1. Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
2. In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky
I was a teen really into philosophy so maybe not applicable.
Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
121–130 of 163 posts
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#122Flowers for Algernon (Keyes)
Doors of Perception (Huxley)
We (Zamyatin)
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#123- Max & Moritz !!!
- Grimm's Märchen (read the gruesome originals!)
- Struwwelpeter
- Erich Kästner: Das fliegende Klassenzimmer, Das doppelte Lottchen, Emil & die Detektive, Pünktchen & Anton
- Das kleine "Ich-bin-ich"
- Oh, wie schön ist Panama
- Pipi Langstrumpf (already mentioned)
- Der letzte Mohikaner
- Zu Fuss durch Afrika
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#124My father’s philosophy textbook from university (A Modern Introduction to Philosophy, edited by Arthur Pap and Paul Edwards, 2nd ed., 1965). As a young teenager, I leaned on it to argue to my mother that God did not exist and therefore she should stop forcing me go to Mass with her
When I was 15, I went to the library of the nearest university, and stumbled upon a book - IIRC, it was Vickery’s The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough (1973) - which introduced me to Algernon Swinburne’s The Triumph of Time-and from there I discovered I liked many more of his poems
When I was 11, I read a large chunk of The Lord of the Rings - I got bored near the start of The Two Towers, switched to reading the chapters of The Return of the King in reverse order, then gave up and to this day have never finished it. But I fell in love with the Appendices
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#125Tons, but there are notable standouts.
- The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adam - Spent all of senior year in HS reading the entire series
- Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut - Maybe it was because I mentally compared Harrison to Crow Sting from professional wrestling or because it was a short story, but I always think about this story
- Have a Nice Day! by Mick Foley - Pro wrestling is my guilty pleasure and like many fans, Foley's life resonated with me about friendship, giving 110%, all the while keeping a positive outlook on life
- Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson - A comic is a book with pictures. Out of all the comics about superheros, webcomics, and old newspaper comics, if I had to only read one of them for the rest of my life it'd be C&H
- Honorable Mention is Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. I'm started reading them during COVID, but I'm thoroughly enjoying that dry English sense of humor, modern society cynism, and fantasy setting. I'm currently on my tenth book (out of ~40)
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#126Tom Swift series, they have aged badly but the science adventure parts of it steered me into engineering.
Dragonsinger by Anne McCaffery gave me an introvert as a role model.
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#127[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#128Stretching the mental legs of young readers has value so having a few series of quick, punchy, engaging literary trash is a good thing. When I was a kid, Point Horror, Goosebumps and various adventure books were the reading gym that gave me the stamina for the books I actually enjoyed (Tolkien, Pullman, and so much Pratchett ). I'm going through this with my daughter now. We still lean on thriller subjects but there…
All of those Choose Your Own Adventure books really built my interest in stories of all kind. I'd juggle 3-4 different by using my fingers as bookmarks until I couldn't hold the book any longer and had to pick ONE storyline.
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#129We didn't have a huge library of books, but my parents had a full set of The World Book encyclopedias, a physician's desk reference, an illustrated home repair manual, and another full series of both Time Life "A Child's First Library of Knowledge" and "Knowledge Encyclopedia" for kids. These are what I spent the most time with. We also had an excellent electronic dictionary with a few interesting games and a thoroug…
Encarta 95 was one of the greatest pieces of software history created in my opinion. I know I would spend hours playing the adventure game in it, swapping between the map and articles to answer all the questions.
There's been some attempts at replicating it with Wikipedia, but I think why it was so popular was because most of the time you were playing it because someone was on the phone, so you weren't allowed online. It was one of the other programs you'd throw up like Space Pinball, the old school screensavers, MS Paint, or even Microsoft Bob to just 'play around' on the computer.
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#130Carl 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].
It was sad that Sagan died before the New Atheism movement started -- in many ways the "The Demon-Haunted World" is sort of the same book as Dawkins' "The God Delusion" but Sagan made his arguments in a more level-headed, less arrogant way and realized that religion was just part of the problem, not the root of it.