Has a book ever changed you?

A book has never not changed me. Granted, there is always the rare instance when a book closes after its last page and you're left a bit slumped and wondering why you devoted your time to a story that was unfulfilling in language, character development, story line...

You get it. However, one could argue that a non-enjoyable book experience helps you discover something new you didn't feel connected to as a reader and human; and that is a bit of change in itself. Who doesn't want to keep discovering themselves? Change is change, regardless of the degree.

But let's get back to the true meat and potatoes of my first question: Has a book ever changed you?

A change in your heartbeat perhaps, the flutter of a memory coming to the surface; a change in the way you view the world, or how you regard a person in your orbit? Has a book ever made you rethink something you were surely determined on, only to find that the specific way an author has strung words together pushes you to pause and reexamine your opinion?

Has a book ever changed what was already stirring up inside of you?

For me, it was January 2006, and that book was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. I had just begun a new semester course on Love and Death in American Literature, and my father had died suddenly just a few months before. When I think back to that time, my first instinct is to be incredulous as to why I would ever willingly register for a class of that topic when everything inside and outside of me had just been shattered to bits. But I also know that I needed a place to find, feel and sit in what I had truly lost; alone, where I didn't need to put any walls or defenses up. A place to find the language to match how deeply desolate I felt.

My journey through Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was a raw and hungry one. I wept over so many of the pages, writing notes to myself in the margins and often re-reading portions that felt particularly connective. As humans, I think our first instinct is to want to push away pain, to not want to go down a vulnerable path of which we cannot see the end. But I had to go on that path with Oskar, who led this haunting narrative of a boy struggling with his father's untimely death.

This was a reading experience that drastically changed me. Side by side, Oskar and I were trying to catch and balance the depth of pain, guilt, love and anger that were given a cruel face through our dual losses.

And just as change is change, no matter the degree, change can also be an ugly road at first glance; and I know this personal reading experience may sound ugly to some. But I've never known anything in life to be just one thing -- let alone change.

Swimming through Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was an excellent example that change is never just one dimensional. Entering Oskar's world changed the way I processed what I was living through: a hard stop in time. It tamed some of the wildness of grief by giving it a name. It gave me an ocean of words to cry with, to feel with. It gave me characters I desperately wanted to nurture; and ones I wanted to nurture me back.

I have always found that books tend to give us what we need and help us find new parts of ourselves in the art of what is within. Oskar may not have been real, but I know what he felt was, because I had to feel it, too.

Challenge yourself to not run from any book experience; I urge you to let it change you -- and then let it propel you into something new.