Here are three books that impacted my life, covering three stages of my life into adulthood. Enjoy!
The Hobbit – J.R.R Tolkien
In Year 5 we had a male teacher, the first male teacher I had ever had actually, but I cannot for the life of me remember his name! Which is a shame because he had a profound effect on my life and my reading habits as an adult.
Every week, after swimming — I remember sitting there with wet hair dripping onto my shoulder — this teacher would read a chapter of The Hobbit to us. And I adored it. It was dramatic and fantasy and I impatiently waited each week for that lesson block to come around.
It kick-started my love for fantasy books and probably my love for playing D&D too! I have been in love with the whole series of books and films ever since and I just wish I could remember his name.
Elegance – Kathleen Tessaro
I read this book as a teenager, my mum got it free from some book catalogue she used to get. It wasn’t her thing, so she passed it on to me. I remember reading it, seeing all of the tips on how women could be elegant and I can recall just wanting to embody that person.
That book started me down a reading path filled with books on Marilyn Monroe, depictions of fictional people working in high fashion and women living in the city with their top-level magazine jobs.
I hoovered up the Shopaholic series. Growing up on a council estate in one of the places regularly voted one of the ‘worst places to live in the UK’, I yearned for the sophisticated world of the city, the boss women (before the MLMs) and the clothes.
To teenage me, that was elegance.
To Die for – Lucy Siegle
Funnily enough, my next book is about fashion too — but a very different angle.
I was working my, then, part-time sales job at The Works and we had a sale in store. Now, when places like that have a sale, we try and pack the sale out as much as possible and its a great opportunity for local stores around you to send their randoms or things they are struggling to sell to pad your sale with.
So we would receive a few boxes from other stores stuffed with books and this book was in one of them. I think I bought it for something like 50p, plus my staff discount. An absolute bargain!
The book discusses the fashion industry and how it is harming the planet. I vividly recall one chapter on the making if denim jeans and the dyes that run into the river that the local people then use for their water supplies. Whole rivers just dyed dark blue from the factory run-off.
The chapter exposed the ingenious ways the factory owners would lie and hide how they were operating to appease inspectors and legal visitors. After reading that book I viewed fashion in a different way than I had from my teens, when I was just desperate to be en vogue. From that time on, I became much more intentional with my clothing choices.
Couldn’t finish a post about books that had an impact on me without a cheeky plug for my own!
Connections: Poems for Healing is available now on Amazon in PB, Kindle ebook and you can read for FREE for a limited time in the Kindle Unlimited library.
