icemann on 26/9/2011 at 10:45
Lone Wolf.
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http://homepages.tesco.net/~parsonsp/assets/images/flightdark.jpgChanged my outlook on choose your own adventure style gamebooks. It taught me that books could be just as interactive as video games (from a gameplay perspective) to a degree. After that I became obsessed with getting all the books in the series (Lone Wolf). Took me a good several years and becoming old enough to start working, but I got all 28 of them eventually.
Vasquez on 26/9/2011 at 11:59
Bukowski.
Vernon on 27/9/2011 at 03:14
Notes from Underground
Twilight of the Idols
The Sickness Unto Death
Dead Souls
The Plague
Nausea (I did't finish this, since it was taken from me by a friend - they were worried about my well-being at the time and they felt the book was't exactly helping. I think they were missing the point)
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (I hit the Russian canon pretty hard, to the exclusion of all other literature for a long, long time. I was finally dragged out of that by a woman who had me read Murakami. The rest is history!)
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http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/1749/emotchord.gifAerothorn on 27/9/2011 at 05:26
It's really hard for me to say. I'm not sure I've ever encountered a work that radically altered my views - but then, my views are pretty fluid to begin with. I generally just jump on board any argument that sounds better than the one I had before.
That said, two off the top of my head:
Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life: I'm actually still in the process of reading this, but it's been really important to me so far. I've been a lying puritan since I developed the capacity for moral reasoning; first in an absolutist sense, later in that I only applied my "no lying" doctrine to myself, not to others. As one might imagine, it's never come from a wholly rational place. This book conducts a thorough, brilliant analysis of the costs of lying in every conceivable situation. It is not a polemic, leaving it to the reader to determine what is situational, but neither does it shy from hard truths (that almost everyone is a hypocrit when it comes to deception). A brilliant work.
Fires on the Plain: I'm not a spiritual person by nature; reading this book is the closest I've come to feeling a certain form of faith, or having a personal connection to the idea of faith. It's hard to say why, exactly.
Volitions Advocate on 27/9/2011 at 05:59
A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
Memoirs of a boy soldier from Sierra Leone who lived through the Freetown battles and other horrors in the jungle before that.
Now he lives in NYC. It's graphic. He has killed more people than I've killed sprites in Doom, and we were probably doing it at the same time. It says a lot about the power of brainwashing, drugs, coersion, and redemption.
