The Good Earth

Your comment reminded me of this book: The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck, which I read many years ago, as a teenager or young adult. I was quite moved by it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_S._Buck https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Earth Excerpt: [ The Good Earth is a historical fiction novel by Pearl S. Buck published in 1931 that dramatizes family life in a 20th-century Chinese village in Anhwei. It is the first book in her House of Earth trilogy, continued in Sons (1932) and A House Divided (1935). It was the best-selling novel in the United States in both 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932, and was influential in Buck's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Buck, who grew up in China as the daughter of American missionaries, wrote the book while living in China and drew on her first-hand observation of Chinese village life. ] It is only today that I got to know, due to googling for the links, that she won both the Pulitzer prize and the Nobel prize for Literature, partly for that book.

House of Morgan - biography of JO Morgan and kin Snowball - biography of Warren Buffet The Good Earth - novel about Chinese farmer Fortune’s Children - the rise and fall of the Vanderbilts

Don't know about changing my life, but these books changed the way i look at things: The Tao of Pooh: Benjamin Hoff Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade by Kurt Vonnegut TI 99/4a basic reference manual Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Abelson, Sussman Object Oriented Analysis and Design by Grady Booch Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler Thieves in the Night by Arthur Koestler All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. War and Peace by L.N.Tolstoy Chapaev and the void by Pelevin

Rory Stewart, _The Prince of the Marshes_. It's about general dysfunction in the early Iraq War, but it's also about the meaning of life. Perhaps it's just how Stewart writes? (His _The Places In Between_ is also well worth reading, but is much better known.) Tony Horwitz, all works -- especially _Baghdad Without a Map_ (which will leave you with a much healthier view of the modern Middle East) and _Confederates in the Attic_ (a dress-rehearsal for the Age of Trump?). Pearl Buck, _Sons_. (Best to read _The Good Earth_ first, but you've probably already read it.) I doubt it's a very accurate depiction of China, and the characters' morality is hair-raising (while the narrator is so far off the deep end that he/she is impossible to take seriously); but it's a memorable adventure story firmly grounded in the plausible, and it dramatizes some important lessons about the dangers that can afflict families and middle age.