Judging from the picture of this blogger's bookshelf, this is advice about reading from a non-reader. Almost any book will change your life if you let it, but that's a poor criterion for selecting a book, since you won't know how it's affected you until you finish reading it. Naïvely sorting books based on their preconceived life-changing potential will probably steer you towards vapid self-help books that promise to "change your life" in their subtitle. Most of those books are garbage. I mean that literally—they'll end up in your bookstore's free pile in ten years, or in the trash.<p>This blogger also implies that there's just no way to decide what to read. With 40 million, or even 4 million, books to choose from, who can pick? As if it were just a matter of picking one out of a hat. It's like he hasn't seen a bibliography, or Goodreads, or even just a list of books that some publisher puts online.<p>Here's a better plan: you should read the great books. They will change your life, but in deeper, more subtle ways. Start with the Greeks, then the Romans, medieval poets, Elizabethan dramatists, Enlightenment philosophers, Victorian novelists, and modernists. But don't take my word for it. Read any one of the hundreds of books about the Western canon. Skim the table of contents of the Harvard Classics series. Go through the Modern Library list of best books of the 20th century. A good rule is: is it an old book, but still in print, and still being widely discussed (in books, not on Reddit)? If so, read it. There's a reason there are still annual conferences where people are discussing Plato, Milton, Woolf, Joyce, and so on. There's a reason there are whole libraries dedicated to Shakespeare alone. There's no such phenomenon which surrounds the latest self-help book trending on TikTok.<p>Here's an example: should you read Hamlet, or Atomic Habits? Reading Hamlet will expose you to complex human emotions, deep ideas, and ingenious turns of phrase. It will unlock for you a whole wing of the library which discusses it, and conversations with others that have read it. You'll understand the many references to the play throughout Western culture, and the books that are based on it. On the other hand, reading Atomic Habits might change the way you think about your habits. I quite enjoyed it myself. It was interesting. But a hundred years from now, people are still going to be reading Hamlet, and the same is not true for whatever so-called "life-changing" book came out last week.