What are the books you've read that shaped you?

illusions by Richard Bach – made me do some soul searching. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand – made me look differently at the liberal/conservative viewpoints. Future Shock by Alvin Tofler – helped me to understand today’s society a little better. The Bible – lots of good advice here.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain – Betty Edwards

A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse

Animal Farm – George Orwell

Mostly the ones I read as a kid.

Robinson Crusoe
To Kill a Mockingbird
That Was Then, This is Now
Lord of the Flies

Also, non-fiction about John F. Kennedy, Frank Lloyd Wright, Andy Warhol.

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Elements by Euclid
The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
Four Quartets by TS Eliot

Gosh. I don’t think I can pin down just 1.

Sacajawea taught me how incredibly strong women can be.

The Biography of Gandhi. It changed my world.

A course in miracles. Emotional intelligence by Daniel Goldman.

1. Alice in Wonderland which I first read at age 9.
2. The Chuang Tzu which I discovered in my student days when I was 19 years old.

There are many others but these are particularly important to me.

Hop on Pop
Green Eggs and Ham
Paddington Bear
A Wrinkle In Time

As a kid very interested in war, I read quite a few military history books.

Around age 6 or so, my friends and I found the war section in the library and the photographs of World War II, especially of the bombing of industrial and urban targets by the United States Air Force, made a big impression.

Around age 11, reading The Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet On The Western Front made a big impression by describing personal experiences of the horror and terribleness of war and how it affected people, and how governments and cultures and so on make young men kill each other and die.

Focusing gave me an effective technique for working on my own emotional material, when I had little awareness of such things.

Confessions of an Economic Hitman showed me a lot of specifics I didn’t know about the history of corporate exploitation and control of governments and part of what is really happening in the world as opposed to the stories the corporate news media likes us to think is the real narrative instead.

Speak Peace In A World Of Conflict had a big effect on how I communicate and listen to people, and how I see solutions to problems.

My Early Life and A History of the English Speaking Peoples, both by Winston Churchill. Plain Speaking, Harry S. Truman. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon. Paticularly his veiled critique on the origins of Christianity. Gibbon may have been writing during The Enlightenment but he still had to be cautious writing about relgion. Ballsey man, Mr. Gibbon.

OMG A Wrinkle in Time!!

I read a book called “Son Rising” in the 80’s. It was my first introduction to autism, which basically no one ever heard of before. That had a pretty profound effect on me.
Later on I strongly suspected on of my day care children had autism, but the parents refused to recognize that there was a big problem with the kid. They were religious. God would never give them any thing less than a perfect child.
Pretty sure the dad was abusive, too.
Anyway, I tried to think like the authors of the book and proceed accordingly, never saying anything to the parents, of course. After several months Mom said the changes in him were amazing.

Little House on the Prairie spoke to me, both as a 12 -13 year old, and when I read them again as an adult. I saw them in a whole new light as an adult, and I really felt sorry for Caroline. I got the impression her husband was a wanderer and she had to go with him.