101–110 of 163 posts
Convinced me to join the Marines out of high school. Then 9/11 happened and that choice got... not so great. Got a clearance and EW training out of it, and that worked out okay in the long run, I guess.
Jules Verne books, particularly the submarine book and the moon book. I think that was my first foray into sci-fi as a kid. I think I was 7
It had a complete recipe for making nitroglycerin. From scratch. Starting with the blubber of a freshly killed seal!
Getting acclimated to the information firehose was probably a net negative. For the first decade, I at least enjoyed high-quality online writing for free. The second decade devolved into half-formed, 140/280 character hot takes, videos and paywall popups, and yet I was still reading a lot of it. The algorithmic, SEO-ified consumer internet now has gotten so bad that I am finally scaling back my reading, but am still online due to FOMO on important events (although usually I end up realizing they are rarely as important as I think them to be).
I must have read that book over a dozen times in middle school.
- Demian
- A Brave New World
- 1984
- A hundred years of solitude, although, I read it in Spanish and I don't know if it'll be as impactful with less cultural shared context
I remember being forced to read it in class, and being completely repulsed by it, then, during a black out finding the book and absolutely loving it
Something as small as suddenly being made aware of how a couple generations ago, people not too far away from me could be marveled at something as mundane to me as ice (Because pre-widespread refrigeration someone born in a dessert could just never see ice in their entire life) really got to me, and then the book itself happened
Never read anything quite like it since
A slight tangent, but as a parent, one thing I've found is that any books my kid discovers for themselves (via friends, social media or just picking up random books in the library) means so much more to them than anything I've ever recommended. Anything I recommend starts out with a massive handicap, since in their minds anything 'old and lame' people like probably sucks. Only if there is nothing else to read will they begrudgingly try one of my books.
And to be fair after about age 11, I rarely read anything my dad recommended to me either, much preferring to discover my own books. So by all means make sure they're surrounded by books, just don't expect your kids to read anything you try to push on them.