Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager? I grew up in a house full of books that shaped my interests. I have two young children and I'm building up a library for them. I'm curious to know what books stood out in your childhoods? |
1) The Sherlock Holmes Canon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_of_Sherlock_Holmes
My first exposure was through "The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes" and it made such a huge impression on me with its focus on the use of step-by-step logical reasoning to solving problems that in a sense it taught me to "think rationally" in real life. I then set about acquiring the complete canon and have read them all so many times that i can quote entire dialogues/passages from memory. The language used is also elegant and beautiful with lots of memorable phrases/quotes/quips etc. Every kid should be asked to read the complete canon and then discuss takeaways from them.
2) Charles Dickens - Started with Oliver Twist, Great Expectations
These books (read the unabridged versions) were my introduction to the "Human Condition/Human Values" faced by people from different economic strata. His books span different genres but always end with a positive note. The writing style is beautiful with a healthy dose of Melodrama, Humour, Vivid descriptions etc. which draw you in and keep you engaged. Here is a good essay on his narrative technique - https://www.lsj.org/literature/essays/dickens
Non-Fiction:
1) Physics for Entertainment by Yakov Perelman - You can get scans of all his and other Soviet authors books at - https://mirtitles.org/
In those days (80s in India) American/British books were generally not available and too costly but Soviet books were easily available and very affordable. My dad bought me this 2-vol set and that motivated my lifelong interest in Science. An example: I was enamoured of the protagonist in "The Invisible Man" by H.G.Wells but Perelman uses it as a scientific case study and shows that instead of being a most powerful man (because he is invisible) he would be the most powerless/pathetic man. Read the book to find out why :-) It also kick-started my collection of Soviet Science books eg. "Science For Everyone" and "Little Mathematics Library" series. Teachers/Students should take a look at these books and use them productively in the classroom/self-study. They are concise, precise with no fluff and a high s/n ratio.
Indian folktales - The Panchatantra, The Jataka and the Hitopadesa.
Ringworld - Larry Niven
Never read anything quite like it since
I was inspired to make a handwriting copying machine based on the "Homework Machine" book.
Great series!
The Forest Runners
Where the Red Fern Grows
Doors of Perception (Huxley)
We (Zamyatin)
It has helped me a lot in understanding how to respect others and navigate social interactions. I found it really grounding and useful, especially during times when I needed a framework for building healthy relationships.
I didn't read it on my own personally, rather, it was read in my eighth grade class from beginning to end. Lots of discussion was had about the foreshadowing and meaning behind Dickens' words. At the time I really didn't appreciate it as much as I should have, but I'm incredibly grateful that my teacher made us read through that.
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brian was another one read in class that I think helped shape my perspective on the world for the better.
i don't know how much of an influence the books had. i started traveling around europe when i was a teenager. was it because of the books or did i read the books because i was already interested in exploring the world?
i know i started reading kipling because of the djunglebook and kim, which both have a significance in scouting.
what surprises me the most is that i didn't read any science fiction until much later, but now i am exclusively focused on that genre. this is worth noting because i wonder what would have happened if my dad had had any scifi books at home or if i had been exposed to them in some other way.
i believe the first scifi book was "brave new world", which was a book assignment in my exchange year in the US, but i didn't really pick up on the scifi aspect of that book either. it is significant because it is the second book i read in english but the first one that i enjoyed reading. the first book, which i hated, was "for whom the bell tolls", which i had picked because my teacher recommended hemmingway as an american author. it was a horrible book that took me almost a year to get through, and i always thought it was because english was my second language. but then i just flew through "brave new world" and realized that my english was not the problem, but hemmingway was. i wish my teacher had recommended someone like mark twain instead.
The series gets sillier and sillier as it goes on. I haven't re-read it lately, but I still have the copy.
The Magus by John Fowles
I was maybe 14 at the time. You just never know because kids are weird.
Convinced me to join the Marines out of high school. Then 9/11 happened and that choice got... not so great. Got a clearance and EW training out of it, and that worked out okay in the long run, I guess.
A great, short read that gives you a very gentle introduction to the world of pure mathematics following the life of Uncle Petros, a mathematical prodigy who devoted his life to trying to solve Goldbach's Conjecture.
Ironically, this is one of the main reasons I didn't study mathematics.
I read it 20 years ago once, and I still think about it everyday.
Ecclesiastes (Qohelet)
As I became a teen my reading became varied thankfully and I came across this book at a time when nothing felt important.
When all feels lost and nothing matters, Ecclesiastes is great for giving a view into what’s it’s like to grapple with the questions of happiness, life and humanity in a way that doesn’t end in your own depression and suicide.
The author finds his reason and method for living. We all must do the same.
Getting acclimated to the information firehose was probably a net negative. For the first decade, I at least enjoyed high-quality online writing for free. The second decade devolved into half-formed, 140/280 character hot takes, videos and paywall popups, and yet I was still reading a lot of it. The algorithmic, SEO-ified consumer internet now has gotten so bad that I am finally scaling back my reading, but am still online due to FOMO on important events (although usually I end up realizing they are rarely as important as I think them to be).
because I liked the never ending mystery of it all, and I was both annoyed, and pleased by the fact that you never actually find out what actually happened to the parents. I know it was a fictional series, but it was, and still is, the only fictional books I’ve ever read. I was particularly impressed by the author’s playful use of words and punctuation that could draw me in and keep me interested and curious. He kind of inspired me to be more creative with the way I use words when I write. Not that I’ve done much writing for fun lately, but occasionally I do.
The other book, I’m almost embarrassed to admit was:
- The secret by Rhonda Byrne.
I got particularly obsessed with this book, I think partly because I grew up in quite adverse circumstances, I started to think that if I was just more positive, more positive things would happen for me. I really developed quite a strong positive and optimistic attitude to life, believing that if I just thought about good things often enough, good things would happen. In practicality this often meant that as a teenager sometimes I came across optimistic to the point of seeming delusional. As I’ve got older, I’ve really come to the conclusion that the book “the secret” is a load of crap. However, I do think that I cope better in life with adversity than some of the people I went to school with have because of how I frame life events, often choosing the frame them as the next opportunity and frame them in more positive ways. I think that’s something I gained from reading that book, even if it was mainly a bunch of nonsense.
The rest of the books I read as a teenager were to do with serial killers. Particularly Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy, and other stuff to do with weird, horrible, violent crimes.
Intimacy
(1) Knowledge. Give knowledge of yourself, what do like, don't like, want, believe, think, plan.
Notice that another person who stands off doesn't give such knowledge.
(2) Caring. Care about the other person, monitor their life, reach out to help them.
Notice how common it is for others just to give you their middle finger.
(3) Respect. Grant credibility, honor, pride, praise.
Notice how others may give you contempt and insults, try to manipulate, take advantage.
(4) Responsiveness. Monitor what they do, listen to what they say, use those two to think about their lives, and do respond appropriately.
Notice how others can not respond, just ignore, turn away.
(5) Affection. It's basic, involves physical contact, especially with facial contact, hand holding, hugging, and apparently is universal at least in all mammels.
Notice how others avoid physical contact.
Uh, as a teen boy dating a teen girls, mostly interested in (1)--(5) or just some anatomy lessons? With some girls, it's easier to have sex or even marriage than much or anything in (1)--(5).
By their teens, maybe boys/girls could benefit from realizing (1)--(5).
That's my "book" for kids!
It had a complete recipe for making nitroglycerin. From scratch. Starting with the blubber of a freshly killed seal!
Such a wonderful thing to discover as a child.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saga_of_Darren_Shan
It helped me escape from a lot of stuff, gave me a fantasy world to run to when books were all I had.
All of Lee Child's Jack Reacher books gave me a character to look up to, someone to aspire to be like. At the time, there was maybe only 3 released but I read them over and over again.
"What will you do, Reacher?"
"The right thing, Mom."
Classic speculative fiction was (and is) amazing. To this day I am still amazed by the universes created by Andre Norton, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and others.
The D&D Player's Handbook, and basically everything on its Inspirational Reading list.
Even though I wasn't into horror or gothic horror, I still devoured (or was devoured by?) Edgar Allen Poe and HP Lovecraft.
Dictionaries and encyclopedias.
As an adult I can now see as a child I was drawn by lonely characters, finding friends and going on adventures. I was well cared for in my family but not emotionally. I was the boy who turned up at your house on Christmas Day. I invested too much energy in transient friends and running the streets. I am very happy to say my kids have had an entirely different experience of life, though I attribute about 70% of this to my wife.
https://www.vox.com/22753080/motel-mysteries-book-david-maca...
2. In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky
I was a teen really into philosophy so maybe not applicable.
I only read "In Search of the Miraculous" when I was 22 or 23, though...
- The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adam - Spent all of senior year in HS reading the entire series
- Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut - Maybe it was because I mentally compared Harrison to Crow Sting from professional wrestling or because it was a short story, but I always think about this story
- Have a Nice Day! by Mick Foley - Pro wrestling is my guilty pleasure and like many fans, Foley's life resonated with me about friendship, giving 110%, all the while keeping a positive outlook on life
- Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson - A comic is a book with pictures. Out of all the comics about superheros, webcomics, and old newspaper comics, if I had to only read one of them for the rest of my life it'd be C&H
- Honorable Mention is Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. I'm started reading them during COVID, but I'm thoroughly enjoying that dry English sense of humor, modern society cynism, and fantasy setting. I'm currently on my tenth book (out of ~40)
I must have read that book over a dozen times in middle school.
Never entirely sure why I love it so much. First read it as a child when I hated apparently similar books - stories that seem written to speak to an adult’s idea of a sweet and innocent childhood - but it would always transport me… somewhere… I could never really describe. Still can’t, but still love it decades later
When I was 15, I went to the library of the nearest university, and stumbled upon a book - IIRC, it was Vickery’s The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough (1973) - which introduced me to Algernon Swinburne’s The Triumph of Time-and from there I discovered I liked many more of his poems
When I was 11, I read a large chunk of The Lord of the Rings - I got bored near the start of The Two Towers, switched to reading the chapters of The Return of the King in reverse order, then gave up and to this day have never finished it. But I fell in love with the Appendices
Its a brazilian book from 30's about a typical family from the time. There's nothing special about the book. I lived at the country side and all I had to spend my time was this book and a couple of others. I'm quite sure I have read it countless times already. It is "personally" important to me.
As am adult The Stranger - Camus and The Old Man and the Sea had a big impact, I think because you can read and get the whole experience in a single sitting.
- The Elenium series by David Eddings (The Diamond Throne, The Ruby Knight, The Sapphire Rose)
- Starlight and Shadows series by Elaine Cunningham (Daughter of the Drow, Tangled Webs, Windwalker)
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Legend of Drizzt series by R.A. Salvatore (the first 16 books)
- Dragonlance series by Margaret Weis (Tales I and II, Raistlin Chronicles)
Now I have them in my own library at home, waiting my kids to grow up enough so they can grab and read (hopefully :)
The idea of the 'Butlerian Jihad', a galactic wide outlawing of AI basically, seems even more prescient today than it would have in the 60s when it was written.
Each would survey some broad topic, for example Ancient Egypt. It would be full of detailed drawings/illustrations and accompanying text snippets. "What did the inside of a pyramid look like?", "How did the Ancient Egyptians use chariots?", and so on.
Mum would always buy me a new one every other week. The topics were diverse & broad, and so never got boring.
A bonus was when a subject I had read in these books happened to come up at school :-)
I started it thinking it was just another scifi book about the future, but it served as a really good inoculation against governmental lies and cant.
- Grimm's Märchen (read the gruesome originals!)
- Struwwelpeter
- Erich Kästner: Das fliegende Klassenzimmer, Das doppelte Lottchen, Emil & die Detektive, Pünktchen & Anton
- Das kleine "Ich-bin-ich"
- Oh, wie schön ist Panama
- Pipi Langstrumpf (already mentioned)
- Der letzte Mohikaner
- Zu Fuss durch Afrika
- Demian
- A Brave New World
- 1984
- A hundred years of solitude, although, I read it in Spanish and I don't know if it'll be as impactful with less cultural shared context
I remember being forced to read it in class, and being completely repulsed by it, then, during a black out finding the book and absolutely loving it
Something as small as suddenly being made aware of how a couple generations ago, people not too far away from me could be marveled at something as mundane to me as ice (Because pre-widespread refrigeration someone born in a dessert could just never see ice in their entire life) really got to me, and then the book itself happened
(Edited for typo)
I started college as a physics major. It was the fall of 1979 and a career with "personal computers" was still in the future, but in school I switched majors and felt I had come home. GEB was the start of all that.
Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (one story in the book "Different Seasons" by Stephen King)
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury)
Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky)
Frankenstein (Shelley)
Brave New World (Huxley)
Farenheit 451 (Heinlein)
Never Cry Wolf (Mowatt)
A Whale for the Killing (Mowatt)
The Machine Stops (Forster)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Starship Troopers (Heinlein)
The Jungle Book (Kipling)
Lost in the Barrens (Mowatt)
The Republic (Plato)
Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke)
Ringworld (Niven)
The Stainless Steel Rat (Harrison)
The Hobbit (Tolkien)
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson)
The Odyssey (Homer)
The Man who Would be King (Kipling)
The Pearl (Steinbeck)
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick)
A Scanner Darkly (Dick)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
Dracula (Stoker)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)
A Christmas Carol (Dickens)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll)
Watership Down (Adams)
Gulliver's Travels (Swift)
Animal Farm (Orwell)
well I guess I know what I'm re-reading next.
I'm all for Machiavelli's pragmatic approach in "The Prince" (oops, another one I forgot to include), but Heinlein is just downright scary in some of his more forceful works (I mean, the salt hoarding in Farnham's Freehold? COME ON! Even I felt like killing the guy on principle)
I also disliked Atlas Shrugged.
We also had an excellent electronic dictionary with a few interesting games and a thorough etymology.
Living in the country, we were often in the car for extended periods and had catalogues of books on tape, mostly of the classics. Otherwise, we lived about half a mile, walking distance, from the town library and would go up on weekends.
On the computer, after CD-ROM drives became affordable, I particularly enjoyed interactive multimedia like Microsoft's Encarta, all of Knowledge Adventure titles, Explorapedia, and DK's "The Way Things Work". After Macromedia Shockwave, tons of eclectic titles about any given subject were being published, and we had discs ranging from the Civil War to Music Americana to I Love Lucy.
Remember, libraries can be anything. Don't limit yourself!
There's been some attempts at replicating it with Wikipedia, but I think why it was so popular was because most of the time you were playing it because someone was on the phone, so you weren't allowed online. It was one of the other programs you'd throw up like Space Pinball, the old school screensavers, MS Paint, or even Microsoft Bob to just 'play around' on the computer.
The translation into our language was good and we had a copy that was almost a family relic, given to my father by his mother who would soon die much to young - it's the closest thing I have to an atheist family bible in a way. I was so disappointed when neither of my children were particularly interested when I read them that same book, but they have different personalities than me, so my theory is that the book wasn't so much of an influence on me as it was simply a story that jived really well with my character.
Will probably make your children atheists though.
So much of the world still runs on fucking bullshit, just look at the justifications for the ongoing [redacted because it'll probably derail the conversation].
I would suggest now perhaps more than ever. Evolution of social media and corruption of big media played it's role
Spoiler-free: based on a shared societal belief in a looming existential crisis, a group of young adults attend a military school whose curriculum revolves around a war game with sports-like rules. The System uses the war game to identify for positions of relative prestige those students most willing to interpret the game rules in creative ways, most willing to question assumptions brought with them from the school-world into the game-world, but naïve enough to believe the game is over once they've “graduated” from it. The books explore the many ways in which the “real world” : school-world :: school-world : game-world.
And yes... I try to separate the art from the artist too when it comes to OSC.
Ender's Game is definitely a classic.
"Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?"
Also Starship Troopers. Reading it made me somewhat regret not joining the military.
The chapters about electronics are obviously quite dated, but I think it still stands up. I'd absolutely give a copy to the kind of kid who has to take everything apart to see how it works.
When I was a kid, Point Horror, Goosebumps and various adventure books were the reading gym that gave me the stamina for the books I actually enjoyed (Tolkien, Pullman, and so much Pratchett).
I'm going through this with my daughter now. We still lean on thriller subjects but there is so much more choice. Goodreads is great for finding subgenres of interest and then similar books to ones that hit the mark.
But use your local library. Pick up random books co-read opening chapters, and review the style and quality together. Use your judgement and public reviews to bin out the real trash and slowly but surely give then confidence to pick up real literature.
Forcing your kid to grind through a book rarely goes well but if you really want to push it, taking it in turns to read aloud can inject enough performative energy to carry it.
I also grew up with three full-sized bookcases mostly filled with all sorts of sci-fi and adventures by my granddad. But when I think of a book, this one always comes to mind first.
Unlike other sci-fi I’ve read before it, this novel had this out-of-usual-limits existential mystery and background dread, mostly unresolvable by its very nature and built into the plot almost immediately so that you have to re-realize it, as if you were at a therapist. I’ve read books with galactic wars, dark corners of space, empires, horrors, strange alien encounters, but only this one touched me so deep.
From non-fiction, it was “from basic to assembly” (noname, can’t find it) and few years later some 80386 system programming manual. I remember another book on assembly in between, it was dark blue.
[tl;dr; You can get arrested in the UK for owning it]
Here's a few I don't see on lists frequently:
Here’s an updated list with your addition:
1. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster- adventure that encourages curiosity while navigating a magical world.
2. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg- Mystery about independence where two kids hide in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
3. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain- A time-travel pioneer + clash between modern thinking and medieval traditions.
4. My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George- survival story of a boy living in the wilderness, promoting self-reliance + love for nature
"Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (Robert M. Pirsig)
"The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea" (Yukio Mishima)
"The Yage Letters" (William Burroughs)
"The Old Ways" (Gary Snyder)
"Life and Death (Elementary Go Series #4)", by James Davies. Really - I studied that one very seriously.
Note: I answered just the "What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?" part, and I ignored that you are building a library for your children and asking for recommendations...
The "Mad Scientist's Club" series
The Great Brain
Those "Encyclopedia Brown" stories
The "The Three Investigators" series
The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne
The original Doyle "Sherlock Holmes" canon
The Soul Of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder
The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien
Nineteen Eighty Four
That is: _The Mad Scientist Club_ _More Adventures of the Mad Scientist Club_ _The Big Kerplop_ _Big Chunk of Ice_
The early experience with the command line in turn made me much better at using it when I started working - new people at my company often struggle with the basics and take much longer to get comfortable with it than I did (the vim learning curve is steep indeed...). Now I prefer doing all my day-to-day computer stuff in the command line.
A more tenuous connection, but it's possible Cuckoo's Egg seeded in me the drive to spend unreasonable amounts of time tracking down root causes of issues and figuring out how things work. But that didn't really manifest until I started working.
A slight tangent, but as a parent, one thing I've found is that any books my kid discovers for themselves (via friends, social media or just picking up random books in the library) means so much more to them than anything I've ever recommended. Anything I recommend starts out with a massive handicap, since in their minds anything 'old and lame' people like probably sucks. Only if there is nothing else to read will they begrudgingly try one of my books.
And to be fair after about age 11, I rarely read anything my dad recommended to me either, much preferring to discover my own books. So by all means make sure they're surrounded by books, just don't expect your kids to read anything you try to push on them.
I wonder if reading is harder to get into now because of the many distracting forms of digital media. Those seem to have replaced recreational reading for me, and I'm not really happy about primarily reading for work rather than for fun.
- Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
- The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson
- Anathem, Neal Stephenson
- Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
- Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, Jon Erickson
- The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle
- Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson
- Mystical Qabalah, Dion Fortune
- Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling
The Animorphs series.
It's both incredibly good entertainment, but also really digs into morality in a way that has shaped how I think of things even so many years later.
Second to that is the "My Teacher is an Alien" series. They're fun books, pretty light, but the last book of the series, likewise, instilled a lot of morality-sense in me, since it's basically a tour of the bad (and good) of humanity.
For a bit of an older age (~15?), nothing quite impacted me like Ender's Game did. Again, a lot of ideas of what is moral and what isn't. (And yes, as others in this thread have pointed out, the author has a problematic legacy, make of that what you will.)
> Pretty soon you'll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents.
> If you're mad at me because that's what you have to take away from Animorphs, too bad. I couldn't have written it any other way and remained true to the respect I have always felt for Animorphs readers.
https://www.hiracdelest.com/database/articles/kaa_response-f...
I loved Robin Hood, and at my local library, I found this amazing book called Bows Against the Barons by Geoffrey Trease. I highly recommend it as I loved it -> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1719399.Bows_Against_the...
Rifles for Watie was another one a librarian recommended me and I read in grade school and loved -> https://shepherd.com/book/rifles-for-watie
The classic Dragonlance Chronicles were amazing: https://www.amazon.com/Vol-1-3-Dragonlance-Chronicles-Set/dp...
I loved the Box Car Children, mostly book #1, but the rest were good.
Hardy Boys was also a series I adored, but I am not sure how they have aged.
My son is 7 and he is reading Harry Potter and just loving it. So I highly recommend that one. I didn't read it until college and it is one of my favorite series. She writes incredible characters and weaves them together so perfectly.
As I got to my teenage years... - Dirk Pitt's adventure books kept me reading all day. - Snow Crash really blew my mind. - Catch 22 stood out fo rme. - Atlas Shrugged and all of her books I liked (but not for the weird cult thing. - Classic Tom Clancy - Upton Sinclair The Jungle - Seismic impact on my view of the world. - Native Son in high school is something I think about to this day and bothers me. - From The Holy Mountain - Huge influence on me in my early 20s and where I ended up.
Quote: Be Proactive is about taking responsibility for your life. Proactive people recognize that they are “response-able.” They don’t blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. They know they can choose their behavior.
While it may be common sense/doh-so-obvious today, this was such a mind-blowing reframe for the teenage me back then, and it shaped me immeasurably as a person for the better, for the 30+ years that follow.