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

by pjacotg on 10/6/24, 6:51 PM with 153 comments

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?

by kstenerud on 10/6/24, 7:05 PM
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 (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)
by washadjeffmad on 10/7/24, 12:32 PM
We 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 thorough etymology.
Living in the country, we were often in the car for extended periods and had catalogues of books on tape, mostly of the classics. Otherwise, we lived about half a mile, walking distance, from the town library and would go up on weekends.
On the computer, after CD-ROM drives became affordable, I particularly enjoyed interactive multimedia like Microsoft's Encarta, all of Knowledge Adventure titles, Explorapedia, and DK's "The Way Things Work". After Macromedia Shockwave, tons of eclectic titles about any given subject were being published, and we had discs ranging from the Civil War to Music Americana to I Love Lucy.
Remember, libraries can be anything. Don't limit yourself!
by gregopet on 10/7/24, 5:10 AM
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 mother who would soon die much to young - it's the closest thing I have to an atheist family bible in a way. I was so disappointed when neither of my children were particularly interested when I read them that same book, but they have different personalities than me, so my theory is that the book wasn't so much of an influence on me as it was simply a story that jived really well with my character.
by netsharc on 10/6/24, 9:29 PM
Carl 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].
by sumo89 on 10/7/24, 10:13 AM
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 planted the seeds of enjoying reading but it did go hand in hand with sitting next to my mum and enjoying the experience. Taking a book on holiday and sitting in the sun reading rather than just playing on my gameboy, which happened too but without bans on screen time more like just encouragement to join in the reading activity. Maybe bad battery lives and non-backlit screens helped too. One book that's always stuck in my memory since is Freakonomics. I read it when I was a teenager and the very logical thinking hit a real nerve. I know the book has had controversy since but I can't say I took away any specific example of "Sumo wrestlers like to cheat" or whatever, but the way of thinking it encouraged has definitely stuck with me. My partner read some Malcolm Gladwell books when she was younger and she was definitely a fan for a similar reason. I think they're a load of tosh with generous leaps of logic but I can understand the appeal of something that encourages you to look beyond the obvious.
by Lammy on 10/6/24, 10:29 PM
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 with sports-like rules. The System uses the war game to identify for positions of relative prestige those students most willing to interpret the game rules in creative ways, most willing to question assumptions brought with them from the school-world into the game-world, but naïve enough to believe the game is over once they've “graduated” from it. The books explore the many ways in which the “real world” : school-world :: school-world : game-world.
by cblum on 10/7/24, 12:58 AM
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 joining the military.
by mystified5016 on 10/6/24, 9:29 PM
When I was pretty young, I was given a copy of The Way Things Work. It had an incredible impact on me and is probably what steered me down the path of engineering. Truly, a fundamental part of who I grew up to be.
The chapters about electronics are obviously quite dated, but I think it still stands up. I'd absolutely give a copy to the kind of kid who has to take everything apart to see how it works.
by m0d0nne11 on 10/7/24, 11:26 AM
Mysterious Island and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (the stilted, nearly verbatim French->English translations STRONGLY preferred! the "improved" translations fail to convey so much of the fascinating details...) and also The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Hitchhikers Guide, of course. And Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.
by oliwarner on 10/7/24, 10:35 AM
Stretching 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 is so much more choice. Goodreads is great for finding subgenres of interest and then similar books to ones that hit the mark.
But use your local library. Pick up random books co-read opening chapters, and review the style and quality together. Use your judgement and public reviews to bin out the real trash and slowly but surely give then confidence to pick up real literature.
Forcing your kid to grind through a book rarely goes well but if you really want to push it, taking it in turns to read aloud can inject enough performative energy to carry it.
by wruza on 10/7/24, 8:59 AM
The City and the Stars, Arthur C. Clarke.
I also grew up with three full-sized bookcases mostly filled with all sorts of sci-fi and adventures by my granddad. But when I think of a book, this one always comes to mind first.
Unlike other sci-fi I’ve read before it, this novel had this out-of-usual-limits existential mystery and background dread, mostly unresolvable by its very nature and built into the plot almost immediately so that you have to re-realize it, as if you were at a therapist. I’ve read books with galactic wars, dark corners of space, empires, horrors, strange alien encounters, but only this one touched me so deep.
From non-fiction, it was “from basic to assembly” (noname, can’t find it) and few years later some 80386 system programming manual. I remember another book on assembly in between, it was dark blue.
by tptacek on 10/8/24, 1:21 AM
As actual books, Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, which a BBS friend of mine gave me when he squatted for a few days in my parent's garage, and Eduardo Galleano's Memory of Fire trilogy, a narrative literary history of Latin America, which the Jesuits made me read. I'd still recommend both today. On the other hand, there's the BBS tfile "Anarchist's Cookbook" (there are dozens of different compilations) probably had a more profound influence on my career than anything else I've ever read, and is what shifted me out of computer games and into the work I do now, when I was in sophomore year of high school. I'm lucky I didn't blow a finger off, though.
by neoromantique on 10/7/24, 12:16 PM
Gibson's Neuromancer and oddly enough Mark Dery's "Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century" that I've read at way too young of an age, which has contributed to my obsession with technology and computing greatly.
by ggillas on 10/7/24, 1:59 PM
My favorite books transported you to a new world and showed you how characters adapted and learned to navigate.
Here's a few I don't see on lists frequently:
Here’s an updated list with your addition:
1. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster- adventure that encourages curiosity while navigating a magical world.
2. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg- Mystery about independence where two kids hide in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
3. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain- A time-travel pioneer + clash between modern thinking and medieval traditions.
4. My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George- survival story of a boy living in the wilderness, promoting self-reliance + love for nature
by edrx on 10/8/24, 2:40 AM
"Cronopios and Famas", by Julio Cortázar - I read it for the first time when I was about 13 and for many years I reread at least once per year;
"Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (Robert M. Pirsig)
"The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea" (Yukio Mishima)
"The Yage Letters" (William Burroughs)
"The Old Ways" (Gary Snyder)
"Life and Death (Elementary Go Series #4)", by James Davies. Really - I studied that one very seriously.
Note: I answered just the "What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?" part, and I ignored that you are building a library for your children and asking for recommendations...
by mindcrime on 10/6/24, 7:10 PM
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
by dang on 10/7/24, 6:40 AM
One that comes to mind is John Wyndham's The Chrysalids - a post-nuclear dystopia that is perfect for adolescents (or was for me, anyway) because it expresses the feeling of being an isolated mutant. Eventually the isolated mutant kids find each other, band together, and defeat the dysfunctional authorities. That was profoundly satisfying when I was 14 or whenever I read it.
by atribecalledqst on 10/7/24, 4:57 PM
I read Cuckoo's Egg when I was in 6th grade. It didn't immediately turn me into a CLI junkie (we likely didn't have a computer with a terminal until upgrading to Mac OS X a year or two later anyway), but I do credit it for not being scared to open up the terminal to kill parental controls a couple years later.
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.
by WheelsAtLarge on 10/6/24, 7:18 PM
Catcher 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.
by dagw on 10/7/24, 1:50 PM
I have two young children and I'm building up a library for them
A slight tangent, but as a parent, one thing I've found is that any books my kid discovers for themselves (via friends, social media or just picking up random books in the library) means so much more to them than anything I've ever recommended. Anything I recommend starts out with a massive handicap, since in their minds anything 'old and lame' people like probably sucks. Only if there is nothing else to read will they begrudgingly try one of my books.
And to be fair after about age 11, I rarely read anything my dad recommended to me either, much preferring to discover my own books. So by all means make sure they're surrounded by books, just don't expect your kids to read anything you try to push on them.
by ryandv on 10/7/24, 12:48 PM
- Neuromancer, William Gibson
- 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
by edanm on 10/7/24, 7:23 AM
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.)
by bwb on 10/7/24, 7:59 AM
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.
by helph67 on 10/6/24, 9:14 PM
I was given "The Great Escape" by Paul Brickhill as a teenager (long ago) and fascinated by the Prisoners Of War resourcefulness in not being controlled by their environment. Some innovations included stealing electric wiring to light the long tunnels, making forged `official' documents without a typewriter and hiding the tunnel `tailings' in plain sight. The movie doesn't do justice to the true story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Escape_(book)
by rayxi271828 on 10/7/24, 9:46 AM
As a teenager, I was fortunate that my Dad bought me a copy of "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey.
Quote: Be Proactive is about taking responsibility for your life. Proactive people recognize that they are “response-able.” They don’t blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. They know they can choose their behavior.
While it may be common sense/doh-so-obvious today, this was such a mind-blowing reframe for the teenage me back then, and it shaped me immeasurably as a person for the better, for the 30+ years that follow.
by retentionissue on 10/7/24, 8:06 AM
Darren Shan's books about vampires/vampaneze.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saga_of_Darren_Shan
It helped me escape from a lot of stuff, gave me a fantasy world to run to when books were all I had.
All of Lee Child's Jack Reacher books gave me a character to look up to, someone to aspire to be like. At the time, there was maybe only 3 released but I read them over and over again.
"What will you do, Reacher?"
"The right thing, Mom."
by musicale on 10/9/24, 3:49 AM
I read anything I could find in the SF and fantasy section in the library, and much of the children's/YA section as well.
Classic speculative fiction was (and is) amazing. To this day I am still amazed by the universes created by Andre Norton, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and others.
The D&D Player's Handbook, and basically everything on its Inspirational Reading list.
Even though I wasn't into horror or gothic horror, I still devoured (or was devoured by?) Edgar Allen Poe and HP Lovecraft.
Dictionaries and encyclopedias.
by GarnetFloride on 10/7/24, 2:46 PM
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.
by sandwichsphinx on 10/7/24, 3:25 AM
Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick (2012)
by p0d on 10/7/24, 1:57 PM
Stig of the Dump and Peter Pan.
As an adult I can now see as a child I was drawn by lonely characters, finding friends and going on adventures. I was well cared for in my family but not emotionally. I was the boy who turned up at your house on Christmas Day. I invested too much energy in transient friends and running the streets. I am very happy to say my kids have had an entirely different experience of life, though I attribute about 70% of this to my wife.
by iwanttocomment on 10/6/24, 7:23 PM
Motel 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...
by hellojebus on 10/7/24, 2:27 PM
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.
by tsumnia on 10/7/24, 2:45 PM
Tons, 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)
by JauntTrooper on 10/7/24, 1:40 PM
Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen.
I must have read that book over a dozen times in middle school.
by funnybeam on 10/7/24, 11:54 AM
Jonathan Livingstone Seagull
Never entirely sure why I love it so much. First read it as a child when I hated apparently similar books - stories that seem written to speak to an adult’s idea of a sweet and innocent childhood - but it would always transport me… somewhere… I could never really describe. Still can’t, but still love it decades later
by skissane on 10/7/24, 2:43 PM
My 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
by j0suetm__ on 10/7/24, 12:34 PM
Éramos Seis.
Its a brazilian book from 30's about a typical family from the time. There's nothing special about the book. I lived at the country side and all I had to spend my time was this book and a couple of others. I'm quite sure I have read it countless times already. It is "personally" important to me.
by schwartzworld on 10/7/24, 11:33 AM
When I was 10ish I helped a couple in a bookstore pick out a book for the their nephew. The husband liked me and bought me a copy of his favorite book from when he was my age: The Time Machine. It kicked off a lifelong passion for speculative fiction that I still read now 30ish years later.
by throwaway889900 on 10/7/24, 11:20 PM
The entire Redwall series! Man I'm hungry now... could go for a nice cordial and scone...
by thorin on 10/7/24, 9:20 AM
I guess it was the hobbit that got me into reading (even more than I already was) and into computers as it came with the c64 adventure game which my godparents had. Every time we went there I got some computer time as they'd bought it for "office work", but I played scuba dive, the hobbit, manic miner, hunchback etc. It also led to reading the lord of the rings, which felt like a massive achievement at the time. I've just read the fellowship of the ring to my kids and it was a fun (though slow) experience.
As am adult The Stranger - Camus and The Old Man and the Sea had a big impact, I think because you can read and get the whole experience in a single sitting.
by intromert on 10/11/24, 2:19 PM
We had plenty of books at home, but none that I recall picking up out of sheer curiosity. However, starting around middle school, these books—discovered on my own in a bookstore—had a profound impact on me:
- The Elenium series by David Eddings (The Diamond Throne, The Ruby Knight, The Sapphire Rose)
- Starlight and Shadows series by Elaine Cunningham (Daughter of the Drow, Tangled Webs, Windwalker)
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Legend of Drizzt series by R.A. Salvatore (the first 16 books)
- Dragonlance series by Margaret Weis (Tales I and II, Raistlin Chronicles)
Now I have them in my own library at home, waiting my kids to grow up enough so they can grab and read (hopefully :)
by niobe on 10/7/24, 12:54 AM
Dune series. Still a unique and thoughtful take on a future space-faring humanity.
The idea of the 'Butlerian Jihad', a galactic wide outlawing of AI basically, seems even more prescient today than it would have in the 60s when it was written.
by droideqa on 10/6/24, 10:33 PM
“The Age of Spiritual Machines” by Ray Kurzweil.
by goralph on 10/7/24, 12:11 AM
I have an insatiable appetite for non-fiction - history, geography, politics, etc which I'm fairly certain can be traced back to a series of educational picture books I devoured as a child.
Each would survey some broad topic, for example Ancient Egypt. It would be full of detailed drawings/illustrations and accompanying text snippets. "What did the inside of a pyramid look like?", "How did the Ancient Egyptians use chariots?", and so on.
Mum would always buy me a new one every other week. The topics were diverse & broad, and so never got boring.
A bonus was when a subject I had read in these books happened to come up at school :-)
by rawgabbit on 10/7/24, 4:53 PM
https://www.amazon.com/Socratic-Logic-Questions-Aristotelian...
https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl/dp/...
https://www.amazon.com/History-Civil-1861-1865-James-Rhodes/...
by throwaway019254 on 10/6/24, 7:18 PM
The Catcher in the Rye
by blendo on 10/7/24, 7:31 AM
I read Orwell’s 1984 in junior high in the 1970s, during the Nixon/Viet Nam era.
I started it thinking it was just another scifi book about the future, but it served as a really good inoculation against governmental lies and cant.
by saltybytes on 10/7/24, 2:33 PM
- 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
by joseda-hg on 10/7/24, 1:43 PM
- Siddhartha
- Demian
- A Brave New World
- 1984
- A hundred years of solitude, although, I read it in Spanish and I don't know if it'll be as impactful with less cultural shared context
I remember being forced to read it in class, and being completely repulsed by it, then, during a black out finding the book and absolutely loving it
Something as small as suddenly being made aware of how a couple generations ago, people not too far away from me could be marveled at something as mundane to me as ice (Because pre-widespread refrigeration someone born in a dessert could just never see ice in their entire life) really got to me, and then the book itself happened
by steve_gh on 10/7/24, 6:53 AM
Gödel, Escher, Bach. Opened my eyes to the beauty of pattern and mathematics.
(Edited for typo)
by ameliap24 on 10/10/24, 4:56 AM
How to Win Friends and Influence People. I know it’s such a basic book, but it really gave me a head start when I was surrounded by bullies and a toxic family culture. It served as a guideline on how to interact with people when I didn’t have a role model to look up to.
It has helped me a lot in understanding how to respect others and navigate social interactions. I found it really grounding and useful, especially during times when I needed a framework for building healthy relationships.
by sky2224 on 10/6/24, 10:26 PM
A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
I didn't read it on my own personally, rather, it was read in my eighth grade class from beginning to end. Lots of discussion was had about the foreshadowing and meaning behind Dickens' words. At the time I really didn't appreciate it as much as I should have, but I'm incredibly grateful that my teacher made us read through that.
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brian was another one read in class that I think helped shape my perspective on the world for the better.
by em-bee on 10/7/24, 10:19 PM
the books that i remember reading are about a guy traveling the americas on horseback, some about traveling parts of the world on a bike. horatio hornblower, all books by karl may and several by rudyard kipling.
i don't know how much of an influence the books had. i started traveling around europe when i was a teenager. was it because of the books or did i read the books because i was already interested in exploring the world?
i know i started reading kipling because of the djunglebook and kim, which both have a significance in scouting.
what surprises me the most is that i didn't read any science fiction until much later, but now i am exclusively focused on that genre. this is worth noting because i wonder what would have happened if my dad had had any scifi books at home or if i had been exposed to them in some other way.
i believe the first scifi book was "brave new world", which was a book assignment in my exchange year in the US, but i didn't really pick up on the scifi aspect of that book either. it is significant because it is the second book i read in english but the first one that i enjoyed reading. the first book, which i hated, was "for whom the bell tolls", which i had picked because my teacher recommended hemmingway as an american author. it was a horrible book that took me almost a year to get through, and i always thought it was because english was my second language. but then i just flew through "brave new world" and realized that my english was not the problem, but hemmingway was. i wish my teacher had recommended someone like mark twain instead.
by mooreds on 10/7/24, 12:09 PM
A Spell for Chameleon, by Piers Anthony. It's the first fantasy novel I ever read. I picked it up from the school book fair on a whim. Led to a lifelong love of fantasy and science fiction. That influenced my college choice (I picked a liberal arts school where I could learn physics and writing; planned to be an SF author). That had a big impact on my life.
The series gets sillier and sillier as it goes on. I haven't re-read it lately, but I still have the copy.
by NathanielBaking on 10/7/24, 12:48 PM
It was the books in my Dad's library that first got me to read for pleasure. I remember him suggesting The Lord of the Rings but it would be several years before I read it. 50 years later I can't actually remember what I read first but over the course of my late childhood, the one that sticks out the most is:
The Magus by John Fowles
I was maybe 14 at the time. You just never know because kids are weird.
by sans_souse on 10/7/24, 2:07 AM
Siddhartha
by rsaarelm on 10/7/24, 8:01 AM
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.
by muzani on 10/6/24, 11:54 PM
Self help books like "Do It!" (can't find the author) and "The Success Principles" by Jack Canfield. They're simplified to the point that they're basically children's books, but they also provide a wide range of tools to deal with the future, with career and failure, and choosing your destiny.
by red-iron-pine on 10/7/24, 1:05 PM
Starship Troopers. Nothing like the movie, more of a political science treatise and tactical analysis of how power armor would work.
Convinced me to join the Marines out of high school. Then 9/11 happened and that choice got... not so great. Got a clearance and EW training out of it, and that worked out okay in the long run, I guess.
by openquery on 10/7/24, 9:36 AM
Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture.
A great, short read that gives you a very gentle introduction to the world of pure mathematics following the life of Uncle Petros, a mathematical prodigy who devoted his life to trying to solve Goldbach's Conjecture.
Ironically, this is one of the main reasons I didn't study mathematics.
by shauna101 on 10/7/24, 12:36 AM
A wizard of earthsea by Ursula Le Guin The moon is a hash mistress Heinlein Weirdstone of Brisingamen The red car
by jurassicfoxy on 10/7/24, 5:11 PM
"Island of the Blue Dolphins" (I was definitely younger than a teenager) stuck with me forever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_the_Blue_Dolphins
by ogou on 10/7/24, 1:40 PM
Family photo albums, especially when looking at them with older family members. Even ones that I've seen many times. It's the small domestic moments in those albums that I miss seeing, not the peak vacations. I wanted to live a life worth putting in the book.
by muddi900 on 10/7/24, 8:25 AM
Doestoyevsky's Crime and Punishment
I read it 20 years ago once, and I still think about it everyday.
by Mehticulous on 10/6/24, 7:50 PM
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
by ou_ryperd on 10/7/24, 4:18 PM
The Leopard Hunts in Darkness by Wilbur Smith gave me complete perspective of my political surroundings. The youth series called Fritz Deelman was futuristic and fantastic entertainment while thought provoking.
by rchaud on 10/7/24, 1:26 PM
I am embarrassed to admit it, but getting broadband/high-speed internet in the early 2000s kicked off an Internet addiction I am yet to resolve. Dial-up forced me to wait between page loads, or anticipate a connection breakage that would keep me grounded in the offline world. High speed changed all of that. We talk about smartphone addiction, but years before that, many of us were likely addicted to their laptops.
Getting acclimated to the information firehose was probably a net negative. For the first decade, I at least enjoyed high-quality online writing for free. The second decade devolved into half-formed, 140/280 character hot takes, videos and paywall popups, and yet I was still reading a lot of it. The algorithmic, SEO-ified consumer internet now has gotten so bad that I am finally scaling back my reading, but am still online due to FOMO on important events (although usually I end up realizing they are rarely as important as I think them to be).
by Quinzel on 10/7/24, 10:45 AM
Books that stood out to me as a teenager: - A series of Unfortunate Events (all of them)
because I liked the never ending mystery of it all, and I was both annoyed, and pleased by the fact that you never actually find out what actually happened to the parents. I know it was a fictional series, but it was, and still is, the only fictional books I’ve ever read. I was particularly impressed by the author’s playful use of words and punctuation that could draw me in and keep me interested and curious. He kind of inspired me to be more creative with the way I use words when I write. Not that I’ve done much writing for fun lately, but occasionally I do.
The other book, I’m almost embarrassed to admit was:
- The secret by Rhonda Byrne.
I got particularly obsessed with this book, I think partly because I grew up in quite adverse circumstances, I started to think that if I was just more positive, more positive things would happen for me. I really developed quite a strong positive and optimistic attitude to life, believing that if I just thought about good things often enough, good things would happen. In practicality this often meant that as a teenager sometimes I came across optimistic to the point of seeming delusional. As I’ve got older, I’ve really come to the conclusion that the book “the secret” is a load of crap. However, I do think that I cope better in life with adversity than some of the people I went to school with have because of how I frame life events, often choosing the frame them as the next opportunity and frame them in more positive ways. I think that’s something I gained from reading that book, even if it was mainly a bunch of nonsense.
The rest of the books I read as a teenager were to do with serial killers. Particularly Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy, and other stuff to do with weird, horrible, violent crimes.
by sheeeep86 on 10/7/24, 11:55 AM
I really liked the book 'Sophies world' it was a nice overview of western philosophy, written from the perspective of a teenager that is learning about the topic.
by graycat on 10/7/24, 9:38 AM
For kids, other than science and engineering:
Intimacy
(1) Knowledge. Give knowledge of yourself, what do like, don't like, want, believe, think, plan.
Notice that another person who stands off doesn't give such knowledge.
(2) Caring. Care about the other person, monitor their life, reach out to help them.
Notice how common it is for others just to give you their middle finger.
(3) Respect. Grant credibility, honor, pride, praise.
Notice how others may give you contempt and insults, try to manipulate, take advantage.
(4) Responsiveness. Monitor what they do, listen to what they say, use those two to think about their lives, and do respond appropriately.
Notice how others can not respond, just ignore, turn away.
(5) Affection. It's basic, involves physical contact, especially with facial contact, hand holding, hugging, and apparently is universal at least in all mammels.
Notice how others avoid physical contact.
Uh, as a teen boy dating a teen girls, mostly interested in (1)--(5) or just some anatomy lessons? With some girls, it's easier to have sex or even marriage than much or anything in (1)--(5).
By their teens, maybe boys/girls could benefit from realizing (1)--(5).
That's my "book" for kids!
by emrah on 10/7/24, 12:32 PM
Jules Verne books, particularly the submarine book and the moon book. I think that was my first foray into sci-fi as a kid. I think I was 7
by sprkwd on 10/7/24, 1:52 AM
Masquerade, by Kit Williams. He hid a treasure in the UK and wrote a book with clues on how to find it.
Such a wonderful thing to discover as a child.
by cbluth on 10/7/24, 9:55 AM
Stacks and stacks of encyclopedias and atlases, some for adults and some for kids, the way things work, books in foreign languages
by blonky on 10/6/24, 11:11 PM
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. It's a sci-fi adventure with self-reliance and counter-cultural themes.
by johannesrexx on 10/7/24, 12:57 AM
Alfred Morgan's The Boy Electrician
by dmitrygr on 10/7/24, 1:23 AM
Atlas Shrugged. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Animal Farm. Cat's Cradle. Brave New World. Fahrenheit 451. Flowers for Algernon.
by Fricken on 10/6/24, 8:11 PM
Well before I could read I was enamoured with my grandmother's National geographic collection.
by nuclearsugar on 10/7/24, 1:37 PM
Star Maker (1937) by Olaf Stapledon
by stonecharioteer on 10/7/24, 8:26 AM
The wind in the willows The Wizard of Oz
Indian folktales - The Panchatantra, The Jataka and the Hitopadesa.
by ArkimPhiri on 10/7/24, 8:22 AM
Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life. It's amazing
by holografix on 10/7/24, 12:45 PM
Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden which I read when I was 15.
by p0w3n3d on 10/7/24, 2:05 PM
Three Hearts And Three Lions - Poul Anderson
Ringworld - Larry Niven
by totalconfusion on 10/7/24, 1:45 PM
Charles Stross - Accelerando
Never read anything quite like it since
by MailleQuiMaille on 10/7/24, 1:17 AM
Lord of the flies.
by AGivant on 10/7/24, 12:38 AM
ABC book, still love reading it on rainy nights
by NotOffical on 10/6/24, 7:17 PM
Danny Dunn series
by qup on 10/8/24, 3:32 PM
Hatchet
The Forest Runners
Where the Red Fern Grows
by eYrKEC2 on 10/8/24, 12:27 AM
The Everlasting Man, by G.K. Chesterton.
by fidla on 10/6/24, 7:51 PM
Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
by akhileshwar09 on 10/11/24, 10:30 AM
CANT HURT ME ! by david goggins
by intelVISA on 10/7/24, 2:29 PM
Flowers for Algernon (Keyes)
Doors of Perception (Huxley)
We (Zamyatin)
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on 10/7/24, 10:44 AM
The Prince by Machiavelli.
by anis-mer on 10/6/24, 11:29 PM
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
by johnthescott on 10/8/24, 5:36 AM
Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas.
by Gud on 10/7/24, 2:06 PM
David Eddings, The Belgariad.
by sorokod on 10/7/24, 5:16 AM
Nine Stories - J.D. Salinger
by peutetre on 10/6/24, 11:07 PM
Dune.
by User23 on 10/7/24, 2:03 AM
The Illuminatus! Trilogy.
by shanecleveland on 10/8/24, 11:05 PM
Hatchet (Gary Paulsen)
by hyperbrainer on 10/7/24, 2:05 PM
Night by Elie Wiesel.
by rramadass on 10/7/24, 7:23 AM
Fiction:
1) The Sherlock Holmes Canon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_of_Sherlock_Holmes
My first exposure was through "The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes" and it made such a huge impression on me with its focus on the use of step-by-step logical reasoning to solving problems that in a sense it taught me to "think rationally" in real life. I then set about acquiring the complete canon and have read them all so many times that i can quote entire dialogues/passages from memory. The language used is also elegant and beautiful with lots of memorable phrases/quotes/quips etc. Every kid should be asked to read the complete canon and then discuss takeaways from them.
2) Charles Dickens - Started with Oliver Twist, Great Expectations
These books (read the unabridged versions) were my introduction to the "Human Condition/Human Values" faced by people from different economic strata. His books span different genres but always end with a positive note. The writing style is beautiful with a healthy dose of Melodrama, Humour, Vivid descriptions etc. which draw you in and keep you engaged. Here is a good essay on his narrative technique - https://www.lsj.org/literature/essays/dickens
Non-Fiction:
1) Physics for Entertainment by Yakov Perelman - You can get scans of all his and other Soviet authors books at - https://mirtitles.org/
In those days (80s in India) American/British books were generally not available and too costly but Soviet books were easily available and very affordable. My dad bought me this 2-vol set and that motivated my lifelong interest in Science. An example: I was enamoured of the protagonist in "The Invisible Man" by H.G.Wells but Perelman uses it as a scientific case study and shows that instead of being a most powerful man (because he is invisible) he would be the most powerless/pathetic man. Read the book to find out why :-) It also kick-started my collection of Soviet Science books eg. "Science For Everyone" and "Little Mathematics Library" series. Teachers/Students should take a look at these books and use them productively in the classroom/self-study. They are concise, precise with no fluff and a high s/n ratio.
by sdgluck on 10/7/24, 2:05 PM
Never Let Me Go
by shauna101 on 10/7/24, 12:37 AM
Just read to them! Every day ! For hours