Books that Changed Me

Be careful what you read!

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I was recently asked by book club members to list and describe the most formative books I have read in my life. For me, those are books that changed how I viewed the world. It was fascinating to think back on my sixty years and consider which texts significantly impacted my life and my understanding of the world. There are many good books—that is, books I have enjoyed, agreed with, gained evidence from, and even quoted or cited in writing and conversation. “Good books” is not the criteria for my list here, however. In fact, a couple of these books I wouldn’t even consider to be “good.” But they were impactful. They changed my understanding of life and the world.

My Criteria

To me, a change in perspective is the primary reason I read. I would like the paradigm to shift. Sure, I enjoy a good story once in a while. But I am a thinker and a poet, so two things appeal. First, I love books that change my understanding and the way that I think. I love it when a book trashes my perspective and forces me to think in new ways. Such books are few and far between, but when discovered, they are pure gold.

But thinking isn’t everything; there is also imagination. Books that stimulate the imagination in new ways, and pull me toward new or different realities—these appeal to me. I write poetry to stimulate, engage, and enjoy the imaginative experience. Yet that is also the reason I read psychology, myth, and folk stories. They touch the imaginative experience, lead me to metaphorical imagination, and it is generally just so much fun.

So, those are my primary criteria. Now, here’s an annotated list of the most formative books of my life.

Re-Visioning Psychology by James Hillman

First read when I was 25 years old, there is no doubt that Re-Visioning Psychology was the single most important book of my life. Hillman did nothing less than introduce me to the great Self beyond the ego, thereby relativizing the ego in me and enabling me to see the greater life within. The book can be read as a delightful tour-de-force of the history of phenomenology, but for me, that would be to discredit it as a mere history of ideas. Rather, the book opened my consciousness to the reality of the soul within and to the pre-eminence of image, fantasy, and imagination in understanding oneself. It enabled me to see and observe myself without getting all tangled up in the observation. In many ways, it taught me how to imagine. For one caught up in the joys of thinking and intellect, this was a life-changing event.

Leaping Poetry by Robert Bly

Robert Bly’s little book on Leaping Poetry changed forever the way I would read and experience poetry. This book brought to me the delights of imagination and what Bly calls wild association. It tantalized me with the notion that I could write that way, and virtually all of my poetry since then has been an attempt to do so. “Attempt” however, is the wrong word. It is more like, “Let the imagination fly and see what happens.”

Less personally, Bly’s book set the stage for a new kind of poetic appreciation. He demands more imagination, more association, more wildness, and more fun from poets and poetry. His examples are mostly from overseas—Spanish, Scandinavian, German, Chilean, and other countries where his brand of leaping is fun and wild. He brings here Vallejo, Lorca, Rilke, and Transtromer before citing some American poets opening imagination—including Ginsberg, Crane, and Gregg Orr. It is a delightful read.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

Published in 2020, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents changed my perception of America. All my life, and even in books I had written, I celebrated that America was a land of imperfect freedom and liberty, getting better all the time. I've always leaned progressive politically and thought everyone should have a fair shake, and I thought we were getting there over the long arc of history. Wilkerson helped me see, in a far more detailed and thorough way, our own home-grown system of racially-based caste, and that my progressive vision was more delusion than reality. I was shocked to read of the lynching in Omaha a mere one hundred years ago in which a white crowd in Omaha lynched an accused black man with no evidence or trial before thousands of people watching, many of whom took pictures, made them into postcards, and sent them to family and friends all around the country. Wilkerson tells of how this practice grew with lynchings until the postal service finally refused to send such postcards. People didn’t stop—they just put them into envelopes and sent them anyway.

Equally shocking is the story of leading Nazis who met in Germany in the early 1930s trying to figure out how to build a racially stratified society and still gain the respect of the world. The model they studied? America’s Jim Crow South.

Wilkerson brings this history into the present with her stories, but for me, this book punctured the mythology of America. I am very lucky to be white and living here. All my life, I believed in a mythology of liberty. From the standpoint of political philosophy, American history, and knowing where I live, there is no going back after reading this book.

What Are People For? and the other books of essays by Wendell Berry

These books had a profound impact on the direction of my life for the first twenty years of my adulthood—until I discovered that the fantasy that they produced was a lie. I was seduced by Berry’s romanticization of the Amish, simplicity, and subsistence farming, which he claimed he was doing on his 12 acres in Kentucky. I dreamed of doing the same and tried it. I spent five years on a small organic farm I purchased in northern Minnesota. Later, I spent three years on a farm in western Wisconsin perhaps an hour's drive from Eau Claire. Try as I might, study as I did, I could not get it to work. Why? I kept asking… Why?

Then I learned two things. First, all the farmers who were making it were given their land. They owed nothing. It came down through generations. Or, they had a big outside income and didn’t rely on the land for their income.

Second, although Wendell Berry celebrated the Amish in his writing and claimed to be a subsistence farmer, he was actually a university professor. He subsisted on a salary, not a farm—and certainly not on twelve acres.

These two discoveries broke the innocence of my dreams. But before that, they had fueled a dream and a fantasy that shaped most of my early adult life. Although I resent the betrayal and the deception, I do not regret the time spent and the inspiration to try a small farm life. I learned much in those years, and much of that learning feeds me today in my small cabin in the woods.

Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

The Origins of Totalitarianism is a long and detailed history of the roots of the eventual rise of European totalitarianism. While covering a history with which I was unfamiliar, it got me wondering about the cultural roots of our own right-wing movements. I read the book in 2007 or so, and it spawned a 28,000-word response. I looked at the preceding decades, particularly the development of Christian fundamentalism, conservative and neoconservative thought, and corporate elitism, and found roots of right-wing extremism in all of them. This shocked me. I was a fairly successful business owner at the time, and had growing fealties toward domestic policy from the Republican side—I surprised myself to see the benefits of lower taxes. But envisioning these roots of totalitarianism helped me bring into focus the forces at work, and led to my book Call to Liberty. It was a call to mainstream political principles—one that landed on mostly deaf ears.

The Road to Serfdom, by Friedrich Hayek

I took up this book at the urging of a friend who suggested that it was key to understanding neoconservatism. He was right. Revered as a classic, The Road to Serfdom is also key to understanding libertarians and the right wing of today's Republican party. Most of them cite this book, this author, and these ideas as foundational to their philosophies.

Yet if you read the book, it is more of a screed against totalitarianism than it is a supporter of right-wing control. Published in 1944, Hayek was most concerned with what had happened in Europe under both the Nazis and Stalin. Yet his warnings resonate just as strongly today as they did then, except they would be warnings against the right. Here’s an example. The book had six key factors to watch out for in defense of liberty.   1) The articulation of an “Ideal Society” (e.g., MAGA), 2) the distortion of thought and ideas in support of such an Ideal Vision (e.g., alternative facts), 3) the loss of real communication between people (e.g., the vitriol of our political discourse), 4) the rise of the ruthless to the top (e.g., Trump), 5) The bold, clear, harsh, public handling of dissent (e.g., “get ‘em outta here” as Trump often said), and 6) citizens trade freedom for security (e.g., the January 6th rioters attacking the halls of freedom).

This book changed my understanding of 21st-century politics in America. It still influences me today. It helped me see that the country is not divided into right or left, as so many say, but rather into radical and mainstream. You can learn a lot by turning this over in your head.

The Origins of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood

The Origins of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood upends one of the most unstated assumptions in economics and totally changed my understanding of modernity. Both armchair and professional economists write as if capitalism is the ultimate economic system, the one that was baked in from the beginning of time, and societies only had to emerge and develop to get to the point where they could engage their natural birthright—i.e., capitalism. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, there is nothing natural about capitalism at all, and enormous wealth has been built in many societies without capitalism, even though capitalism has had its own kind of spectacular success.

Woods makes it clear that capitalism arose from a peculiar set of historical circumstances involving changes in state power, changes in social relations, and changes in religious ideas and doctrines, and had these changes not been occurring at the same time, capitalism could not have come into being. This insight led me to write a concise little book on the impact of this system called The Great Mechanism: The Power Behind the Relentless Juggernaut of Western Capitalism. Capitalism’s unique laws of motion could only take hold with modernity’s new thought structures introduced by Rene Descartes and expanded by others. Once I understood this, I came to understand why we can’t seem to stop capitalism in its ongoing conquest of the planet.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

Paul Mason’s book on Postcapitalism opened the door to imagining a completely new future for humanity on earth. The core of Mason’s argument is that digitalization, with its zero cost of reproduction for digital products and infinite supply, will eventually lead to a breakdown of the fundamental laws of market capitalism, especially how supply and demand determine prices. Since 100% digital products have zero cost of reproduction and infinite supply, the ratio of supply to demand that establishes a price breaks down. This was amply displayed when ebook prices crashed and caused publishers to collude to create a minimum price. That’s not capitalism, that’s monopoly control.

Mason's thesis is that everything is going "digital," and as it does, markets will break down, capitalism will fail, and we will usher in an era of postcapitalism. For me, this led to a reimagining of the world and two books. The first is Speculations on Postcapitalism, and the second is the forthcoming book What Is Postcapitalism? Through these books, I was able to see a whole new world that could emerge and free my mind from the strictures of capitalism.

That's what I will list for now. Other books on business, farming, investing, and poetry had their impacts. I'll add those in a follow-up essay. These will do for now.

—Anthony Signorelli

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