But the reader has to want to change
So far, comments to my post yesterday about the concept of 'books that changed my life' pretty much confirm my own feeling that if books do affect us, it's by a process of influence or catalysis -
I.e. it's about what a reader gets out of a particular text at a particular time in their life (and it may not be a high-culture text at all, says woman who first encountered the term 'feminism' aged c. 8 in a rather silly feature in the Girls' Crystal and gained her knowledge of the suffrage movement from the Pankhurst Story in Pictures in a Girl Annual).
The revelation is less likely to be 'Wow! I never thought of that before!' than 'Wow! they are putting my inchoate feelings into words!/Articulately expressing my own rather confused thoughts'. Or else a subtle influence along the lines of 'What would a George Eliot character do?'
Which requires a reader who has those existing thoughts and feelings to be catalysed and a general approach to the world that can be influenced.
Which set my train of thought seguing into the dramatic Damascus Road narrative of change which focuses on some perceptible moment where change becomes apparent, and less on the less obvious process that got there, and the repercussions of changing afterwards.
To use an analogy of the suffrage movement, it's as if you get all excited about the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 and don't consider that this was the outcome of decades of campaigning, bringing about changes of attitudes, and also think that that was the endpoint, rather than the beginning of another phase (like just getting the Act implemented, e.g.).
(I also had a tangential thought about the books that influenced one even before one read them, and possibly even if one never has, in the way that I could hardly be unaware of Foucault when getting stuck into my PhD, but this is, pretty much, probably a whole nother thing.)
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