Your Three Most Influential Books

[Alex K]

Those aee books I ate up when I was 10...16, so very important years. I never had a great interest in reading fiction when I was young, and it still plays only a minor role in my reading



I spent my late childhood with a soldering iron in hand



This wonderful report on virtual reality from an optimistic wide eyed 80s perspective really inspired me


Taught myself the basics of special relativity from this book

Runners up are Darwin's VOTB and Origin, and Verne's 20000 leagues under the sea.

[abaris]

Come to think of it, I don't have any book that contributed to who I am today. I can think of a lot of books broadening my knowledge or my horizon or simply entertaining me in a most pleasant way, but who I am is entirely a result of the world surrounding me. And probably of my upbringing, but this would be too long and would derail this thread. Suffice to say, I come from a family that had to flee from Hitler and that makes me especially sensible to every kind of bigotry and exclusivness.

Consequently I did a lot of reading about it in my time. I've read all 22 volumes of the Nuremberg tribunal protocols. I've also read the accounts of the perpetrators, such as Rudolf Höss or the diaries of Josef Goebbels. Well, maybe that kind of reading actually led me on some kind of path after all, since from there I got interested in criminal profiling and read the books of John Douglas, but also the ones of Thomas Müller, who is one of the most prominent european authorities in the field.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Twain's 'Letters From The Earth'.  Gave form and substance to what I felt more or less instinctually - that Christianity was nonsense.

Lee's 'To Kill A Mockingbird'.  It is hard to think of a better fictional exploration of courage in the face of injustice.

Breathed's 'Penguin Dreams'.  The importance of absurdity.


Boru

[Aroura]

My mom told me this was the book that got her hooked on Sci-fi, so I read it at age 11 or 12.  It was one of the things that made me start to question religion. It's was also pretty scary for that age, and a good book in general.


Don't laugh, but I really find the little parable's in here applicable to my own daily life.   I hate that word, parable, but it fits. I find them very useful to help me stay focused on positive things and not get caught up in a negative thought cycle (which is something that used to happen to me a lot more).


I read this ages before the movie, and it has been my favorite short story ever since.  It brilliantly illustrates some of the problems with our criminal justice system, but is also a beautiful story of hope, for the guilty and the innocent.

[Nope]

I read a lot but I don't know how to answer this question. When I was a teenager, I used books to escape from my homelife. I could sit on the couch, surrounded by chaos, and be protected because I was lost in a book and had entered another world.

The only reading that I can pinpoint as being influential are the National Geographic magazines. That sounds strange but they made me want to explore new places.

[pocaracas]

I.... can't pinpoint a single book in my life...
They sort of all pile up on top of each other giving me a broad view of most of humanity's achievements and also our understanding of how the world works.

There was a book that we had to read in 9th grade, it's a portuguese classical novel - Os Maias - about a guy who falls in love with a very beautiful girl... (and this happens half way through the book which is some 900 pages long full of elaborate descriptions of every single location). The guy eventually finds out that she's his sister, but keeps shagging her. Then someone tells her, and that he already knew about it before the last shag, and she leaves.
His life then goes on as the bohemian that he was.

So, at the nice age of 14, I was introduced to incest and how absolutely non-awful, or even normal, it was if you didn't know you were in an incestuous relationship. Also, you could just pretend to forget about that detail and shag away... Makes you wonder about perspective and how much truth lies in the standard admonishment of incest....

[Longhorn]

Geez, I can't name three books

I mostly read fiction, too and they all sorta merge in my mind.....

[Whateverist]

Those aee books I ate up when I was 10...16, so very important years. I never had a great interest in reading fiction when I was young, and it still plays only a minor role in my reading

I can relate.  I've always preferred nonfiction but every now and again I read a novel and love it.  I felt that way about Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi, Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky.  I'm not sure whether I am just feeling less acquisitive toward facts or have simply become a pleasure junky.  

Then there are novels which I loved reading which cross over toward being influential.  Loads of SciFi have this quality for me.  In fact, I'm moving Cats Cradle by Vonnegut to my honorable mention list.  But Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein and so many others make you think.

In my own 10 .. 16 age bracket I was immersed in every thing to do with animals.  I think I exhausted my local library.  That interest has since transferred itself to the plant kingdom.  In the world of horticulture I go by serialplantfetishist which pretty much says it all. 

My most recent influential non-fiction book was:
Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo
by Sean B. Carroll

[Iroscato]

I don't read as much as I'd like to, but a couple that come to mind -
The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins - I read it when I was 14-15, and it sandblasted away pretty much all the remaining doubts I had about the existence of gods.
Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan - read it about a couple of years ago and it massively reinforced my faith in humanity and our achievements, not to mention our potential.

[vorlon13]

Well, I've posted about an electronic kit assembly manual as being significant for my technical prowess, so what else is there?

LOL, my sense of humor, of course.  So what big influence can I identify in that regard?


Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head, and other drawings.

B. Kliban