Five books that changed my life

"Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labelled 'This could change your life.'"
– Helen Exley

I’ve read a hell of a lot of books. I’ve read a lot of damn good books. I’ve read many that I consider absolute masterpieces. But there aren’t many of which I can say that they literally changed my life.

These are some of the books that did more than educate or entertain me. These are the books that made me who I am.

Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain
Reader’s Digest

I've been fascinated by folklore and mythology since I was old enough to read: I grew up reading retellings of the Norse, Greek, and Egyptian myths by Roger Lancelyn Green, and I could practically recite the Alan Garner books word for word.

When I was nine, my mum gave me this book as a Christmas present. I read it over and over again. I couldn't get enough of the stories from all around Britain: ghosts, fairies, monsters, witches, strange local traditions, customs, festivals, and more. For years I took it everywhere: on every family trip, or every time I went to a new town or a new village. I loved finding out if there were any strange events associated with the place or interesting things to see nearby.

It made me realize how much history there was all around me: practically every town and village has its legends. I felt like I was growing up in a world filled with magic and mystery. Whenever I go back to England, and particularly to the West Country, I still get that sense. There's enough material in that book to write at least a hundred stories. Maybe I should.

Illusions
Richard Bach

I don't know how many times I've read this book. It's a beautiful story about biplanes and religion. I never really liked Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which is the Bach book that everyone else seemed to love, but this one appealed to me on a very deep level. It holds the same place in my heart as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance does for many other people.

For years, I described it as my personal Bible. I even became a bit of an Illusions evangelist: I’ve bought at least 20 copies of this book and given them away to people who I thought would appreciate it. It taught me a lot about self-belief, and our power to make the world what we want it to be. I still read it regularly, and every time, it makes me feel good about myself.

The Invention of Tradition
Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger

Just because everybody believes something, that doesn't make it true, even if we've known it for generations. Many of the things that we think of as traditional are in fact recent inventions. (Sorry, Scots, clan tartans didn't exist until Walter Scott invented them as part of the celebrations for Queen Victoria's Silver Jubilee.)

This book really made me think hard about the nature of culture, and the way we perceive the world. When people appeal to traditional values, particularly politicians, are they talking about something which only exists in our imaginations? Or, more worryingly, something which they have manufactured to manipulate us? Thatcher's Britain always harped on about traditional values. Today Trump and the MAGA movement constantly call for a return to an America that never existed.

As they say, those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But before you can learn from history, you have to find out whether that history is even true.

Hamlet on the Holodeck
Janet Murray

Writing stories is hard. If you're reading this, you probably a fellow writer, so you know this only too well. But writing interactive stories is even harder.

With a regular story, you, the author, are in complete control: whether you’re writing a book, a play, or a movie, the audience simply experiences your story passively. But with an interactive story, the audience is in control, or at least they have to feel like it. You have to allow them to make choices, and you have to make them feel like those choices are significant. That requires a whole range of different writing and narrative techniques.

These days, video games have mastered the art of interactive stories, but back in the 1990s, we were still learning how to make them work. Most interactive movies were deeply unsatisfactory experiences, and computer role-playing games were painfully clunky, with little to no actual role-playing involved. We had gamebooks and text adventures, which taught us the rudiments of non-linear storytelling, but we were still grappling with trying to create immersive experiences like the Star Trek holodeck. This was the first book that really tried to understand what was involved in interactive storytelling. It was eye-opening: after reading it, I quit my job and became a game designer for the next 5 years.

Many years later, I had the opportunity to meet the author, Janet Murray, at an event at Georgia Tech. I was deeply flattered that she knew who I was from my time at nGame and Moviestorm, and gave me a personal tour or some of the projects going on in her research lab.

Behave
Robert Sapolsky

Why do you do what you do? You may think it's because you decide to do it. Not so, argues Sapolsky. He takes a deep dive into how we make decisions, covering everything from autonomic reactions to genetics and culture. But not only are our decision-making processes controlled by multiple different systems, they're also influenced by a whole host of factors, from diet and sleep to sunlight, air quality, exercise, illness, sexual attraction, age, economic status, and many more. In other words, he argues, we don't have nearly as much free will as we think.

This was the book that made me realize how much our thinking is affected by our physical and social environment - and how much of the impact is deeply harmful on a psychological and neurological level. It’s what led me to study neuroscience and NLP, and in particular, try to understand how techniques like meditation affect our brains. The end result was Unhack Your Brain, which I started publishing on September 2024.

What are the books that changed your life? I’d love to know!