The search for the [thing] that will change your life

Books for when you’re looking for something...but not sure what

Tell me what to read to change my life.

It’s one of the questions I’ve been circling for as long as I can remember—and one that lives at the core of Moon Lists. The search for the [book / film / conversation / idea / quote / snack / story / place] that will shift…something.

I’ve been thinking about what the criteria are for “life changing.” Not in a dramatic, burn down my life and start over way (although, maybe). In the quieter, slow-burning sense. Something that shifted the terms. Something you didn’t realize you were looking for until you found it. Something that rewires, alters, reintroduces you to yourself.

It’s less about the answer than the pursuit. I want to believe the answer is somewhere in a book…I just haven’t found it yet.

It’s rarely one book. It’s a single line in this one, a closing chapter in that. It’s something I didn’t understand the first time. It’s a sentence that rearranges me.

Recently I’ve felt a bit wayward, and have been scanning my bookshelf to see what stands out. I’m starting with a personal list: if I lost every book I owned, these are a few I’d rebuy. These aren’t books that necessarily changed everything…but they changed something for me.

To go analysis mode, they tend to have in common…

• They don’t teach me a lesson, but they shift my attention.

• They reward small, strange, mostly unspectacular moments.

• They’re atmospheric: more about tone and tension than grand takeaway.

• They live in the margins. Not “main character” books—but the kind that show up in your notebook, on a walk, mid-conversation, when you weren’t trying to remember them at all.

(This is not to imply that my life-changing books ought to be yours. But if you’re also someone who keeps asking the same question—or orbiting the same obsessions—then maybe these can be pins on your map, too.)

1. Anne Truitt’s journals

Four books—Daybook, Turn, Prospect, Yield—written over the course of an artist’s life. The closest thing I’ve found to honestly capturing what it feels like to live attuned to your own rhythms, to make creativity into a daily (and often lonely) act of devotion. Truitt writes with rigor, processing everything with you in real time: art, motherhood, self-doubt, aging, and the internal work of becoming someone.

(Of the four, I return to Daybook the most.)