Books that changed your life/perspective?

[TSherbs]

When I was a younger man my pick would have been Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums.

I could have written this same sentence.

I recommend the works of Nassim Taleb- read them in order: Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan and Antifragile. These books changed how I gather and consume information, make decisions and see the world.

This is my current favorite translation of the Dao. It's amazing- it includes explanations and criticism from the last 2000 years.

A recent book well worth a read: The Dao of Capital. If you like the Dao, the Austrian School of Economics and pine trees, this book is great.

I came to Dharma Bums later in life. Hesse's Siddhartha bowled me over when I was 20. Then I read Nausea, by Sartre. A one-two punch.

Red Pine is fabulous.

[Titivillus]

Poetic Eddas by S. Sturluson
Neuromancer by W. Gibson
Labryinths by J Borges
Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by P. Reps

I've got North of 3 thousand books on my Kindle and can get through a normal size novel in about 4 hrs. So I do read a lot and I would say that the 4 examples above changed me in that they pointed me toward a much larger number of books and connected authors.

[bluesea]

Aldous Huxley - Brave New World. I'd like to say Island was more influential, but that would be more in the 70's-80's. Real life took over shortly thereafter.

[Scrawler]

Winnie the Pooh
Brave New World
Atlas Shrugged
The Jerusalem Bible Readers Edition
The Quran
The Universe from Nothing
Mien Kampf
A Canticle for Leibowitz

In no particular order

[jar]

Language in Though and Action

[cajunphil]

Alas Babylon by Pat Frank. Published in the same year as A Canticle for Liebowitz.. Frank takes a different twist.

Two that were not as popular but gave me a perspective were Language, Truth, and Logic by A.J. Ayers and Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, a lightweight but amazing book on what can happen when communications escape corporate, governmental, and religious control. I thought that Crying accounted for the formation of nations from states in Europe and presaged the collapse of the Soviet Union, the present day American election, and access to pen information on FPGeeks and other forums. I always keep a couple of copies of these two around to give away. I haven't reread Canticle in 30 years, so thanks for the reminder; I'll have to dig up a copy.

[stub]

Since this isn't Favorites, but rather books that changed your perspective (though changed your life also kind of gets back to the notion of favorites &, anything that you read that has that big an impact likely changes your life and perspective blah blah blah)....

I'lll stick with change your perspective, in a literal sense, a book that after you read it made the world look different to you or changed how you navigated the world around you. It is a snobby choice but if you all are brave enough to namecheck that hack Rand (yuck) i'll but venture forth too:

Roland Barthes' rich, entertaining, and brilliant Mythologies

</here endeth the snobbery>

[stub]

It is a snobby choice but if you all are brave enough to namecheck that hack Rand (yuck) i'll but venture forth too:

Roland Barthes' rich, entertaining, and brilliant Mythologies

</here endeth the snobbery>

A possible alternative would be the Sept. 1985 issue of Juggs magazine. TAKE YER PICK.

[Brilliant Bill]

Life/perspective changing...

There are probably 100 or more, but I'll cite two that engendered fundamental changes.

1. The Art of Clear Thinking by Rudolf Flesch. Published in 1951, I read it as a teen and immediately embraced the idea that tools can be used to think clearly regardless the complications of circumstances.

2. The Outsider by Colin Wilson. I read it in an Alienation in Literature course in college. It spoke to me personally in a way nothing else had, and it gave me a road map for a world where people like me exist outside the norms of conventional society.

[bjmoose]

When I was 14 I was given a copy of "Stranger In A Strange Land" by Robert A. Heinlein. It influenced me greatly during my "formative" years - especially my approach to education, people, and religion. And I find that lo, these many years later, it hasn't changed all that much...

[Lady Onogaro]

Recently I read Stephen Pressfield's The War of Art, and I found it very helpful in reshaping my ideas about creativity and, in particular, writing.

Other books that were important to me in one way or another (in no particular order):

Baha'u'llah and the New Era by J. E. Esslemont
A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr
Making Sex by Thomas Laqueur
The Women and the Men by Nikki Giovanni

I've certainly had a lot of discussions around Thomas Moore's The Care of the Soul.

I teach literature courses, so I'm always coming across ideas in books that I respond to in one way or other.

[TSherbs]

True Love -- Thich Nhat Hanh

[VertOlive]

In my youth: The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham

At a critical crossroads: Father Elijah by Michael OBrien

In recent years: Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis' series of Greek Lectio Divina--Fire of Mercy Heart of the Word. The final volumes are still being written. If I never read another writer in my remaining years, I will die content.

[writingrav]

God in Search of Man by Abraham Joshua Heschel

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[Brilliant Bill]

Rabbi Heschel -- a leading light of my spiritual journeying!

God in Search of Man by Abraham Joshua Heschel

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[Chuasam]

The Little Prince

[RocketRyan]

Bird song by sabastian faulks is fantastic and left me thinking for months. Also the post office, I forget the author really made me look at myself from another perspective. Both books make you think about human behaviour, or at least made me think.

[Blue Note]

When I was 14 I was given a copy of "Stranger In A Strange Land" by Robert A. Heinlein. It influenced me greatly during my "formative" years - especially my approach to education, people, and religion. And I find that lo, these many years later, it hasn't changed all that much...

Ditto to everything you said. Definitely a game changer.

[Blue Note]

Half a dozen out of many dozens.

Slaughterhouse Five--Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Crime and Punishment--Fyodor Dostoevsky
India: A Wounded Civilization--V.S. Naipaul
Slowly Down the Ganges--Eric Newby
Kitchen Confidential--Anthony Bourdain
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual for the Compleat Idiot--John Muir.