91–100 of 163 posts
A few come to mind, over the course of my childhood up to and including high-school. The "Mad Scientist's Club" series The Great Brain Those "Encyclopedia Brown" stories The "The Three Investigators" series The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne The original Doyle "Sherlock Holmes" canon The Soul Of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien Nineteen Eighty Four
The Magus by John Fowles
I was maybe 14 at the time. You just never know because kids are weird.
- Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
- The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson
- Anathem, Neal Stephenson
- Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
- Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, Jon Erickson
- The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle
- Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson
- Mystical Qabalah, Dion Fortune
- Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling
The His Dark Materials was probably the first books I got really in to and some of the only books I've ever re-read. I read a couple of others by the same author but wasn't grabbed as much. I think I was around 13 at the time. Harry Potter were probably some of the first "long" books that I ever read but I wasn't a huge fan and gave up by the third. I'd say those along with random Discworld and assorted fantasy books…
Pippi Longstocking. I was read that book so many times I knew it by heart. Her mix of courage, playfulness and of speaking truth to power, her refusal to follow society's rules where they made no sense, her innate sense of justice. I'd say that even today hers would be a personality I try to be. The translation into our language was good and we had a copy that was almost a family relic, given to my father by his moth…
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…
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…
> 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 because that's what you have to take away from Animorphs, too bad. I couldn't have written it any other way and remained true to the respect I have always felt for Animorphs readers.
https://www.hiracdelest.com/database/articles/kaa_response-f...
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…
Did you read "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" or "Glory Road" by Heinlein? Both of those impacted me in terms of opening my world view (line marriages, an empress making cold logical decisions I wouldn't expect, etc).
I'm all for Machiavelli's pragmatic approach in "The Prince" (oops, another one I forgot to include), but Heinlein is just downright scary in some of his more forceful works (I mean, the salt hoarding in Farnham's Freehold? COME ON! Even I felt like killing the guy on principle)
I also disliked Atlas Shrugged.
Gödel, Escher, Bach. Opened my eyes to the beauty of pattern and mathematics. (Edited for typo)