What book changed your life?

That's the question posed on today's Unshelved comic. Oddly enough, mine was The Grey King by Susan Cooper. It touched off...

• a lifelong love of the fantasy genre,
  
• a love of all things Welsh,
  
• a love of folklore and British/Celtic mythology,
  
• a sense of good vs. evil,
  
• the idea that ordinary lives can have immense consequences in the grand scheme of things,
  
• the idea that evil can masque itself as beautiful, and therefore beauty should not be equated with good,
  
• a sense of ancient knowlege,
  
• and it, along with the series Robin Hood: the Hooded Man and Mary Renault's books of ancient Greece--and all the mythology that these made me want to learn more about--probably did a lot to bring me to Paganism as an alternative faith, my devotion to the Light (so to speak), and my concept of the Divine.
  

Mind you, I don't believe those works of fiction made me Pagan, as some conservatives might claim. Rather, they touched a part of me that yearned for something different than what I'd experienced, that felt spirtuality in nature, and in magic. So, you could argue I was a Pagan in search of Paganism. My studies since--of Paganism, Christianity, Judaism, and other religions, have only served to underscore my own beliefs. But reading that book, back at the age of 13, was the start of it all.