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!
Stephen King’s “The Stand”. I was very young for the material (around 9 y. o.), and thought it was very strange to see so many people wanting to harm each other in the face of a really scary emergency.
Fast Forward 30 years and now it all makes a ton more sense, and based on COVID and just… Life, seems to have accurately captured the way humanity will still find a way to try to destroy itself regardless of circumstances around them.
- I think about that book even 10 years later
“The Perennial Philosophy” by Huxley. Even though I agreed with most of what he’d argue going into it already, it kind of blew my mind and both validated and changed the ways I was living
Manufacturing Consent ~ Chomsky
Night by Elie Wiesel. it made the Holocaust something that was REAL. obv i’m not an idiot i know it happened. i mean that it was so moving and emotional. i feel like sometimes we forget that in the grand scheme of things these major historical events weren’t long ago. it really put things in to perspective for me.
I don’t like preaching religion but probably Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason. Its not really a religious book per se, but it made me think about the inevitablility of there existing an infinitely Good God. Since its an exploration of Plato’s Republic and his metaphysics it in a big way changed how I thought about everything else in philosophy and life.
In the mid-70’s, before I was full grown, Gravity’s Rainbow – among many other things it taught me – cured me of paranoid tendencies by providing a sensible and thorough analysis of what paranoia is.
Not that there aren’t plenty of evil nasty people. The novel doesn’t suggest there’s any shortage of them. Just points out that they’re not all plotting against me personally. Paranoia is an exaggeration of one’s own importance in the grand scheme of things.
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.
The Prophet - Khalil Gibran hit me so hard when I first read it as a teenager.
I re-read more recently and some of the magic’s not there anymore. Kinda sad…
Spaiens - Yuval Noah Harari
I had grown up in a rather religious household, and had never taken an Anthropology course before reading this book. It completely changed the way I thought about what it means to be a person.
Cannery Row by Steinbeck.
It’s a simple book about kindness, supporting others, and finding light in darker times. I read it during my angsty teen years and it really helped to change my perspective of it being me vs. the world to understanding that the world is full of simple kindness, you just have to look.