Books That Shaped Your Life

[Mofo Rising]

Got interested in this topic after the Atlas Shrugged post. Ayn Rand is one of the stereotypical authors that people find when they're young and then colors their thinking for the rest of their life.

I'm not for or against Rand in any fashion, but I do find it fascinating that there are books one can read that loom large in one's personal philosophy forever. The power of literature, folks!

So which books did this for you?

I can easily pinpoint the book that kick-started my entire approach to the world. It's The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. A cult book, to be sure, which I read sometime around my sophomore year in high school. The book is essentially a gigantic shaggy dog joke filled with sex, drugs, rock & roll, and, above all, conspiracy theories.

The reason it sticks with me is because it is an anarchic exploration of the nature of reality. The central idea is that the universe is a wild and wooly place. We, as people, try to understand it by putting different frameworks on it that we can work with. The authors describe these approaches as Belief Systems, handily abbreviated as B.S. The joke of the book is that they fill it with so many different ways of looking at the world, all taken at face value, that you eventually have to question all of it. Every conspiracy theory is taken as true, but there are also stand-ins for philosophical schools. Ayn Rand is there, as is H.P. Lovecraft. The kicker is that none of it is true and all of it is.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Funnily enough, that kick-start eventually led me to science, which I still think is the best approach to understanding the world around us. One of the authors, Robert Anton Wilson, railed against science as "fundamentalist materialism." But both views are nuanced, so it's not a big deal.

Later I found Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, which covers much of the same ground, but is leagues and away the better book.

But The Illuminatus Trilogy was the book I read first and holds a special place in my heart.

[Ed, Ego and Superego]

Probably some books:
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck.  The non-judgemental acceptance of the odd inspired me.
Island by Aldous Huxley- It was a summary of his social engineering ideas

[Vik]

Post Office by Charles Bukowski is the main one.

[The Burgomaster]

La Philosophie dans le Boudoir by the Marquis de Sade

[Flick James]

Atlas Shrugged certainly colored my thinking. However, I find that I am a little more easy-going than that. I will give Ayn Rand some credit for guiding me philosophically to the likes of greats of the Enlightenment, such as Hume, Descartes, or Voltaire, and away from the (IMHO) bleak and depressing philosophers that Kant spawned (i.e. Sartre, Camus, and their ilk). For me, Kant forever poisoned the well of philosophy, and of Western thought.

However, in contrast to Atlas Shrugged, I was both deeply amused and moved by the early Vonnegut novel The Sirens of Titan. The story is so absurd, and is the most original take on matters of God and spirituality that I've ever seen. The story also takes a collection of characters that have few redeeming qualities, yet guides some of them to a sort of redemption at the end, in an ending that, for me anyway, was heartbreakingly sad and beautiful.

How did the novel shape me? I guess it helped lead me to realization that the Universe is so vast, and contains mysteries that dwarf what our frail human minds have come up with in contemplation of that vastness, that our lovely little planet, as rich and beautiful as it may be to us, is really not that unique or noteworthy when applied to the rest of the Universe.

[Ed, Ego and Superego]

La Philosophie dans le Boudoir by the Marquis de Sade

I'm not sleeping at your house.

[ulthar]

I cannot say that any one book (or small set of books) has shaped my life or my thinking, but there ARE very strong influences that, taken together, form a collective whole.

I know I will leave some out, but some of the prevalent "with me almost every day" ones include:

1984 by George Orwell
Moby Dick Herman Melville
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
The Constitution of the United States by several of the Founding Fathers (poetic license calling it a book...)
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
The Holy Bible by various authors (or by God)
MacBeth by William Shakespeare
The Iliad and The Odyssey attributed to Homer

And, a few short stories are definitely on the list:

"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut
"The Feeling of Power" by Isaac Asimov

I'm sure I'll think of more mere moments after hitting 'post.'

[Flick James]

The Holy Bible by various authors (or by God)

I don't know if there was humor intended here, but if so, well done.

[ulthar]

The Holy Bible by various authors (or by God)

I don't know if there was humor intended here, but if so, well done.

 

[RCMerchant]

The Books of Charles Fort.
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown.
The Pictoral History of Horror Movies by Denis Gifford.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer.

[lester1/2jr]

Jackson Pollock: an american saga
Chinese Boxing: masters and methods

[Flick James]

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV "text revision" (DSM-IV-TR)

It's the Moby Dick of Psychological non-fiction.

[ER]

Cosmos.

[66Crush]

Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga by Stephen Davis.