Very nicely done, Asa. I agree with you! I often think of the change that books have prompted in me as not so much a change from one thing to its opposite, but from changing a notion or intuition into a conviction or at least a confidence. In a weak sense, books give me the words I lacked ("what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed," Pope, Essay on Criticism); in a strong sense, like Socrates reports in the Symposium, they have moved me from "opinion" to "knowledge." And I call that a change!