The transformative books that made Daniel Puzzo, teacher and mentor | Reads With Friends
The varied books that guided a bibliophile’s life through crossroads and nine countries
Daniel is one of my very first Substack friends, and someone whose kindness and wit (and sarcasm!) have often caught me off guard in the best of ways. He is based in Vienna, and has had quite a journey getting there: his job as an English teacher with the British Council brought him to Kyiv, which he then had to leave when the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine erupted. He is quite the bibliophile, with a varied reading diet, and I was privileged to recommend a book for his 2025 Reading Challenge earlier this year.
For his very generous guest post, he has written a marvellous piece on transformative books that follow his life’s turning points, ranging from classic literature to more modern reads. The books trace this voracious reader’s journey and interests starting two decades ago, leading him from one pivotal moment and country to another (Daniel has lived in a total of nine countries). There are also notes on books he has reread, books he is afraid to reread, and a rather large collection of books he considers significant in his life, including ones from his year of reading books authored only by women in 2019. As someone who believes firmly that books can have a profound impact on one’s life, and also that books evolve with age, I thoroughly appreciate Daniel’s essay.
I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do, and we would love to know your thoughts in the comments.
I’m honoured to be writing a guest post for Alicia. Her newsletter is one of my favourites, and I can’t imagine a friendlier bookworm.
I’m also terrified.
A confession: despite being a self-proclaimed bibliophile—or even bibliomaniac—I’ve recently realised that I don’t think I know how to review books properly.
I feel like a fraud.
For my 2025 Reading Challenge, Alicia recommended Pachinko, which I thoroughly enjoyed. But when it came time to describe the book, I struggled. How does one even write a book review? And how to avoid spoilers? [NOTE FROM ALICIA: Daniel has indeed described the book well in a mini review of Pachinko on Substack Notes.)
My own newsletter is what I jokingly call “nicheless” and “genre-fluid”, but books and reading have always been a major part of it. In my pre-Substack Blogspot days, I wrote about books all the time. Part of me is tempted to pivot toward a more book-focused approach, but my interests are too scattered to commit just yet.
Instead, I want to talk about something broader: how books shape us. How they come into our lives at precisely the right moment. How their messages linger for years.
How, sometimes, they even alter our destinies.
Here are just a few of the books that have had a profound impact.
These all come from a previous life, some two decades ago, at a time when I was lost, directionless and had no idea what the future held in store… though funnily enough, that’s not far off how most of us are feeling all the damn time!
1. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
This is the book I’ve recommended and gifted more than any other.
It’s also the bleakest, and some people have never forgiven me for that. “Damn it, Daniel, that was so depressing!” But it was exactly the book I needed at a time when I was making a drastic change, leaving behind a stable but uninspiring life in the US for something more… adventurous? Existential?
This novel follows a wayward couple venturing into the Sahara Desert after World War II. It’s a journey of self-discovery set against an overwhelmingly vast and indifferent landscape, a story of alienation and the fragile human condition in an unfamiliar world.
That was the world I thought I was entering. Surely there was more to life than what I was experiencing?
Not the most uplifting book, but one that lingers and hits hard.
2. The Soccer War by Ryszard Kapuściński
I read this nonfiction book alongside The Sheltering Sky while preparing for a master’s degree at Edinburgh University. Up until that point, my geopolitical interests had been rooted in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
It's named after the brief 1969 war between El Salvador and Honduras, triggered by tensions after a World Cup qualifying match. Kapuściński, a Polish journalist, uses his eyewitness account as a catalyst to explore broader themes of war, revolution and political upheaval across Latin America and (mainly) Africa during the Cold War. His unique and poetic style of journalism, interspersed with elements of memoir, and his tales of derring-do made me want to follow in his footsteps.
This book piqued my interest in West Africa, which led me to fall for a Zambian woman at university in Edinburgh and then work together in Nigeria (until things fell apart).
She later gave me…
3. Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
And lo and behold, there I was in Nigeria, working in the development sector and still feeling lost. Our relationship was on shaky ground (she had returned to the UK), and in a particularly rough, introspective patch in the sweltering Niger Delta, pondering what the hell I was doing with my life, this book became a strange sort of therapy.
I want to focus on the mesmerising opening line:
It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
That sentence alone was enough to pull me in. I could only imagine what kind of book awaited me after such a tantalising intro.
Who is this narrator? Who is Ali? And what on earth does the archbishop want? What country is this where we have an archbishop and this Ali? And the archbishop is there to see him? Goodness, this must be a man of some importance. What the hell is the archbishop going to think?
Earthly Powers wrestles with themes of faith and reason, power and morality, good and evil. I’m not religious, but I’m fascinated by literature that explores belief and identity—see also The End of the Affair and The Heart of the Matter, both by Graham Greene.
4. Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov
Though not the most representative work of Ukrainian literature, this book played a pivotal role in redirecting me from Africa back toward Eastern Europe.
And funnily enough, it was also given to me by my Zambian ex-girlfriend (she had incredible taste in books and later became an author).
A darkly comic novel set in post-Soviet Ukraine, it follows a struggling writer who lands a job penning obituaries for still-living public figures. When they start dying mysteriously, he realises he’s caught in something sinister, with only his pet penguin, Misha, for company.
I ended up in Ukraine shortly after my stint in Nigeria, where I ended up working with Kurkov’s wife and even doing amateur theatre with his children.
What a small and funny world, eh?
And in one of the biggest what-ifs of my life, if I hadn’t read Death and the Penguin when I did and ended up in Ukraine… I mightn’t have been in the agonising position of deciding whether to stay or leave in February 2022.
5. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Lviv, Ukraine, 2005. No internet in my flat. The pre-ebook era. Amazon didn’t deliver to Ukraine. The bookstores had little in English. My personal collection would barely last a month.
I was panicky.
Then, I found the British Council library.
That year in Lviv turned out to be one of the most wonderfully inspirational years of reading. Faced with little choice, I discovered some unexpected treasures, magical gems I otherwise may have never given a thought to.
Desperate for books, I picked up A Confederacy of Dunces despite hearing mixed reviews. And I’m so glad I did. It’s one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, featuring the outrageous, insufferable Ignatius J Reilly, an eccentric and arrogant slob stumbling and bumbling through absurd misadventures in 1960s New Orleans. His delusions clash with reality, creating a hilarious satire of society.
It hit way too close to home. In some ways, my life has been a series of misadventures ever since.
6. The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho
I’m going to cheat with this last one.
I hated this book. But I’m so glad I did.
It reassured me that I made the right decision when I turned down what I thought was the love of my life to move to Ukraine and start teaching.
Some books change your life by affirming your beliefs. Others do so by repelling you.
To get the full story of why hating this book turned out to be a blessing in disguise, check out ‘The Alchemist, a Barmaid, and an Unexpected Life Lesson’.
Just narrowly missing the cut
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
A Bend in the River by V S Naipaul
A House for Mr Biswas by V S Naipaul
A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
A brief word on rereading
Great books reveal new layers at different points in our lives. The Sheltering Sky has frustrated me on different rereads, though it has also led to new insights, while If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller enchanted me once, only to let me down a decade later. (How many books, by the way, are written so effectively in the second person?)
Because it thrilled me the first time, and because I still dream of writing a similar book (haha), I’m desperate to reclaim that magic. So, it might be time for another reread—ten years after the last and twenty years after the first.
But A Confederacy of Dunces, I’m afraid to reread. I don’t want to lose the magic.
Great books can, paradoxically, do that to us.
A notable absence: who’s missing?
Looking at my list, a glaring question emerges: where are the women?
I’m tempted to say I was deliberately being provocative by only choosing old, grumpy white guys but… these were the books that did it for me back then. The Indian-born, Trinidad and Tobago-raised V S Naipaul, with his themes of post-colonialism, identity and belonging, just missed the cut, which would have added in at least some diversity.
Over the years, I’ve leaned more toward nonfiction, but when I reflect on my favourite books, many women writers stand out: George Eliot, Toni Morrison, Sigrid Nunez, Emily St John Mandel, Angela Carter, Willa Cather, Laila Lalami.
I could also mention a handful of my all-time favourite reads—To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee), I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith), Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Olga Tokarczuk), and Grand Hotel (Vicki Baum). Sure, okay, but… there’s still something missing…
I’m generalising here, and relying on anecdotal evidence, but there seem to be far more women talking about fiction, and women’s fiction mainly, on Substack. Where are the men? And what are we reading?
I’ve always considered myself an insatiably curious and open-minded reader, but years ago I decided it was time to put my money where my mouth was. In 2019, I dedicated a year to reading only women, especially women from different corners of the world. I was inspired by an essay by Gary Younge in the Guardian (you can read more about this in my 2025 Reading Challenge post).
I still, however, have neglected Asia (and Latin America). That’s been a whopping blank on my reading map (A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe is just one recent read that has sat with me for a long time, one of the most harrowing books I’ve ever read).
This brings me back to why I love Substack so much, and writers like Alicia. They’re exposing us—or me[n], anyway—to new writers, fresh perspectives, different outlooks.
A whole new world of possibilities
Suddenly, despite my ever-sprawling TBR list, I want to read more of Han Kang, Diary of a Void, Butter, Convenience Store Woman, The Memory Police, Tan Twan Eng’s books (I’m not giving up on men just yet!). [Links to Alicia’s book reviews.]
This is a nice problem to have, even if the overwhelming choices do fluster me at times!
A Confederacy of Dunces, then, might be the most influential book I’ve ever read.
And it highlights the magic of reading—unexpected discoveries, new perspectives, a never-ending journey.
I have recently added a Start Here/Table of Contents page for my Substack where you can see the range of themes I cover. The second theme may be of particular interest: Bibliophilia, Reading & Writing.
My commonplace book, with my Lviv 2005 reading list:
Alicia’s favourite posts by Daniel
‘Readers, help! It's my 2025 Reading Challenge’ (a thoughtful post on Daniel’s approach to reading, books he read in 2025, and what he’s focussing on this year)
‘My social media dilemma’ (one a lot of us on Substack can relate to…)
‘A Decision I Never Wanted to Make’ (on his last days in Kyiv before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine broke out)
‘Should You Move to Austria (via Ukraine)?’ (an interview by Daniel with on settling into Austria from Ukraine)
Once again, a hearty thank you to Daniel for his thoughtful post. And as recompense for his complaint that his TBR is now far longer with no thanks to me, mine has also expanded a fair bit…
Write to us in the comments!
Have you read any of the books Daniel mentions?
Which books were you reading at pivotal moments of your life?
Did any of these books transform your life, or shape which paths you took?
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Some of my favourites here Daniel. Lovely post. Thanks.
This is great and fascinating, I just read your comment about meeting the wife of the author of Death and a Penguin, that’s wild !!! I think we have different reading tastes, as I’ve read nothing on your list 🤦🏻♀️ 😆 and you probably won’t like the three books I recommended to you ages ago when you asked everyone 🤦🏻♀️😁