What are some books that have impacted you the most?

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Animal Farm
Fahrenheit 451
Fight Club
Slaughterhouse 5
Beowulf
The Jungle
Naked Lunch
The Jungle Books

Let's make more noise for Charlotte's Web!

Letters from the Earth by Mark Twain.

Flowers for Algernon
The Deed of Paksennarion - Elizabeth Moon

Voltaire's Bastards: Dictatorship of Reason in the West - John Ralston Saul
Secret Teaching of All Ages - Manly P Hall
Lectures on Ancient Philosophy - Manly P Hall
Meditations On The Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism - Unknown Author (Valentin Tomberg) translated (from French) by Robert Powell
Mystical Qabbalah - Dion Fortune
Qabbalistic Tarot - Robert Wang
Straw Dogs - John Gray
Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
All Things Are Possible - Lev Shestov
The World Goes On - László Krasznahorkai
The Case Against Reality - Donald Hoffman


Hoping to grow the end of this list one of these days soon with more existentialism, absurdism, higher quality postmodernist thinkers, and I've been hearing a lot of references to Gilles Deleuze from different people that make me want to check out some of his work.

Isabella prompted these.
Diary of Anne Frank
Life with a Star by Jiri Weil

A history of Western Music, and it’s companion, A short History of Opera—Donald Jay Grout

The Pilgrim’s Progress—John Bunyan

The Formulae of Concord

The Small Catechism of Martin Luther

The Cost of Discipleship—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Hiding Place—Corrie ten Boom

Faust—Goethe

The Sorrows of Young Werther—Goethe

metaphysical texts such as-
*"return from tomorrow" [dr. george ritchie MD]
*"life after life" [dr. raymond moody]
*"you cannot die" [dr. ian stephenson IANDS]
*"journeys out of the body" [robert monroe]
*"many mansions" [gina cerminara]
and one not-so-metaphysical and more purely physical-
*the only investment guide you'll ever need" [wall street journal]

1984, George Orwell. I'll likely re-read this novel periodically for the rest of my life. I'm sure I was impacted by it in essentially the same way most other people have been, so I won't beat a dead horse about this one. That said, I do think I was personally influenced especially by Winston's all-consuming loneliness, and how that loneliness was eventually leveraged against him ("Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood"); this aspect of the story was especially horrifying to me and, I think, helped me develop both a healthy skepticism of political social engineering and an appreciation of how important it is to be able to tolerate loneliness (and other unpleasant experiences).

The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux. I don't think this one had much philosophical influence on me as, frankly, it's not a very well-constructed or consistent novel. It is a great story, though, and it impacted me tremendously when I read it as a kid and fell in love with it. Phantom in all its various adaptations became a special interest that persisted for many years and resulted in a massive collection, and I still have a deep fondness for it as an adult. Even today, although my interest in Phantom specifically is significantly less intense, its influence can still be found in my love of detective/mystery stories in general (especially those with a gothic, occult, or supernatural twist). By far the most impactful book I've ever read in terms of time, money, and long-term interest.

welcome to our club, Xenosaur

I once dropped a Victorian Welsh language family bible on my bare toes , it was quite impactful

Seriously though I have only read a handful of actual fiction books, the last one was the first Harry Potter which I read to my daughter at bedtimes. I do like reading reference books though like antique guides and I made a successful online business because of it, so it's probably a Miller's that impacted me the most.