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Top books that changed your life

#81
There's a lot of repeats on my list, but it's for good reason. They're influential books!! As follows:

1984 - This book sparked the political awareness bug in me

Slaughterhouse 5 - It's just a great read about the fragility/beauty of life

Cash By Johnny Cash - It's about Johnny Cash, nuff said

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut - it's great to know that in a 1000 years from now, the highly evolved species of man will still find farts funny

Johnny Got his Gun by Dalton Trumbo - The end of the first half is so epic. Nothing is worth dying for.

I still haven't finished reading Atlas Shrugged, partly because I lost interest, partly because I didn't share/get the views it was conveying. I will begin to reread it soon though. But I will say that Fransisco's rant about the importance of money in our society (around page 380?) is one of the most important things I have ever read.
 
#84
I think this is one of the coolest readings out here. :hyper:
 

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#85
I gotta read Slaughterhouse Five. I saw the move a while back and liked it. Pretty surreal.
Scarlet Fire said:
Anthem (Ayn Rand)- A fantastic argument for why science must never be abandoned, and why the pursuit of knowledge is one of the most noble goals of humanity.

Self-Reliance (Ralph Waldo Emerson)- As is evident by the book's title, this one taught me the importance of being self-reliant, and the liberation that comes from it.

Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)- This one did a lot of things for me. It's one of the reasons I'm now such a strong pacifist, and it also totally changed the way I think about time. It also introduced the phrase "so it goes" to my view of life: sometimes things happen that are out of our control, and there isn't always something we can do about it. Nor is it something that we can blame on someone, or something.

Beowulf (unknown) and Grendel (John Gardner)- There are two sides to every story. Nothing is black and white. There is no good vs. evil. Everything is subjective, and everything needs to be treated as such.

Various works by Jean-Paul Sartre- My life is my own. I get to choose what I do with it, and nobody else (so long as I'm not infringing upon anybody else's rights to live the same way). This is the primary reason I'm a libertarian. Live and let live.
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#86
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Factotum - Charles Bukowski
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas - Hunter Thompson
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
 
#89
sixstring-lym said:
The 4 Hour Work Week - Timothy Ferriss
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Hey, that sounds good! I gotta look into that.

Uhmmmmm

The Art of selling : Tom Hopkins

Other sales books by Brian Tracey and Zig Zigler


Skinny Bitch, a book about eating right.


That's about it--- other than when I went on a Steven King reading splurge. But I can't say those books "changed my life".

Unless you define that phrase. Anyone want to expand on that?

Allen
 
#90
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
V. - Thomas Pynchon
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
The Recognitions - William Gaddis
Franny and Zooey - JD Salinger
Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters - JD Salinger
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men - David Foster Wallace
Underworld - Don Delillo
Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut
White Noise - Don Delillo
Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
The Illuminatus! Trilogy - Robert Anton Wilson
Factotum - Charles Bukowski
The Rainbow Stories - William T. Vollman
The Ice-Shirt - William T. Vollman

all real heavy books, man.

there are surely more, but that's pretty much my top list.
 
#91
The only books that have actually changed my life would be the top foog guides like the Michellin guide because they have made me put on weight. Other books may have influenced my thinking, but none have actually changed my life. Quite frankly, I simply don't believe most of the posters in this threads lives have actually been changed by these books. It seems to me its more a list of "books I dig". FWIW.
 
#93
The BurgerMeister said:
all the books in my list have guided me to make certain choices in life, thus changing the course of my life... so the books in my post actually have changed my life. they may not have changed me physically, but they certainly have changed and helped shape my being.
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I supose then it becomes an interesting philosophical question about whether everything in your life can also be said to change you life since everything you do shapes your being in some way. Hehe, I better post a long ass list of every book i've ever read! :D

I guess by my of thinking about what is intended by "change your life", something like the bible could very well change your life if upon reading it, you decided to convert to Christianity. OTOH, if for example after reading say, The Forgotten Soldier, I had more sympathy of German soldiers in WWII, I wouldn't necessarily say it changed my life (even if it could be said to influence future thoughts on a particular subject). I guess when I hear the phrase "changed your life" I would equate it more with an epiphany that manifests itself in an almost immediate change. But, maybe I am out of line with what others are thinking! :D
 
#94
Mark Latimour said:
I supose then it becomes an interesting philosophical question about whether everything in your life can also be said to change you life since everything you do shapes your being in some way. Hehe, I better post a long ass list of every book i've ever read! :D

I guess by my of thinking about what is intended by "change your life", something like the bible could very well change your life if upon reading it, you decided to convert to Christianity. OTOH, if for example after reading say, The Forgotten Soldier, I had more sympathy of German soldiers in WWII, I wouldn't necessarily say it changed my life (even if it could be said to influence future thoughts on a particular subject). I guess when I hear the phrase "changed your life" I would equate it more with an epiphany that manifests itself in an almost immediate change. But, maybe I am out of line with what others are thinking! :D
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yeah... things always become more philosophical with me. :) that might be why my list is as long as it is. like you say, every book i've read, movie i've seen, person i've talked to, etc., has, in some way, changed my life... or maybe the phrase i'm looking for is "helped shape my life."

interpretation is a beautiful thing! :hyper:

i will say this: after reading the books in my list i saw the world in a different light, and that view hasn't changed since.
 
#99
I really didn't think Snowcrash was all that great and influential, though I did enjoy it as a work of fiction.

It was a very cool take on how a capitalist society would function when government failed. It is very concievable [to me anyway] that that is what would actually happen should government simply cease to be in the world. A cool perspective.
 

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