Book Blogger Hop!

The folks over at Crazy for Books have a wonderful feature called the Book Blogger Hop, where people who blog about books answer a question each weekend.  It's a chance for book bloggers to connect with each other.  This week's question is:

What book influenced or changed your life?  How did it influence/change you?

The Giver, which I first read in middle school, has really made an impact on me.  Ever since reading it, I've had a different sense of the future, more questions about what is to come, and (not sure if I'm phrasing this correctly, but) a better understanding of how much speculation there really is in our day to day lives.  I still say that The Giver's impact has been a positive one.  Though I'm sure I understood the book better when I read it more recently than when I first picked it up, it still affects me the same way.  Is that really what the future of our species holds?  Why does every futuristic book portray such a controlled society?  Humans pride themselves on their power of choice; what does such a dystopian view say about us?  If anything, these questions have led me to be more discerning when deciding what to think about things, because any one choice could swing the future in a completely different direction.  It makes me ask more questions about things around me and my own life.  Finding a book such as The Giver at such a young age really changed my way of thinking about everything.


Writing that paragraph was actually a really pensive experience.  I guess in the back of my mind, I knew where certain ideas I have came from, but being able to say exactly what they are attributed to is a completely different experience.  For anyone that hasn't read The Giver- do it!  Even if you're not a fan of dystopian novels, this one goes so much deeper than most.  It was written much earlier than a lot of the other well-known dystopian YA novels, and speculates a lot more as opposed to spelling everything out for the reader.  It's as much a book to read as a book to think about.


*To everyone visiting from the Book Blogger Hop:  I write about pretty much anything on my blog; you'll find book posts mixed in with a lot of other topics.*