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[danny_boy]

In LarryC's thread on influential books I said that Dune had changed my life.  Had I not read Dune (as a linguistics undergrad), I may not have developed the interest I did in Arabia and "desert cultures" and so may not have ended up taking Arabic and then going to Saudi Arabia.  And if I hadn't done these things, well, I just wouldn't have become the "me" I am.

How about you?  How has some specific piece of writing ACTUALLY changed your life?

[larryc]

Walden. It fed into my teenage arrogance and narcissism even as it deepened my appreciation of nature and solitude. Walden was part of the path that took me to the Appalachian Trail, to multiple summers working for the Park Service, to exploring other transcendentalists and then other great literature, and to learning to revel in solitude and silence. But it also encouraged me to be a little sh-t sometimes.

[t_folk]

Walden. It fed into my teenage arrogance and narcissism even as it deepened my appreciation of nature and solitude. Walden was part of the path that took me to the Appalachian Trail, to multiple summers working for the Park Service, to exploring other transcendentalists and then other great literature, and to learning to revel in solitude and silence. But it also encouraged me to be a little sh-t sometimes.

Walden was the reason I spent the summer between my junior and senior year in HS hiking 630 miles on the AT - just me and my dog. It was an amazing time. Living in Appalachia I had always been an avid hiker and spent most of my summers on Hogpen Gap or Tesnatee Gap near my home, but that book made me commit to a larger endeavor.

HST's Hell's Angels led me to journalism and to pick up and leave everything I had ever known at 20 to edit a small weekly in rural Colorado.

[voxprincipalis]

Walden. It fed into my teenage arrogance and narcissism even as it deepened my appreciation of nature and solitude. Walden was part of the path that took me to the Appalachian Trail, to multiple summers working for the Park Service, to exploring other transcendentalists and then other great literature, and to learning to revel in solitude and silence. But it also encouraged me to be a little sh-t sometimes.

Without self-awareness, we receive from any text what we are prepared to receive from it -- or what we are looking for. This is true of Walden, Ayn Rand (see the other thread), the Bible, or the Tao Te Ching.

With self-awareness, it is possible to choose what to take from a text and what to leave behind.

VP

[big_giant_head]

Stephen J. Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. 

I never read the second half (about intelligence testing), because the first half (about 19th century racial "science") threw me into an existential funk.  What I took away from it was that it is nearly impossible to identify one's own biases and to see how much that seems unquestionable to people in any given era might be seen as laughable, naive, or even evil by people in another era. 

The scientists Gould refers to were doing perfectly acceptable work in their time, based on assumptions and prejudices that were never questioned (that were perhaps not questionable) by the respected minds of their generation.  And when the data they produced contradicted their hypotheses, they made (apparently unconscious) errors in simple math that allowed them to confirm the "truths" they already thought they knew.  They had, I concluded, a deep emotional need to have their biases confirmed.  And because they all had the same biases, it worked for decades. 

It made me change majors from the social sciences to the humanities, where that kind of uncertainty and ambiguity is studied like a cell on a slide.  No.  We roll around in it like a dog with a particularly juicy dead fish.

(And yes, I do understand that science has ways of discovering and progressing past these kinds of mistakes.  That's its major strength.  But I am still fascinated by the conditions of culture that create the bubbles of assumption that give rise to the the mistakes in the first place.)

[spork]

The first book I read on my own (in contrast to being read to), in kindergarten.  The equivalent of Dick and Jane; I believe the plot involved a dog named Tip.  There were probably two sentences every other page.  For the entire spring half of the school year, the class went through the book one page, or one sentence, at a time.  Toward the end of the year I asked the teacher if I could take the book home so I could try reading it on my own.  She said yes.  I read it in one night and realized that reading was 1) not as complex as we kindergarteners had been led to believe, and 2) a lot more fun as a solitary rather than as a group activity.  From that point on I was hooked.

[sciencephd]

The Sacred Canopy; Peter Berger. 

Was part of changing my views about religion, and its place in society.

[saguaro]

The first book I read on my own (in contrast to being read to), in kindergarten.  The equivalent of Dick and Jane; I believe the plot involved a dog named Tip.  There were probably two sentences every other page.  For the entire spring half of the school year, the class went through the book one page, or one sentence, at a time.  Toward the end of the year I asked the teacher if I could take the book home so I could try reading it on my own.  She said yes.  I read it in one night and realized that reading was 1) not as complex as we kindergarteners had been led to believe, and 2) a lot more fun as a solitary rather than as a group activity.  From that point on I was hooked.

Could it be Flip? The Ginn Basic Readers had Tom, Susan, Betty, Mother, Father, and Flip. Good stuff. I'm curious because that's what I used.

[neutralname]

When I was young and impressionable, I read Colin Wilson's The Outsider, along with Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment.  I'm not sure whether these changed my life or whether I was going in that direction anyway, but certainly they seemed profound and important to me at the time.

[eumaios]

I think the book was called Run, Dog, Run, and I think it had a mostly red cover. I've no idea what happens in the story, but I do, just barely, remember what the dog looked like and how much I loved looking at that book. That was the book that hooked me.

Green Eggs and Ham taught me that words are just the coolest toys ever invented. Dr. Seuss is why I like S. J. Perelman.

The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Swiss Family Robinson made me prefer stories in print to stories on film.

Dandelion Wine amazed me because it seemed so familiar, so comfortable. Hardly anything in that book actually corresponded with anything in my 12-year-old life, yet at the same time Dandelion Wine seemed to be about me. I'm pretty sure Ray Bradbury was the first author to make me see what real writing is and what it can do.

Anyway, those books, plus Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, and The Lost World, are why I majored in English. If my parents had given me an Erector Set a couple of years earlier, maybe I would have ended up in a racket that pays.

[helpful]

Two books. I read War and Peace by Tolstoy on a road trip when I was about 12. I also read the Foundation series by Asimov. Both of them got me interested in the big, wide world and universe.

[conjugate]

Yes, Asimov.  I read (and still have dozens of) his science essays.  But in some ways, this question is a bit like asking how a particular amino acid has changed my physical appearance.  (By that, I mean that there's a huge number of them and it's hard to single out any one.)

I have to think about it for a while, but perhaps the first book that made me interested in what I am interested in is Asimov's collection The Martian Way and Other Stories.  I was able to buy a copy with my allowance (less than a dollar at the time) and it really inspired me.  I think that was the first book of his that I found, but around the same time I also found Asimov's Earth is Room Enough and several other short story collections.  One of those was first, and got me hooked into SF, which got me interested in science, which got me interested in physics, which got me interested in math, which is where I am today.  I still have those books, too.

[locutus]

It's a difficult question. Plenty of books might have been influential. But it's difficult to think of anything that flat out changed my life.

Carl Sagan's Contact perhaps. Though that basically just reaffirmed many of my thoughts on science and religion. My life wasn't really changed in any way.

[elsie]

When I was around 13-14, I read As You Like It and Pride and Prejudice. In those two books I found my role models. The intelligence, wit and compassion of Rosalind and Elizabeth Bennet showed me the kind of woman I wanted to grow up to be.

[mdwlark]

A friend gave me a strange little book called "Notes to Myself" by Hugh Prather.  This is not great literature or philosophy by any means.  Prather had more than a few philosophical blind spots, but he said what I needed to hear.

At the time I was very involved in living my life to please others, and was constantly confronted with the fact that others can never be pleased.  Prather's comments freed me from that obsession, but unfortunately, not from those people.   So instead of escaping from toxic people, I just annoyed and offended them, but I granted  myself the freedom to have my own values and thoughts. That alone was revolutionary and has stayed with me.  I didn't like the book he wrote as a sequel. 

An example of his ideas: "If someone criticizes me, I am not any less for that.  It is not criticism of me, but critical thinking from him..."   

On a loftier note, I went on a Shakespeare kick that lasted many years.  I digested King Lear, The Tempest, and the Winter's Tale.   Lear was the most influential; The Tempest is my favorite.  The trial of the queen blew me away in the Winter's Tale.  The themes of estrangement, injustice, reconciliation and redemption resonated deeply because I felt so alienated on so many levels and needed to find redemption from it.  Being blind and foolish also hit home. I was also influenced by Richard II, Henry IV part I, Coriolanus, and Henry VIII (Queen Catherine's strength, again, the unjust trial of a queen--arrogance rejecting and damaging that which is most noble).

I can't think of a single book in my profession that is that influential.  Sad.