What are some books that have changed your life?

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In summary: For a few months, I slept on the floor in the living room, while my parents and sisters got their own bedrooms. I was so frustrated, I begged my parents to let me move into one of the bedrooms, and they finally did. That was when I got my own bedroom, and my World Book set.
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Since this is about Any book, I decided that General forums would be a good place, feel free to move. What books do you deeply love, have changed you, or believe that every literate person should have?

These can be in any language and of any subject. I pose this in hopes of expanding my collection of already amazing books. As for my input, I believe every person should read:

Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise)
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment
(Marquis De Sade for a powerful message; very, very, very disturbing to most people.)
Philosophy: Plato (Obviously), Kant, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Hegel, Spinoza, Aristotle, Epictetus, Nietzsche, Sartre, Confucius.
Homer's Odyssey and Iliad (Alexander Pope's translation proved to be the best for me)
The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli


Many thanks for any input.:smile:


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Bunicula.
 
  • #5


Dr Zhivago
Of Human Bondage
Les Miserables
The Spell of the Yukon
Development of Concepts of Physics
The Stranger
The Nature of the Chemical Bond
Machinery's Handbook (any after 15th ed)
The Lady in the Lake
the Bible Book of Amos
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Soul on Ice
A Farewell to Arms
The Guns of August
Street Without Joy
All Quiet on the Western Front
The Guide for the Perplexed
Huck Finn
 
  • #6


Evo said:
Bunicula.

Hahaha...I only know what this is because when I traveled to Uganda, we brought a bunch of random childrens books (they don't have books there), and this was one of them...my gf's choice.
 
  • #7


And,
The Business of May Next
The Furniture Doctor
The Confederate Nation
Mere Christianity
Relativity Visualized
The Federalist Papers
The Odyssey
Quo Vadis
Dispatches
The Gathering Storm
To Kill a Mockingbird
 
  • #8


Encyclopedia Brittanica (A-Z). I used to browse through it at a neighbor's house, because my parents couldn't afford a set.

Columbia Encyclopedia, 2nd Ed. Nice condensed book about 5 inches thick with tiny print, but had lots of articles in the humanities (history, geography, art, . . .) and science. I used to read that in bed, especially when I was home ill and couldn't go to school.

Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia - strictly science and technology. I used to spend hours browsing it in addition to the Columbia Encyclopedia.


Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Simply brilliant.


Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Empire series.


Myths and Modern Man (one of the best books on the subject)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00072V4S8/?tag=pfamazon01-20
by Barbara Stanford

Houston Smith's The World's Religions

Christmas Humphreys - an obscure book on Buddhism, which I can't locate.


Jerzy Kosinski's Being There


There are thousands of other books on my list.
 
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  • #9


I second Astro's nomination of a good set of encyclopedias. We had the World Book set...well not a full set :redface:.

Our household also had a giant dictionary...had to be 6" thick. It wasn't the OED, but it was a great book for a kid to browse through.
 
  • #10


Fragment said:
Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise)
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment
(Marquis De Sade for a powerful message; very, very, very disturbing to most people.)
Philosophy: Plato (Obviously), Kant, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Hegel, Spinoza, Aristotle, Epictetus, Nietzsche, Sartre, Confucius.
Homer's Odyssey and Iliad (Alexander Pope's translation proved to be the best for me)
The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
It happens I've read each of the books in your list (but not each of the authors) except for Canterbury Tales which I am reading now.

My list would include:
The Apology of Socrates, by Plato
This Perfect Day, by Ira Levin
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
The Mouse that Roared, by Leonard Wibberley
The Einstein Theory of Relativity by Lilian Leiber
 
  • #11


The Stranger was the most influential book I've ever read, it changed me forever, and I'm glad.

But the best book I read is Sartre's Nausea

The story is excellent but even more so is the writing which expresses a rich use of language, even in a translation from the French. The book is deep, it's not an easy read.
 
  • #12


lisab said:
I second Astro's nomination of a good set of encyclopedias.

Our household also had a giant dictionary...had to be 6" thick. It wasn't the OED, but it was a great book for a kid to browse through.
When I was about 10 or 11, my father scraped up the dough for a set of World Book encyclopedias, and kept buying yearly updates. I read them from cover to cover, and I always had a volume in my bedroom, bookmarked so that I could keep track of where I was. They weren't Compton's or Britannica, but it was enough for a young kid who had questions and a library card.

When we moved into that house, my parents and my younger sisters got the actual bedrooms upstairs. I got a very small walk-in closet with a small ell over the staircase. Lucky for me, that ell contained shelves full of cheap editions of classic literature. When I wasn't reading the World Book, I was reading Twain, Dickens, Hawthorne, Verne, etc every night. I had a cheap AM radio that could pull in stations in Buffalo, Albany, Boston, WWV, etc, and I had multi-media every night. Music and books.

Edit: By the time I hit 5th grade, nothing in our elementary school library was interesting or demanding enough to capture my attention for long. The principal of the school who also taught 5th and 6th grades used to bring in books from her library and loan them to me for reading with assigned commentary/review required. God! I learned to hate Somerset Maugham during that period, and idolize Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce.
 
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  • #13


Catch-22, by Joseph Heller - simply unbeatable in every way

Closing Time, by Joseph Heller - almost as good as its predecessor (but very grim)

Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton - a good thriller with some surprisingly interesting philosophy

The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin - my favorite novel in elementary school, still a favorite

The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure, by Hans Magnus Enzensberger - the book that first got me really interested in math

Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky - a classic exploration of morality with decent thrills to keep things moving

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky - denser than C&P, but also a bit deeper

and many more...
 
  • #14


I don't read.
I don't understand how a book will change me.
I don't understand why people read books to change their lives or themselves/find some book that changed them (someone recommended me to read a book that changed his life).
I unsuccessful tried to change myself using a book about living the present moment (zen) but later I discovered that changing life involves bit of more work than just sitting and reading a book.

IMO, if I want to change myself/believes I would write the way I changed them rather than reading.
 
  • #15


Be the book, rootx. Be the book.(be the ball, Danny, in case you were sleeping or unavailable during the 80s)
 
  • #16


1984.

Truth, freedom, dignity, sanity, values, and why losing them is a fate worse than death.
 
  • #17


rootX said:
I don't read.
I don't understand how a book will change me.
I don't understand why people read books to change their lives or themselves/find some book that changed them (someone recommended me to read a book that changed his life).
I unsuccessful tried to change myself using a book about living the present moment (zen) but later I discovered that changing life involves bit of more work than just sitting and reading a book.

IMO, if I want to change myself/believes I would write the way I changed them rather than reading.

I can understand if you don't think that a book will change you, but why do you choose not to read at all? Many "classic" books are written much better than alternative forms of entertainment (television shows, movies, video games). Whereas a television show is written in a few days by a team of writers, books can capture the brilliance of the works of some of the best authors in the past several hundred or thousand years which took years to complete.
 
  • #18


Art of Love, Ovid
Anything Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas (Their works are much better in French, if you can read it.)
Metamorphoses, Ovid
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
Anna Karenina, Tolstoy
War and Peace, Tolstoy
Don Quixote, De Cervantes
Lolita, Nabokov
Paradise Lost & Paradise regained, Milton
Das Kapital, Karl Marx (Touches many subjects, including philosophy and economics)

A good book is hard to find, but once you find it, you realize you need nothing more. :wink:
 
  • #19


How about more "educational"/textbook books. I realize Encyclopedia Brittanica might be a good place to start, but what would one read to gain general knowledge of one particular subject? (Medicine, law, history, geology...)
 
  • #20


Where the Wild Things Are
James and the Giant Peach
Rumpelstiltskin
The Billy Goats Gruff
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
A Christmas Carol
Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates

(Yes, some are fairy tale stories, not so much books.)
Once you're old enough to read literature, I don't think it matters much what you read, but I think it's those childhood books with lessons about how to treat other people that are important.
 
  • #21


Sir Arther Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes short stories.

Edgar Allen Poe's short stories and poetry.

Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (+ Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul and sequel)

Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus Trilogy

Robert Anton Wilson's Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

Tom Robbins' Another Roadside Attraction (all of his books really but this is the first I read)

Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers (along with Twenty Years After and The Man in the Iron Mask)

I enjoy most books but these are the ones that stick out the most in my mind.
 
  • #22


1984. Opened my eyes. Can't get em closed again.

Shogun. Taught me what a leader is.

Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas. Math is beautiful. Reread it every few years.
 
  • #23


Atlas Shrugged

(and its surprisingly relevant for our current time)
 
  • #24


"The Enormous Egg", by Oliver Butterworth, ages 10-14.
 
  • #25


DaveC426913 said:
1984. Opened my eyes. Can't get em closed again.

Shogun. Taught me what a leader is.

Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas. Math is beautiful. Reread it every few years.

I'm going to have to read 'Shogun'. I'm planning to go to the bookstore soon to get some Philip K. Dick stories, and I think I'll get that while I'm there.

This wouldn't happen to be the book that inspired the 80's tv miniseries, would it? I hope so. I fell in love with it when I was like 10 years old. Books are almost always better than the movies so I'm sure it would be one of my favorites as well.
 
  • #26


The BFG - Roald Dahl, basically got me really interested in reading in the first place. I must have been about 10 or so, and I just couldn't put it down.

Other than that, I read for pleasure or for research, not really life changing stuff.
Terry Prattchet
Tolkien
Tom Holt
etc

I have a great aerodynamics book by John Anderson, which I think is very accessible to anyone, not just engineers.
 
  • #27


DaveC426913 said:
1984. Opened my eyes. Can't get em closed again.

Well said. I'll go with that answer too.

Also, Animal Farm and Atlas Shrugged.
 
  • #28


Huckleberry said:
I'm going to have to read 'Shogun'. I'm planning to go to the bookstore soon to get some Philip K. Dick stories, and I think I'll get that while I'm there.

This wouldn't happen to be the book that inspired the 80's tv miniseries, would it? I hope so. I fell in love with it when I was like 10 years old. Books are almost always better than the movies so I'm sure it would be one of my favorites as well.

That would be it. By James Clavell.
 
  • #29


Astronuc said:
Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Simply brilliant.

Oh yes! Can you believe I've forgotten about it? Think I'll track it down and read it again.
 
  • #30


DaveC426913 said:
1984. Opened my eyes. Can't get em closed again.
"A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess was like that for me.
 
  • #31


I'll second a lot of previously mentioned books, but when I was young, this one really stood out:

"Earth Abides" by George R Stewart
 
  • #32


Huckleberry said:
This wouldn't happen to be the book that inspired the 80's tv miniseries, would it?
It is, yes.

Foolish me, I never saw the mini-series. I was in my "I don't watch pop TV" phase.
Missed V, Roots, SNL, Hill Street Blues too.
 
  • #33


I agree with a lot of the books mentioned that I've read, will try to think of others.

Telling that my daughter recently asked what the big books that look alike in her grandparent’s house are about, and why her grandfather is often looking through them.
I appreciate having had them around- even more so now that I don’t. As my internet savvy daughter noted, my Dad still enjoys them.
 
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  • #34


Does anyone know the price of Encyclopedia Brittanica in U.S. stores? (All volumes, A-Z)
 
  • #35


Fragment said:
Does anyone know the price of Encyclopedia Brittanica in U.S. stores? (All volumes, A-Z)

http://store.britannica.com/jump.jsp?itemType=PRODUCT&itemID=822

I don't know that I've ever seen an encyclopedia set actually sold in stores. I'm sure they were at one point and they still might be but a quick google search will get you in the ballpark.
 
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