I grew up in a house full of books that shaped my interests. I have two young children and I'm building up a library for them. I'm curious to know what books stood out in your childhoods?
Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
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Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#2[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#3Have 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 (Forster)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Starship Troopers (Heinlein)
The Jungle Book (Kipling)
Lost in the Barrens (Mowatt)
The Republic (Plato)
Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke)
Ringworld (Niven)
The Stainless Steel Rat (Harrison)
The Hobbit (Tolkien)
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson)
The Odyssey (Homer)
The Man who Would be King (Kipling)
The Pearl (Steinbeck)
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick)
A Scanner Darkly (Dick)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
Dracula (Stoker)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)
A Christmas Carol (Dickens)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll)
Watership Down (Adams)
Gulliver's Travels (Swift)
Animal Farm (Orwell)
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#4A 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
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#5Danny Dunn series
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#6The Catcher in the Rye
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#7Catcher in the Rye, Salinger captures that feeling of being a lost teenager while at the same time thinking that we know everything. It's an amazing book to read as a teen.
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#8Motel of the Mysteries, David Macauley's satire of then-modern America intertwixed with a satire of archaeology and historical and academic understanding, masquerading as a picture book. A remarkable work I still think about today.
https://www.vox.com/22753080/motel-mysteries-book-david-maca...
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#9[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?
#10Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy