I owe my life to this book or poem

This post is in response to the question posed by the Professor, "

Have you ever read a book, story or poem that saved your life?"

Since I don't believe I've ever been seriously, intentionally suicidal, I can't really credit anything I've read as affecting me so deeply that it changed my mind from proceeding with any sort of self-inflicted doom.

Nor do I have any fantastic stories of botched subway muggings where my well-worn copy of Catcher in the Rye miraculously stopped a bullet from penetrating my chest, or perhaps a what-if scenario where I thought, "Had I not stopped off at Barnes & Noble to buy Dubliners that day, I would have been on the transit bus that overturned and exploded, killing everyone on board."

I suppose I can, however, credit books in general for changing my life. I was one of those people, you think can't possibly exist, who made it through 12 years of schooling without ever reading a book from cover to cover. Yep. That's me. I won't go into the details of how I accomplished this feat and still graduated high school, but it's true.

Then, when I was 19 or so years old, I used to hang out in a student center at the local community college while a friend went to night classes and I needed something to do to pass the time. I grabbed a paperback from the local bookstore called Say You Love Satan, a true-crime type non-fiction story about some Long Island teenagers, with whom I identified (based on the cover photos) due to their life-style, musical tastes, age, etc., who dabbled in some devil worship which lead to one kid brutally murdering another kid over something petty. Oh, in case you're wondering, the murderer kept commanding the victim to, "Say you love Satan!" and continued stabbing him when he wouldn't, hence the title.

Anyway, it might not have been a literary classic by any means, but it was interesting enough to keep me reading all the way through. I was hooked. Finally, something I could read for my own interest. Next up was a hefty 1000-page fiction set in post-apocolyptic America (very similar to Stephen King's The Stand) by Robery McCammon called Swan Song, which to this day remains one of my favourite books ever.
I devoured it in a week.

Then the beginning of the end came. My future mother-in-law turned me on to the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genre, recommending I start with The Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. This sword & sorcery trilogy was the beginning of a series of dozens of Dragonlance books, all based on the same setting and history, most of which I eventually read more than twice.

After that, it didn't really matter what I read. I alternated between heavy classics like The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, and Paradise Lost, and lighter fare like the Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, Frankenstein, Dracula, etc.. I don't think I've gone more than a few weeks ever since without being in the middle of reading at least one book.

So how has this changed my life? Well, the love of reading has given me an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, without which I'd most likely have spent the past decade or so doing nothing but playing video games and perhaps working in some dead-end, minimum wage job, or finding myself on the wrong end of some knife wielding satanist, instead of spending those years seeking new knowledge and experiences through travelling or taking night classes in a variety of subjects from Latin to Children's Literature.

Therefore, I have to attribute much of what has made me into the person I'm proud be today to not just one, but books in general.