For me, it was a book called ‘The Outsiders’ by S.E Hinton. It is known as a literary classic these days, but it was quite hard hitting when it was released back in the 1960s.
In a nut shell; It is about a group of semi-impoverished greaser friends growing up in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma, and all the life challenges they face, and how they react to prejudice against them whilst coping with family issues.
It was the first book that made me realise that some people in society don’t get it easy growing up, and I discovered what it meant to live on the ‘wrong side of town’ and what societal prejudice was. The outsiders was the first novel I read that brought up hard subjects like; domestic violence, alcoholism, street gang violence etc.
It was the first book to shatter my naive way of thinking about the world, at 13 years old! It is still one of my favourite stories to this day, and for all its slightly dark themes, I love the compassionate friendship and brotherhood that is displayed in this book!
For me it was an off shoot book of the animorphs, a series which i knew very little about and did not read, although i had seen a couple episodes of the television show. It is called The Ellimist Chronicles and it features an alien trying to find a way to survive some kind of destruction of his race or planet, eventually getting absorbed by a hivemind thing, then breaking free in a way into the background of the universe, able to see and manipulate the ‘strings’ of time and matter. Had some pretty heady scifi concepts that i later enjoyed more in Herbert’s original Dune series and other stuff. But some of that book remains stuck in the dome, and probably will forever.