Books that have influenced your thinking

[Bootstoots]

What books do you still remember for their influence on how you see the world? How did they change your thinking? If you can figure out how to summarize in a post what you took from them, do it!

Mine will be withheld for a while to avoid biasing the thread.

 

[Synobun]

I can't say a book has ever influenced my worldview. Same with shows or movies. I tend to change slowly, and internally, without seeking material to spur these changes on.

I'm always baffled when I befriend people in college and their worldview completely changes after every social or economics class they take. At most, these things refine my views slightly, but I need to have already come up with said "view" before that can happen.

Actual experiences can change my views, though. Conflict, unique situations, stuff like that.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Reading Siddhartha was a changing point for me. I've talked about it before but I read it when I was miserably depressed and thinking about suicide on a daily basis. The book gave me perspective and calmed me in a way that I desperately needed. It shifted my perspective and helped me grok how temporary things are. That's the only single book that changed my perspective though a lot of movies have done that. There have been series of books that have had big impacts on me - Ben Bova in particular showed me what is possible if we build out a space fairing civilization.

 

[Ajidica]

Probably the most influential book I've read was Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. It really shaped my thinking on why people join mass movements or political 'cults' (like the modern day alt-reich) or fanatic movements. Following that, Robert Fisk The Great War for Civilization did a lot to shape my thoughts on the history of the modern Middle East and how morally bankrupt Western 'humanitarian intervention' actually is.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I'm embarrassed to think that the books that might have had the biggest impact on me were Wayne Dyer's books, Pulling Your Own Strings and Your Erroneous Zones. Just because I happened upon them at a very particular age: old enough to be able to take in what they were driving at, but young enough to attribute too much authority to someone just on the basis of his writing with great confidence. They're "take charge of your life and be your own person" self-help books. I really think they helped me take charge of my own life and be my own person, to the degree that I could and needed to at that age, and have probably had a generally positive impact on my life overall. But I think I'd be embarrassed to read them now.

 

[Truthy]

Everything I've read by Steven Pinker has had a big influence on me, especially The Blank Slate. Some kind of summary is: human nature exists and matters massively, Western culture has a tradition of denying its existence, Western culture is too enamored with imagined "state of nature" tropes, we should be skeptical of educational and social silver bullets, inequality is a more intractable reality than commonly realized, culture is overused to explain things, and ideas about human nature are often corrupted or misunderstood for philosophical or political reasons. Practically, it got me interested in psychology and genetics and determined many of the books I've read since then, like Thinking Fast and Slow, the Hungry Brain, the Righteous Mind, Sapiens, Homo Deus, and Who We Are and How We Got Here.

Also: Ordinary Men, which is about the Holocaust and Godel, Escher, Bach, which is about lots of stuff.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Possibly the single most influential book that I have read was the DSM-III*. I'm fascinated by the human mind and that book helped me to understand it like no other.

*The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

 

[Birdjaguar]

Siddhartha, The Way of Zen and the Prophet were all important to me as a freshman in college. They set me down a path I could not have imagined at the time.

 

[Arwon]

Pretty much just the Lorax

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Since everyone seems to be trotting out the academic stuff, one of the most useful and influential books I ever bought and used was the Harbrace College Handbook.

That's the reason I had so much trouble forming my first ungrammatical Cheezburger caption. I almost couldn't force myself to type "teh" instead of "the". It's why I struggled with writing dialogue for stories until finding and following the advice to turn off the video and listen to the audio to get characters' dialogue right - a lot of times it's anything but grammatically correct.

But fiction is important as well, so I have to agree with @hobbsyoyo regarding the Ben Bova Grand Tour novels.

(and I bet everyone thought my first choice would be Dune, right? Well, it's on the list, but came later than the Harbrace)

 

[Traitorfish]

In terms of how I perceive the world as being put together? Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Harry Braverman's Labor & Monopoly Capital, Murray Bookchin's Post-Scarcity Anarchism, E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Whinging lefty books from the 1970s, to nobody's surprise.

On a personal level? I can't think of any. Like Synsensa, I don't tend to come away from books with a new revelation, but to digest them, Sarlaac-like, in the context of what I already know or think. The above are books that presented me with a certain way of looking at things that managed to up-end certain assumptions I'd previously carried by taking something I'd blithely assumed to be rational and straightforward and demonstrating that it really isn't; by presenting me with something that couldn't simply be digested in the context of what I already know or think, because it called so much of that into question. I don't think I've read any one book that had that impact for me on a personal, day-to-day level. Probably this is proof that I should read less books about factories and more books about people.

 

[brennan]

Hume, Locke, Kant, Ayer, Spinoza, Engels, Orwell, Arendt, Hitchens, Piketty, Attenborough. And Larry Niven.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Tom Paine: A Political Life by John Keane got me to read The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason. More than any other political thinker Paine inspires me and has influenced my worldview.
Fiction has probably had as much influence. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and lots of Kurt Vonnegut particularly God Bless You Mr Rosewater and Hocus Pocus help me believe that in a world without meaning or purpose we can find our own.

 

[abradley]

Am an old fool (82) and in my youth books about early Americana were the rage.

One author that stands out was Kenneth Roberts "
Roberts's historical fiction often focused on rehabilitating unpopular persons and causes in American history. A key character in Arundel and Rabble in Arms is the American officer and eventual traitor Benedict Arnold, with Roberts focusing on Arnold's expedition to Quebec and the Battle of Quebec in the first novel and the Battle of Valcour Island, the Saratoga campaign and the Battles of Saratoga in the second. Meanwhile, the hero of Northwest Passage was Major Robert Rogers and his company, Rogers' Rangers, although Rogers fought for the British during the American Revolutionary War. Oliver Wiswell focuses on a Loyalist officer during the American Revolution and covers the entire war, from famous events such as the Siege of Boston, the Battle of Bunker Hill, the New York and New Jersey campaign through the Battle of Fort Washington, and the Franco-American alliance, to less-remembered events such as the Convention Army, the exodus to Kentucky County, the Siege of Ninety-Six, and the resettlement of the United Empire Loyalists, as well as providing a later look at both a dissolute Rogers and a frustrated Arnold among the British." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Roberts_(author)#Historical_fiction

Not sure how they shaped me but I was surrounded by early Americana media in my youth.

 

[civvver]

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. That's about it. The Bible if that counts. I read some Plato and Socrates and Machiavelli but I don't think they influenced my thinking that much.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. That's about it. The Bible if that counts. I read some Plato and Socrates and Machiavelli but I don't think they influenced my thinking that much.

I forgot that one, it was enlightening and tore down some of the mythos of genius types I had been carrying around at that time. I guess I had assumed before then that great people in whatever field just sort of burst onto the scene as experts but in reality, nearly everyone has to grind to get to expert status.

 

[Peuri]

If I think about my current positions on various issues, the following books probably have had the most influence on my thinking:

George Orwell - 1984
Read it in high school. It got me interested in how language shapes reality. Influenced me to go study history.

Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death
Disillusioned me to the utility of fun, and alarmed me to the danger of adding the element of fun to things like the news and education.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations
Helped me to understand what concepts and words are.

R. Dunbar, C. Gamble & J. Gowlett - Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind
Opened me up to evolutionary psychology.

Daphne Patai & Noretta Koertge - Professing Feminism
Enforced my confirmation bias that a large chunk of gender studies is ideology first and science second.

 

[rah]

All input has some influence. Even LOTR did because it increased my love for that genre. The same could be said for the early SF magazines like galaxy.

 

[civvver]

I read slaughter house five but didn't get it. What was the message? Not sure how it was supposed to affect me. I just thought it was a weird time travel story.

 

[Truthy]

The main message is that you should say "so it goes" whenever you get the chance