The reason I wrote Linchpin: If you want to change people, you must create enough leverage to encourage the change to happen.

Books change lives every day. A book takes more than a few minutes to read. A book envelopes us, it is relentless in its voice and in its linearity. You start at the beginning and you either ride with the author to the end or you bail. And unlike just about any form of electronic media, you get to read the book at your own pace, absorbing it as you go.

I published a book today. My biggest and most important and most personal and most challenging book. A book that scared me.

It took me ten years to write this book. I’m hoping it changes a few people.

But yeah – Vonnegut. I’ve read pretty much everything I could find of his, which was a lot. Player Piano probably remains my favourite.

Mark Vonnegut wrote a worthwhile book himself, Eden Express. I recommend it.

Not quite his father, but then, who is?

I also like your broadening of the context to different media channels, and your reference to the practice of blogging reminds me of some other inspiring things I’ve read – and written – about, drawing on the wisdom of Oriah Mountain Dreamer, David Whyte and Martin Buber: Oriah and Buber, I and Thou: Bringing All Of Who I Am to Blogging.

Two other quotes I’ve recently encountered, regarding the power of expression and positive subversiveness:

I recently heard David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, describe his philosophy, in which he noted “”A lot of people want to have it right before they express it, but you won’t know if it’s right until you start to express it”.

And, I was perusing MLK quotes on MLK Day last week, and found the following particularly poignant: “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.”

A snippet of a piece by William Gass I posted on Cosmopoetica seems apropos:

‘And there are an unorganized few (the unhappy few whom I should like to represent, “the immense minority,” as Juan Ramón Jiménez so significantly puts it) who sincerely love the arts. There are those for whom reading, for example, can be an act of love, and lead to a revelation, not of truth, moral or otherwise, but of lucidity, order, rightness of relation, the experience of a world fully felt and furnished and worked out in the head, the head where the heart is also to be found, and all the other vital organs.’