a shameless steal of a good idea from rationalia....
what are the books that have had significant influence on you and why
fiction or non fiction...



the last line of the book did it for me

“there were no watching eyes"

The central character was free to make his own rules and game....it freed ME from conventional society and rules
once around, I'd make the most of it and not follow anyone else's muse...
so far so good

Oddly that novel can trip people including our fourth year English Lit prof - huge battle with our small very elite English Criticism class he held at his home....
week after week we told him he was wrong and that the novel had suckered him.....just exactly what it was about...not to get suckered into someone else's game....
To his everlasting credit he came around and apologized...
It was an eye-opener for all involved...really got some of us on toe to toe mind skill basis with a university professor level intellect and made our points...
growing up interlude...

this was central to the book as well

T. S. Eliot - Little Gidding
- We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

and that has also been a crucial insight

I'll give you an example...

17 years after I divorced my first wife....
I found out she was gay....

talk about a bunch of dominoes falling into place....it re-arranged my personal view of that period in my life in a dramatic way....I knew it for the very first time....
and was much relieved and re-assured at my decision to leave...
I needed, she needed it...but at the time I had no idea why she needed the parting of ways.....not sure she did at the time eithrer but she sure as hell needed to find her own way and I was drowning in her unhappiness...

••

Another other significant influence was



as I always felt myself to be one...

The Outsider is a non-fiction book by Colin Wilson first published in 1956[1].

Through the works and lives of various artists - including H. G. Wells (Mind at the End of its Tether), Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Harley Granville-Barker (The Secret Life), Herman Hesse, T. E. Lawrence, Vincent Van Gogh, Vaslav Nijinsky, George Bernard Shaw, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky and G. I. Gurdjieff - Wilson explores the psyche of the Outsider, his effect on society, and society's effect on him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outsider_(Colin_Wilson)

and perhaps one of the most insightful works for me even tho the author is associated with some strange ideas in other works of his...this non-fiction work is superlative in my view.



Koestler's Act of Creation which is hard to find....a tour de force of biology and it's role in human creativity...similar to Goedel Escher and Bach in it's interleaving disparate subjects ( poetry, jokes and the eureka moment in science ) and all underpinned by solid biology/psychology and understanding of how creativity occurs...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Creation

It fits very well with my Bayesian brain view of human neural net

These are stand outs...there are many more in a lifetime of reading....

Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Although never religious and even mocked religion and belief in God I did have other flights of fancy like believing in reincarnation, astrology, UFOs, telepathy, telekinesis etc... (I would've been the perfect confirmational biased example for the theist that say "When people don't believe in God they believe in all kinds of crazy stuff") and this little book just destroyed all of that in the small amount of time it took me to read. I rarely read a book more than once let alone the 9 or 10 times I've read this.

Third grade Science textbook.

Two of the books that shaped me are on this thread already - John Fowles's The Magus and Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Hah.. another Magus influenced.....what was the influence for you

Catch 22 was a big one for me, although I can't say why tbh, 1984, because it's just got so many concepts, and it's so clear, the Crtique of Pure Reason, it's hard to explain, I think it's mostly wrong, but how it's put together is awesome.
Beyond Good and Evil, and The Birth of Tragedy, because they showed how powerfully arguments can be made.
Honestly though, I think Alice in Wonderland was probably my biggest influence, in part because I was so young reading it, but mainly because it shows some of the weirdness of language.

George Orwell's 1984. It is hard to describe how this book affects me, yet some passages of it have stayed with me since the first time I read it eight years ago.

Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series. While the whole series has had some impact on how I think about things two things stand out.

The first is called Wizard's First Rule: "People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool."

The second is the entirety of book 6, Faith of the Fallen. The Wizard's Rule from this book, I think most people here will appreciate. "The only sovereign you can allow to rule you is reason."

The third book that had a huge impact on me was The God Delusion.

All of Orwell, but especially The Road To Wigan Pier and 1984.

Aside from that, the book that most affected my outlook has to be William Golding's Lord Of The Flies, because it demonstrates the essential nature of humans, namely that we are simiply animals, and given the right circumstances, our animal nature will assert itself at the drop of a hat.

I'm about 50 pages from the end of The Magus right now!

I've really enjoyed it. I'm not a big fiction reader, and can count on both hands the number of novels I've finished in the past decade, but I've loved this book.

mostly, it's been -------->cook books

The Bible - a moral guide to how not to act

Nausea.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressell.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3608/3608-8.txt

This book was written in 1906 by a building worker, I have posted a couple of paragraphs from the first page, please notice what he has called the newspapers, Daily Chloroform and the Hobscurer. Fox news anybody.

'Some of you seem to think,' said Owen, sneeringly, 'that it was a
great mistake on God's part to make so many foreigners. You ought to
hold a mass meeting about it: pass a resolution something like this:
"This meeting of British Christians hereby indignantly protests against
the action of the Supreme Being in having created so many foreigners,
and calls upon him to forthwith rain down fire, brimstone and mighty
rocks upon the heads of all those Philistines, so that they may be
utterly exterminated from the face of the earth, which rightly belongs
to the British people".'

Crass looked very indignant, but could think of nothing to say in
answer to Owen, who continued:

'A little while ago you made the remark that you never trouble yourself
about what you call politics, and some of the rest agreed with you that
to do so is not worth while. Well, since you never "worry" yourself
about these things, it follows that you know nothing about them; yet
you do not hesitate to express the most decided opinions concerning
matters of which you admittedly know nothing. Presently, when there is
an election, you will go and vote in favour of a policy of which you
know nothing. I say that since you never take the trouble to find out
which side is right or wrong you have no right to express any opinion.
You are not fit to vote. You should not be allowed to vote.'


'As for not trying to find out wot side is right,' said Crass, somewhat
overawed by Owen's manner and by what he thought was the glare of
madness in the latter's eyes, 'I reads the Ananias every week, and I
generally takes the Daily Chloroform, or the Hobscurer, so I ought to
know summat about it.'

Lord Of the Rings
Hitchhikers Guide
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Watership down
Mycelium Running
I Claudius
Plato - The Republic
Fruit of the Gods
Brave New World

My 3rd and 4th grade Science and Social Studies textbooks. I made the honor roll up until junior high, but it wasn't until those 2 grades that I actually enjoyed school, and actually remember learning quite a bit.

Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus", and to a lesser extent, Nietzsche's "Beyond Good & Evil" and "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". Nietzsche helped me feel less like a lack of faith was a bad thing, but I didn't and still don't understand his full philosophy, and there are some things that don't sit right with me.
Camus' emphasis on finding meaning in life from the fact that it eludes us was a much bigger influence on me. It helped me appreciate what I have.

The God Delusion is another one. Like many of you, I learned of many of the arguments I use against theists.

I first read Carl Sagans Cosmos at the age of 14, especially the chapter The Lives Of The Stars. This was when I found out we're made of star stuff which was a bigger revelation than anything religion has to offer.

More recently there was Godel, Escher and Bach by Douglas Hofstadter that changed the way I think about thinking

Herman Hesse's Demian had quite an impact on me, and sort of messed me up for a while, really. It's a very short book and it seems easy to read, if you go over it too quickly, but it's amazing how some of it is very unsettling when you stop to consider it, and thought-provoking. There are some great dialogues in there, I quite liked how the character named Demian would take passages from the Bible and give them an entirely different interpretation to what is the norm, often having an outlook on them that was entirely in opposition to what Christianity would have, but that in many regards made a great deal more sense.

That book invited me to be more critical and detached from things, to consider different ideas and interpretations more, and to not be afraid to experience things even if they went against so-called social norms and prefabricated values even if only to push myself to the limit, test myself, find out who it is I really am (which is basically what the central character - Sinclair - does throughout the book, the book is titled Demian as that character is a mentor of sorts to Sinclair). The book also told me that it wasn't always necessary to question authority, but instead, to make up your own rules and disregard that authority entirely to define your own path.

I think my attitude towards my own past was probably influenced by that book, too. I don't see my past as a set of good deeds and bad decisions to regret and create fears from - or dwell in, but just a set of experiences which taught me what I know and make me who I am today.

Mac_Guffin wrote:Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus", and to a lesser extent, Nietzsche's "Beyond Good & Evil" and "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". Nietzsche helped me feel less like a lack of faith was a bad thing, but I didn't and still don't understand his full philosophy, and there are some things that don't sit right with me.

You have to be very careful with Nietzsche if you're reading it in translation, particularly Zarathustra, the translations available up til recently have all been heavily criticised for deliberate mis-interpretation and editing. The recent Oxford Classics version is apparently very good, but I've not finished it yet, and haven't read the others, so can't really compare.

Oh, I forgot Carl Sagan's "Demon-Haunted World". I was a lot less skeptical (though, an atheist) before I read it. I learned a lot more about the pattern-seeking tendencies in humans.

shh wrote:

Mac_Guffin wrote:Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus", and to a lesser extent, Nietzsche's "Beyond Good & Evil" and "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". Nietzsche helped me feel less like a lack of faith was a bad thing, but I didn't and still don't understand his full philosophy, and there are some things that don't sit right with me.

You have to be very careful with Nietzsche if you're reading it in translation, particularly Zarathustra, the translations available up til recently have all been heavily criticised for deliberate mis-interpretation and editing. The recent Oxford Classics version is apparently very good, but I've not finished it yet, and haven't read the others, so can't really compare.

I've read both Kaufmann's translation and this guy named Robert something-or-other. He was the existential philosophy professor on that movie "Waking Life".

I'd like to learn German some day to read it how it's supposed to be read. I've learned a few words from a German dictionary, but you can't really learn from a whole language dictionary.