which means I twitch a lot–those adverbs can be very handy).

The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles changed the way I look at things–it taught me how to literally see the forest for the trees (or whatever the cliche is).  The book is all about learning how to look deeper at things, to examine them and see them for what they actually are.  It taught me about paying attention to even the little things that seem unimportant.  And it’s a super good story.

Today I took a look at the topic on twitter and saw that more kids’ books are making the cut.  I saw some Bernstein Bears, some Lois Lowry and a couple of Baby-Sitter’s Club mentions. Have I mentioned my love of the Baby-Sitter’s Club here before?  I have? Okay good.  Because those books helped me grow up and but for the limit of 140 characters and not wanting to spam the thread, I would have listed them last night too.

So what about you:  What are the books that really changed your world?  And why?

FTC Annoying Stuff:  NONE of those links are affiliate links.  I linked them because they are sites and products that I whole heartedly endorse.  Nobody paid me for any of that stuff.

Other note: This would be longer but I used up all of my scheduled “blogging for fun” time. Now I have to get to work!