When I saw you post I was like, "Holy Crap, someone else read that book?" I always wanted to reread it and I couldn't locate a copy on-line at that time and so I gave up on it. Now it's too expensive...heh.

Zinn retells the American narrative through the eyes of the less fortunate, and provides a powerful counterpoint to popular American history.

(((hugs))) I'm not sure if it influenced me, but remember my aunt reading it to me, then reading on my own. I plan to read it to my granddaughter.

and lives near me now.

come to mind.

On edit, When I was younger, "My Side of the Mountain" and "Swiss Family Robinson" were favorites of mine.


Thanks for the thread, Quixote.

I saw the film version advertised on TCM the other day, had not thought of it in years....

Jon Stewart's book "America" (A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction) are also some of my favorite books.

life was not tough for me; my family were Alaska homesteaders, self sufficient.

Plato's Republic (esp. the Parable of the Sun)
John G. Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks
Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace

Desert Solitaire got me into Monkeywrench Gang and that got me into others...

Those have definitely influenced my life

... and I took MWG as my Bible.

My lawyer told me to say nothing more.

I've always wanted to live out another sequel to MWG.

The things that people did seem silly and primitive now that we have the advantage of 400 years of scientific inquiry on our side, but it makes me wonder about the things we take for truth now, how ridiculous will they seem in another 400 years?

Chock full of amazing truths about work, life, getting to financial independence, etc.

A Distant Mirror - Tuchman - the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The Culture of Contentment - Galbraith - I do think the contentment has been orchestrated by the 1%

That was a different time and I was different. I think I still have it and will have to drag it out.

An important part of this discussion is that the influence of a book on a person depends on where that person is at the time. For example "Catch 22" had a big impact at the time I read it but wouldnt have that same impact now.

By Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I could also say 'The Tempest' by William Shakespeare.

This week, the book most influencing my life comes out tomorrow. Yep.

But I will tell you that the internet with all of its books has been amazing. I can read anything and everything. I loved the library. I would skip class to go to the library and read.

The internet is like the world's biggest library and I take advantage of that.

followed by The Lorax and the Butter Battle Book.

I can't rule out any Judy Blume book, BTW.

I have a string.
Do you have a string?
I have a string.

I have it put up now.

I can't say that any one book has influenced the way I live my life--I'd say common sense and humanity take care of that automatically.

However, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle had quite an impact on me when I read it and probably played a role in my almost life-long vegetarianism. I read Native Son by Richard Wright in my early 20's and that really opened my eyes to racial social injustices. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins opened my eyes to quite a few things that took the polish off America's halo for me and when I was quite young I really liked Abe Lincoln's biography and I also really appreciated Susan B. Anthony's biography because it showed how hard women had to work to get the vote and how most men (at the time) thought it better a black man vote than a woman of any color because of his dangly bits making him exceptionally smarter than women without our dangly bits.

As a child, Beautiful Joe (about animal abuse), charlottes Web.
Early teen John Hersey 's Hiroshima, snuck from the adult library.
Then of course To Kill a Mockingbird, which was SO much more than the wonderful movie.

And on and on and on. While The Bible was not a favorite, it has had a huge influence in both my parent's librul interpretation as well as recent congress's "fuck the people praise the lord" one.

But often whatever I was reading, which is and has been a lot from deep to escapism.

I can't single out one book that has influenced my thinking more than others, but that one showed a young me that there were authors out there, decades older than I was, with whom I shared a connection. I think Vonnegut and I belong to the same karass, and I discovered a great many other writers who belong in there too. KV was first though, and remains my go to when I start to feel just a little shaken in my world view.

Vonnegut is missed.

I

And the rare movie that lived up to the book.

One of my favs too

also.

There's billions of books out there. A lot of them deserve to be very influential. Not all of them in the same place. I can cite a diversity; Karl Marx, Frank Herbert, Mircea Eliade, Paulo Bacigalupi, Larry Niven, Naomi Klein, Charles Darwin, Black Elk, Tariq Ali, Rumi, Howard Zinn, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Brian Jaques, Richard Dawkins, David Quammen, Jack Horner, and hundreds of others.

How can I read as much as I do, absorb what I do, and pretend that one book, just one, is the be-all end-all formative text of my life?

Upton Sinclair.

I learned at an early age from MAD, starting with this first issue that I read, that newspapers, TV, the movies and conventional "wisdom" are full of lies.

MAD taught me some real skepticism at a very early age.

short and to the point.

To kill a Mockingbird also

story intensely. It made me laugh and cry, and it awed me with Salinger's ability to create something that could touch me so deeply on so many levels. I can't put it or any one book as my number one in any category, but it is certainly in the top tier.

Some interesting discussion of this book in the Amazon reviews.

Mostly, we are all just orphans

A sort of Nature/Self-Help Deal.

Seriously.

take us to the (Army/Air Force) Base library and let us check out as many books as we could carry. Library day was always a huge event from ages 6-13. Lois Lenski's books were a favorites of mine from the time I could read big words. She wrote about children in different situations and they always sounded like someone I would love to have as friends.

Also there were the Moffat books. Did you read about the Moffat Family?

Thanks for the recs.

Really quite enlightening as to how they got along.

Another book I remember is the Trolley Car Family. Homeless during the Depression, they found an old trolley to make into a home.

a little girl,last summer I found 7 of them at a garage sale,3 of them 1st editions,all in wonderful shape.I was so happy and they are now sitting on my bookshelf.

Congratulations to you!

By James Kunetka and (pre-woo) Whitley Strieber.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warday

about environmental degradation called "Nature's End" that I like.

Well spotted! The opening incident in Denver was indeed reminiscent of "Warday." The book also did a good job of predicting the rise of social media and how it can be used to propagandize public policy.

Although it didn't have the same lasting impact on me as "Warday," perhaps it merits a repeat reading, since it's been at least a decade for me.

Not wanting to be Willie Loman it was the book that convinced me to join the army. Best decision I ever made.

That was a bolt of lightning -- it completely changed my life. In the moment of that bolt I realized I didn't have to be a Christian. I was pretty slow as a young person, from a small town, it never occurred to me that I didn't have to go to church because everyone I knew did. Existentialism! Fun! Then "Tropic of Cancer" and Anais Nin.

I'm going to have find a copy and read it again. Thanks for mentioning it!

Just kidding.

Who can name just one book? I think HRC's answer is as good as anything.

I'd rather have a President influenced by the teachings of Jesus than one whose biggest influence was The Fountainhead.

Runner-up would be "Living on the Earth" by Alicia Bay Laurel.

Third place goes to "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman.

Honorary Mention goes to "The Whole Earth Catalogue".

Be Here Now followed by Autobiography of a Yogi.

Fire in the Lake and the Pentagon Papers were both very influential in my life. I knew that the US involvement in Vietnam War was wrong and caused so many soldiers to die needlessly, but I really didn't understand the background and the evil maneuvering that took place in the 1940s and 50s that inexorably led to the "war". It didn't just happen in a day or a month or a year, and the Tokin Gulf incident, even if it occurred (probably didn't) was just one more small step into the quagmire. The historical perspective described in Fire in the Lake and supplemented by Danial Ellsberg's disclosure of the official documentation of our involvement led me to question other foreign and domestic policies. Yes, there was a lot of history that led to Bush's was on Iraq. Yes, Snowden is a hero for releasing official records that describe our country's dealings with both enemies and allies alike.

Two books that I read when I was 11 ... Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.

I have read so many books .... but I can still "feel" what I felt when I read those two (42 years later)

by Herman Hesse.

but it certainly is one I reread every so often to remind me of just how damn materialistic I am.

I read it when I was in Vietnam. It helped to shape my ideas about war and peace. I recall that I loaned the book to a friend and he refused to cut his hair afterwards and was punished with an Article 15 and threatened expulsion from the Army.

Learning to appreciate.....period. Music, life, people.... no matter how it comes to you.

Read it at 17, changed the course of my life, as well as everything else by Hesse.
Next it was Nikos Kazantzakis.

I always read voraciously from grade school onward so it's very hard to single out one book. Chalice and the Blade gave me something entirely new to think about human history with, though.