Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling

Even though I didn’t want to admit it to myself, I had to concede that the book that changed my life more than any other was Richard Lyman Bushman’s Joseph Smith biography, “Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling”. I struggled with this because I feel like RSR is a book that has probably changed many lives, and there is something unromantic about that. I thought long and hard about collections of essays I’ve read by Wendell Berry, or Hugh Nibley. I hoped maybe one of Don Delilo’s books, or something I thought might be more personal to my experience, could serve as “the one”. The last thing I wanted to choose was a book that 80,000 people had read in the last 6 years. However, when I really thought about it, there is no book in my short history of reading (I consider the year before my mission to be the first time I really read a book) that has effected who I am more than Bushman’s biography.