Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
11–20 of 163 posts
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#12Well before I could read I was enamoured with my grandmother's National geographic collection.
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#13I was given "The Great Escape" by Paul Brickhill as a teenager (long ago) and fascinated by the Prisoners Of War resourcefulness in not being controlled by their environment. Some innovations included stealing electric wiring to light the long tunnels, making forged `official' documents without a typewriter and hiding the tunnel `tailings' in plain sight. The movie doesn't do justice to the true story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Escape_(book)
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#14When I was pretty young, I was given a copy of The Way Things Work. It had an incredible impact on me and is probably what steered me down the path of engineering. Truly, a fundamental part of who I grew up to be.
The chapters about electronics are obviously quite dated, but I think it still stands up. I'd absolutely give a copy to the kind of kid who has to take everything apart to see how it works.
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#15Carl Sagan's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World
Will probably make your children atheists though.
So much of the world still runs on fucking bullshit, just look at the justifications for the ongoing [redacted because it'll probably derail the conversation].
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#16Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
Can you tell more? I loved Ken Kesey story at some point but haven’t revisited him for a while
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#17A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
I didn't read it on my own personally, rather, it was read in my eighth grade class from beginning to end. Lots of discussion was had about the foreshadowing and meaning behind Dickens' words. At the time I really didn't appreciate it as much as I should have, but I'm incredibly grateful that my teacher made us read through that.
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brian was another one read in class that I think helped shape my perspective on the world for the better.
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#18Ender's Game and especially Ender's Shadow. I hesitate to recommend OSC at all due to his Problematic™ personal politics, especially as a member of the maligned group, but they had a big impact on the way I see The System in which we all live.
Spoiler-free: based on a shared societal belief in a looming existential crisis, a group of young adults attend a military school whose curriculum revolves around a war game with sports-like rules. The System uses the war game to identify for positions of relative prestige those students most willing to interpret the game rules in creative ways, most willing to question assumptions brought with them from the school-world into the game-world, but naïve enough to believe the game is over once they've “graduated” from it. The books explore the many ways in which the “real world” : school-world :: school-world : game-world.
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#19“The Age of Spiritual Machines” by Ray Kurzweil.
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#20Dune.