The great thing about reading is that the stories can teach us new things! So what book has made an impact on your life or changed it for the better? Mine would be 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher A girl who committed suicide leaves 13 tapes, each explaining how an individual person had an impact on her decision. I was bullied a lot at school and depression was the result of that, so it really hit home! It also makes you think about how you treat others and should be careful about what you say. My first book is inspired by this story because of similar experiences I've had and I believe you can never write too much about this subject.
To Kill a Mockingbird, and just as impactful, Heart of Darkness. If I must add a third, it would be, Lord of the Flies.
Would you believe "The Fox and The Hound"? The original one, not the Disney Version. By reading the originals, it opens a favorite movie or TV Show up beyond what one can imagine sometimes. Take the original Planet of the Apes. Short book but so much different than the movie.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Was advised to read the ancient Greeks before reading Neitzsche. One of my professors strongly suggested doing so while I was in my 1st year university back in the day. I totally concur, even in the later phases of life.
'The white seal' (Kippling), 'The cat who walked by himself' (Kippling), 'Im All verschollen' (have to find the book, will update the author), 'Memory' (Bujold).
Oh my yes. I'd pass along a link if I could but just do a search on the Fox and the Hound by Daniel P. Mannix on Wikipedia. Let's just say Todd isn't so cute and cuddly in the original version.
If you're speaking of impact on my writing, I'd have to say it was Mary Stewart's historically accurate (as far as we know) Merlin trilogy. I enjoyed reading her romance/mysteries in the late 50s and early 60s, but this is the first book she wrote that was neither. I loved her unabashedly emotional, but fully adult style of writing. Reading The Crystal Cave was when I realised this style could also be applied to well-researched non-romance novels—to stories with real meat on them. It was an eye-opener.
Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. It set me on a journey of endless fascination with all things culinary, which seem to find their way into every book I write.
I liked that book, too! Didn't send me on a culinary journey, but made me at least SOMEWHAT interested, which was a pretty big step from where I started!
Crime and Punishment- that cat and mouse game is delicious... ok it has a horrible tacked on ending, but the rest of it is fantastic. The Foundation Trilogy- you can write in omniscient, have huge time jumps and several MCs and your story can still come together brilliantly. The Gormenghast Trilogy- just beautiful. And most importantly... anything by Steinbeck... just a truly brilliant, brilliant writer. Ok, I'm done...
Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury. The Conquerors Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn Warbots, by G. Harry Stine ( more of a comical take in my opinion when it comes to Sci-fi War genre.)
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. Never read anything else which speaks so powerfully about the experiences of people of colour.
I'm an asexual/aromantic virgin. I did not know that I was aro/ace when I was 12, I thought I was a broken straight kid. I thought that wanting sexual/romantic relationships was as fundamental to "human being" as eating and breathing. Before my dad told me that "asexual" was a thing, the only reference to my own existence that I could find in the world was the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illnesses, Revised 4th Edition, describing "Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder." The steps to my orientation were: Dad telling me at 15 that "asexual" was a thing and that he was pretty sure that I was Reading in a book of trivia that 1% of the population are estimated to be asexual (later finding out that it's closer to 4%) Arthur Conan Doyle's second Sherlock Holmes novel A Sign of Four. I had accepted by this point that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with my orientation, but I thought that my life would be less personally difficult if I was more like everybody else, so I still tried to make myself feel attraction for girls at my school. When I read A Sign of Four, the scene that hit me was Watson remarking at how beautiful a woman was who had just hired Holmes, only for Holmes to remark that he hadn't noticed, explaining to Watson that he went out of his way not to let attraction to people interfere with his life. I had been trying to be straight for a while, and reading literally the symbol of genius in all of literature explaining that he made a conscious effort to be more like me because it made his life easier rather than harder... Amazing. Finding the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network's website and registering under the name "Sherlock Holmes" to interact with other people like me Everything that I have ever written in my life has been to give other people what Conan Doyle gave me.
A book that really left a lasting impression on me was Boy In The Striped Pajamas by John Boyne. I think the reason it had such a lasting impression on me was the ending. Anyone who has read this book knows what I'm talking about. It's an ending that you have to reread and then stop and think about for a while, not because its confusing but because your mind is trying to process all the emotions.
As a child, I could never read novels. I couldn't read them. They didn't interest me in the slightest. Literature was the most difficult subject in school after French. ETA: I wasn't able to willingly suspend disbelief. We had a junior sort of encyclopedia that I read through. Completely. For my thirteenth birthday, I got an Encyclopaedia Britannica which I read every day, pulling out a volume at random and relishing all the facts I absorbed. Then, when I was around 19 or 20, I read Crime and Punishment and have been reading novels ever since. So I guess that book had an impact. It changed my attitude toward literature. Something similar is going on these days with poetry.
Neverwhere by Neil Gaimen It introduced me to a whole style and genre I didn't know existed. Discovering that kind of creativity was what drove me to seek out more and to develop my own creativity.
The Prince by Machiavelli It completely explains the philosophy of Western politics without taking up many pages at all. It could not be more relevant in our day and age. I now see political moves in terms of the fox and the lion.
Blindsight by Peter Watts. Spoiler Showed me how bad my strategy of abstract thinking and contemplation is for actually accomplishing things. I'm easily in the 99.9% percentile of humanity, but I haven't written or done hardly anything and now I know why. This book will change you. The Black Swan by Taleb, for self-explanatory reasons.
I award you all of the points, and may God bless your soul I found that book when I first started researching how to make non-human psychology uniquely distinct from human psychology for SciFi/Fantasy works. The author has the whole book on his website for free, and I actually read the Notes and References – how vampire eyes works, how the aliens evolve without genes, and of course the cornerstone: how sentience is different from intelligence – before reading the story itself Well, most of it, parts were beyond me, but the parts that I did read were hilarious: [A] variety of researchers have made objects pop in and out of the visual field unnoticed, conducted conversations with hapless subjects who never realised that their conversational partner had changed halfway through the interview, and generally proven that the Human brain just fails to notice an awful lot of what's going on around it. Check out the demos at the website of the Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois and you'll see what I mean. This really is rather mind-blowing, people. There could be Scientologists walking among us right now and if they moved just right, we'd never even see them. I am the cynical, vindictive misanthrope that I am today in large part due to what Peter Watts taught me about how humans think (or don't, as the case may be).
Sounds cheesy, super cheesy actually, but My Sister's Keeper. It was conjoined with another incident, in which a freind of mine dealt with cancer herself. Put both together, and since then my career direction is medicine. (No, not writing, actually.)
