Just to agree, the first book I thought of was Zen. Just because I believe in quality over quantity. However I think if a book made you who you are, you aren't much.

Deep 🙄

Of course you're going to be deeply affected by wise words at an impressionable age. If you're not, you're likely very self absorbed and quite likely autistic.

user-removed

EDIT; come on Rusty, that was a wee bit amusing

Sorry, but it does make me blub. Lost opportunities, innocence & all that.

Having said that, anything by Leslie Thomas or the Spike Milligan war biographies have me crying like a fat girl in a cake shop as well…….. 😀

I struggle to understand why Ernesto would suggest that I'd comment on a book that I hadn't read: What a sad, argumentative man he appears to be – always needing justification, then resorting to insults when challenged.

I love the music and literature threads on here: I've picked up on loads of things that would otherwise have passed me by – surely that's the point?

ernie, care to contribute, or would you prefer to just assume the superior position, as usual?

No, I would rather just sit here smugly confident of me and Graucho Marx's superior sense of humour

No, I would rather just sit here smugly confident of me and Graucho Marx's superior sense of humour

Yep, you really make this forum what it is.

Rusty – he wasn't. He was making a joke about not being able to read whilst ones' eyes are filled with nostalgic tears.

Oh, OK, in that case I apologise wholeheartedly.

On the road, by Jack Kerouac

Must read some of the aforementioned titles however…

Not a fan of Marx Rusty Spanner – eh ?

"From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it" Groucho Marx

On the road by Jack Kerouac +1

I read it aged about 18 and didn't let go of the idea of hitchiking till i was 26, got divorced met new girlfriend and flew to Southern Spain and hitchiked around Europe 😛 and continued all the way round the planet.

And didn't go home for 5yrs.

Thanks Jack 😉

Neccessary illusons by noam Chomsky. Entirely changed my outlook, and stopped doing straight away something that had been my life up to that point.

Quite a few: Hesse would have to be up there having read the lot in one summer; Huxley and BNW; Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish; The Hashish Club (vols 1&2); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus; more recently Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, Bergson's Creative Evolution and Hakim Bey's TAZ (The Temporary Autonomous Zone).

Slaughterhouse 5
Extreme Rock
Touching The Void

Edward Abbey – read his books as he is sadly under-read in the UK. Desert Solitaire is mostly about Moab if you need another reason!

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman – shaped the way I look at nearly every single work-related task (and many others) since I read it 13 years ago.

Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintainence

Read it at my first Glastonbury aged 16 as I hid from the torrential rain upon arrival

The book was stolen along with my rucksack on the last day of the festival!

Can't really think of one that massively changed me – Crime and Punishment had a huge influence on my reading, though. Before that I just read SF / fantasy and could never get into the classics. To read something by a dead Russian bloke that was fast-paced, super readable and deeply cool was a major eye-opener – Never looked back.

Ok not a book, but reading it cover to cover throughout my teens and 20s had a bigger influence on me than anything else. And it wasn't just about music back then.

Goodnight Mr Tom
Grapes of Wrath

Great thread. I'd like to say Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, but this probably had more of a role:

I too find it difficult to comprehend this idea that a book can have enough influence on someone to cause them to change their outlook on life.. (I guess I haven't read the right books yet)

I think the one book that has changed the pattern of my thinking was a self-help book on relationships… 😕

1984, every time I read it I'm amazed at how precient most of its ideas are.

Faranheit 451, for similar reasons to 1984

Catch 22, an absolutely brilliant satire.

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, probably my favourite book, can't say its influenced my life in any great way though, I've have yet to find myslelf on a spacecraft in a dressing gown, clutching a towel!

A woman in Hebden Bridge Trades Club on Monday night was reading this:

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry……..

Gordimhor- havr you read 'The return of John McNab', another by Andrew Greig.
MKat, I dont know if they changed my outlook on life as much as made me examine ideas. Im quite surprised that some folk seem to feel that learning from, and being influenced by others somehow lessens you. Some of the best thinking in history has been expressed through writing, I for one am happy to consider the ideas of others.

samuri

sounds eerily similar to me tbh, in addition to the horror stuff (james herbert and stephen king, dean r koontz etc) did you ever read a fantasy writer stephen donaldson? he did the chronicles of thomas covenant, and i loved them as a kid, re reading them now actually….

I like Yoga as much as the next man, its a great way of maintaining flexibility, but some people really do rip the arse out of it. Mind you I do have a massive blind spot when it comes to anything 'spiritual'.

I can't recall any one book making me who I am. As for Catch 22 and Catcher in the Rye mentioned above, I thought they were both over-rated. Crime and Punishment was a v pleasant surprise, but again hardly something that moulded me.

The book that I could not get enough of as a kid and still recall fondly now was an Usbourne book of the Sea. It makes me wonder if I should have been a marine biologist or something similar

"Down and Out in Paris and London" always flavoured my outlook life after reading it.

Dare I suggest "The Screwtape Letters" with so many Dawkins fans around?

Heh, well I'm certainly not disputing that we learn things from books – but I guess I haven't read anything that has shaped my views on life to such a degree that I can remember them 😐

Don't think I've been influenced by any books. I used to read loads but I can't think how any of them changed me. I read books that were generally adventure books or total fiction in odd ways, but in no way do I see how they would have encroached on my real life. My real life fed my reading of the books, not vice versa. What an odd concept.

Rusty Spanner – Member

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry……..

😐 Sounds like a difficult one Rusty

My real life fed my reading of the books, not vice versa. What an odd concept

What is an odd concept? Your view of your own reading habits, or that some other folk may have been inspired or had their outlook altered by reading something?

Without a doubt, the most influential book I have ever read is:

The the Russian girl I met in Terragona will testify to it's power…
The cover quote from 'Loaded' cheapens the whole thing a bit, sadly.

Another On the Road fan here. I must have been 17 or 18 when I read it. Then as a mature-ish student I did my dissertation on Kerouac and got heavily in Hunter S Thompson and today I'm a writer/journalist.

On the road, by Jack Kerouac and lots of books about merchant shipping in the war of my dads.
Led me to an extended trip of 10 years then came back and went off on a boat for 3 years.
The books didn't make me do it just had a big sign up saying you can do it.

Dare I suggest "The Screwtape Letters" with so many Dawkins fans around?

Of course you may – if you seriously want to promote the works of a abject, pompous woodentop who wrote like a 15-year-old….

When I was 12, THIS was the one that made me realise the religion my stupid parents were trying to force on me was just a load of risible, dumb, ignorant twiffle…

Quite a few above have been important and therefore had probably had some effect but one that made me think differently for a few weeks was "Speed of Dark' by Elizabeth Moon. And another was The Wrench by Primo Levi and well there are a few….

American Pyscho made me all I am today 😈

The Beano