131–140 of 163 posts
Tom 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.
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…
well I guess I know what I'm re-reading next.
Ender'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 wi…
I remember being very disappointed reading Speaker for the Dead, in that it's a total change of pace from the more "hero's journey" structure for Ender's Game, but now looking back, I really appreciate how it expanded the themes and brought a more nuanced flavour to the whole series. And yes... I try to separate the art from the artist too when it comes to OSC.
Dune. So many thought-provoking quotes throughout the books, especially the first one. This one pops up in my head often, many years after having first read the book: "Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?" Also Starship Troopers. Reading it made me somewhat regret not joi…
The early experience with the command line in turn made me much better at using it when I started working - new people at my company often struggle with the basics and take much longer to get comfortable with it than I did (the vim learning curve is steep indeed...). Now I prefer doing all my day-to-day computer stuff in the command line.
A more tenuous connection, but it's possible Cuckoo's Egg seeded in me the drive to spend unreasonable amounts of time tracking down root causes of issues and figuring out how things work. But that didn't really manifest until I started working.