Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?

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 a lot of morality-sense in me, since it's basically a tour of the bad (and good) of humanity.

For a bit of an older age (~15?), nothing quite impacted me like Ender's Game did. Again, a lot of ideas of what is moral and what isn't. (And yes, as others in this thread have pointed out, the author has a problematic legacy, make of that what you will.)

My Side of the Mountain was one my mom got me that has really stuck with me. About a boy running away from home and living in a tree, so good -> https://shepherd.com/book/my-side-of-the-mountain

I loved Robin Hood, and at my local library, I found this amazing book called Bows Against the Barons by Geoffrey Trease. I highly recommend it as I loved it -> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1719399.Bows_Against_the...

Rifles for Watie was another one a librarian recommended me and I read in grade school and loved -> https://shepherd.com/book/rifles-for-watie

The classic Dragonlance Chronicles were amazing: https://www.amazon.com/Vol-1-3-Dragonlance-Chronicles-Set/dp...

I loved the Box Car Children, mostly book #1, but the rest were good.

Hardy Boys was also a series I adored, but I am not sure how they have aged.

My son is 7 and he is reading Harry Potter and just loving it. So I highly recommend that one. I didn't read it until college and it is one of my favorite series. She writes incredible characters and weaves them together so perfectly.

As I got to my teenage years... - Dirk Pitt's adventure books kept me reading all day. - Snow Crash really blew my mind. - Catch 22 stood out fo rme. - Atlas Shrugged and all of her books I liked (but not for the weird cult thing. - Classic Tom Clancy - Upton Sinclair The Jungle - Seismic impact on my view of the world. - Native Son in high school is something I think about to this day and bothers me. - From The Holy Mountain - Huge influence on me in my early 20s and where I ended up.

Clive Barker's Books of Blood, Stephen King's stuff up until the early 90s (I later found out the point where the books turned boring was when he'd stopped using drugs), short stories of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, and The Destroyer pulp novels, particularly after Will Murray started writing them.

Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life. It's amazing

The wind in the willows The Wizard of Oz

Indian folktales - The Panchatantra, The Jataka and the Hitopadesa.