Current Events > What's the most important book you've ever read?

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Important in the sense that it has had some strong influence on your life, not necessarily historical significance.

The Bible

Captain Underpants and The Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants

Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook

Started a lifelong hobby and made me a lot more creative as a writer and storyteller

charlie brown's encyclopedia

The Game by Neil Strauss

I know it's cringe but it's true, it jumpstarted a lot of things for me

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Hop On Pop

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

The whole series, tbh.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

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Catcher in the rye

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry always stuck with me.

TMOG posted...

Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook

Started a lifelong hobby and made me a lot more creative as a writer and storyteller

Same. If we are talking about literature though it's From Here to Eternity by James Jones.

Paradise Lost by John Milton. It definitely has been a foundation for allusions and such.

1984
Mein Kampf
The Fault in Our Stars by Hank Green

1984

DB_Insider posted...

The Fault in Our Stars by Hank Green

John Green.

The Zombie Survival Guide

Divine Comedy

live and let die

i had planned to read the entire james bond novel set in chronological order. i loved casino royale, i did, but there was something about live and let die. some part in that book that made me feel like... i had uncovered what james bond was all about. the mood, feel, setting, it all just clicked. i guess it just influenced my current situation right now more than anything, which is why i mentioned it.

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The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas

Hmm.
I've always liked history books set in the cracks in the common historical narrative. Like, everyone talks about the Roman Empire and how it fell (the Western Empire, anyhow), but you rarely hear any discussion of, say...the death struggle between the Eastern Roman Empire and Sassanid Persia that weakened them both so severely the former was maimed and the latter swallowed up by the Muslim Arabic caliphate (or how, for example, Jerusalem's Jewish community opened the gates of the city to both the Persians and the Arabs and just kind of slowly dissolved in the long centuries of Muslim rule afterwards). War of the Three Gods , by the way.

I like books that examine causes (The Sleepwalkers) and aftermath (The Vanquished) too. Like, WW1 happened in part because all the major participants believed a general European war to be inevitable and this was, ironically, something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or that the aftermath of the war was, particularly in Eastern Europe, as messy if not messier than the war itself had been.
Or, for a completely different example, Ghost on the Throne , which examines the immediate aftermath of Alexander the Great's death. Basically, history doesn't ever end.

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It's really hard to pick a singular book. Although I have not amounted to much so I guess the question does not matter.

Hard to pick one. I'll cheat and say the Animorphs series. I think it shaped my sense of morality in a lot of ways as well as my taste in fiction in a number of ways, although I gravitated more towards fantasy when I was younger.

TMOG posted...

Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook

Started a lifelong hobby and made me a lot more creative as a writer and storyteller

What edition?

D&D's been a huge part of my life, but I didn't get into it because of the PHB. Its definitely the game that impacted my life the most though.

mein copy of The Alchemist by Paulo Cuelho.

Don't know the exact name, but it was this huge science and medical book my grandparents had. I would read parts of it all the time. I enjoyed learning everything that was in there. It was from the 1950s though, so it probably wasn't up to date, it even had a section on how to protect yourself from atomic blasts.

I feel like in terms of my sense of humour a lot of it built off of Wayside Stories from Wayside School

The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims by Arthur Schopenhauer

Books of the library back when I was at the University. The self University.

Blood Meridian

Probably 1984

Why, the Good Book, of course!

Seriously though, LOTR.

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Harry Potter made me like reading so I guess that.

AloneIBreak posted...

Important in the sense that it has had some strong influence on your life, not necessarily historical significance.

Oh, in that case, scratch 1984. The Name of the Wind is that book for me.

Probably the dictionary, lol.

Shotgunnova posted...

Probably the dictionary, lol.

You read the dictionary from cover to cover?

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.