Probably Starship Troopers, I don't even remember when I read it, but it sure did affect my worldview from a young age.
I was reading at a pretty young age, so I don't actually know. However, I used to haul around like a security blanket a Golden Book that was about a girl and her mother going shoe shopping, so I'll say that one.
Reading has always played an important role in our family. As a small child I always wanted to read for myself. One of the first books that I could "read" myself was (in German, my mother tongue) "Pony, Bear & Apple Tree". Several words were represented in the text as pictures: http://www.echtkind.de/media/catalog/product/p/o/pony_b_r_und_apfelbaum_leseprobe_2.jpg I started to read real books, which consist exclusively of text, when I was perhaps 6 or 7 years old. In the beginning books that were read to me by my parents before. Unfortunately, I can't remember the first real book I read myself.
Outside of school, and not read to me by my parents, probably My Naughty Little Sister by Dorothy Edwards, but the books that got me obsessed with reading were the Kevin and Sadie series by Joan Lingard: The 12th Day of July, Across the Barricades, Into Exile, etc. At the height of the Troubles, a Protestant girl and Catholic boy fall in love in 1970s Belfast. Be still my beating 9-year-old heart And then of course there was Judy Bloom, who taught me everything about growing up that my mother refused to
