111–120 of 163 posts
As an adult I can now see as a child I was drawn by lonely characters, finding friends and going on adventures. I was well cared for in my family but not emotionally. I was the boy who turned up at your house on Christmas Day. I invested too much energy in transient friends and running the streets. I am very happy to say my kids have had an entirely different experience of life, though I attribute about 70% of this to my wife.
Here's a few I don't see on lists frequently:
Here’s an updated list with your addition:
1. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster- adventure that encourages curiosity while navigating a magical world.
2. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg- Mystery about independence where two kids hide in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
3. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain- A time-travel pioneer + clash between modern thinking and medieval traditions.
4. My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George- survival story of a boy living in the wilderness, promoting self-reliance + love for nature
Ringworld - Larry Niven
Gödel, Escher, Bach. Opened my eyes to the beauty of pattern and mathematics. (Edited for typo)
I started college as a physics major. It was the fall of 1979 and a career with "personal computers" was still in the future, but in school I switched majors and felt I had come home. GEB was the start of all that.
Depends on the age, but for age 9-14ish, one series is hands down the most influential thing I've ever read: The Animorphs series. It's both incredibly good entertainment, but also really digs into morality in a way that has shaped how I think of things even so many years later. Second to that is the "My Teacher is an Alien" series. They're fun books, pretty light, but the last book of the series, likewise, instilled…
K.A Applegate's letter to distressed fans after the series ended is worth a read > Pretty soon you'll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents. > If you're mad at me…
Have Space Suit Will Travel (Heinlein) Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein) Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (one story in the book "Different Seasons" by Stephen King) Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck) The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury) Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky) Frankenstein (Shelley) Brave New World (Huxley) Farenheit 451 (Heinlein) Never Cry Wolf (Mowatt) A Whale for the Killing (Mowatt) The Machine Stops (Fors…