Five Books of Fiction That Changed My Life

The Lord of the Rings

Nothing quite like it has ever been written before. With its own theology, myths, history, languages, and geography, Middle Earth is a world of beauty of which no other prose has captured.

There was sorrow then, too, and gathering dark, but great valour, and great deeds that were not wholly vain.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

Most readers, I think, read to escape feelings of ordinary life. I know I certainly do. So before you begin this adventure, you’ve been warned: Tolkien makes us all deal with the joys and sadness wrapped in an epic tale you won’t be able to put down. Despite the fireside breakfasts and good cheer that gratifies the Hobbit in each of us, Tolkien does not allow the reader to escape anguish and sadness. Instead, he paints a picture of those who were happy before darkness and will be happy if they live to see it gone.

The Magician’s Nephew

The Magician’s Nephew is not merely a beginning—it is a beholding of the world in its infancy, a hymn to creation itself. In these pages, the reader glimpses the raw edges of a universe being sung into being by a lion whose voice carries both power and peace. It is a tale of first things: the planting of a tree to shield a future king, the ringing of a bell that should never have been rung, and the solemn choosing between what is right and what is easy.

What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.

C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

It’s in my top five favorite fantasy novels not only for its charm, but for its clarity. It remembers what most stories forget—that magic is most potent not in the spells cast, but in the choices made. That goodness is not bland but brave. That beginnings matter because they shape all that follows. And in the trembling, golden light of Narnia’s first dawn, one finds not only a world being born—but the whisper that our world, too, was made with such love.

No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.

C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

Dante’s Inferno

Dante’s Inferno earns its place in my top five favorite fantasy novels not merely because of its sweeping imagination, but because of its clarity of moral vision. It is a descent, yes—but a descent with purpose. A journey into the underworld that illumines the nature of sin, justice, mercy, and ultimately, the soul’s longing for God.

At every turn, Dante’s vivid language and symbolic structure awaken the reader to deep truths. Through the dark wood, across the River Acheron, down the spirals of Hell, Dante maps not only the terrain of punishment, but the soul’s reckoning. As Virgil says to the pilgrim:

This has been willed where what is willed must be, and is not yours to question.

Canto III

I admire this work for its moral weight and its mythic imagination—its ability to fuse theology and poetry into something timeless. In Dante’s lines, there is sorrow, certainly—but also sharp insight into the consequences of misused freedom. And yet, amid the torment, moments of beauty flicker, as when Dante confesses:

In His will is our peace.

Canto III, paraphrased from Paradiso but foreshadowed even in Inferno

The Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is not just a story of transformation—it is a parable of alienation, of what it means to be seen and not known, to be changed and yet unchanged at the deepest level. It holds a firm place in my top five favorite novels because it dares to confront the quiet, crushing strangeness of human existence.

From the first line, Kafka does not ease us in:

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

There is no explanation, no incantation, no clear cause—only the brute fact of Gregor’s condition. And yet, the true horror lies not in his transformation, but in how swiftly the world reshapes itself around his new form: with discomfort, avoidance, and eventually, rejection.

I love this work not simply for its bleakness, but for its honesty. It is a mirror that distorts only to reveal what we often refuse to see. It speaks to the fragile, bureaucratic absurdities of modern life, the ache of familial expectation, the quiet desperation of being useful, then discarded.

Kafka’s world is sparse, almost sterile—but it seethes with unspoken pain and quiet rebellion. In its pages, you’ll find something haunting and oddly holy: a witness to the mystery of suffering without resolution.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy is a quiet thunderclap of a book—brief in pages, infinite in weight. I count it among my top five because it refuses to lie. It does not entertain death as a literary device or a noble abstraction. It holds death up like a mirror and dares you to look.

Ivan Ilyich lives as many do—decorously, correctly, conventionally—until an ache in his side reveals the unspoken truth: that a life lived for appearances is not a life at all. As death approaches, Tolstoy peels away every pretense, until Ivan, naked of comfort, is finally capable of truth:

“It is impossible that all men have been doomed to suffer this awful horror.”

And later, in one of the most quietly redemptive lines in literature:

“He sought his accustomed fear of death and did not find it.”

I love this novel not for its morbidity but for its mercy. It tells the truth so starkly that it becomes a kind of grace. It affirms what Kafka hints at and Dante declares—that we must pass through suffering to reach anything real.

My own novel is shaped by this same impulse—or at least I am trying! I’m writing on the same subject not to distract from death, but to understand how we live in light of it. Like Tolstoy, I’m drawn to the moment when facades crack and the soul at last begins to speak. Where others flinch, Ivan Ilyich stares down the void—and finds, in the final breath, the possibility of peace.