Poll: Novels that have impacted you the most?

[Koroviev]

Assigned reading + overenthusiastic teacher = epic fail

Read something about which you'd like to have a conversation. If you like shooting smack, read a book about that. If you like bragging about your conquest of alien mutants, then read about that.

I'll look but TBH reading in general has never interested me as a leisure activity. It's always been something I've done to gain information on something. That's why my library is 100% full of shop manuals and magazines on RC, cars and computers.

There's nothing wrong with that. If I could find a decent book that could tell me everything I've ever wanted to know about Russia, then that's all I'd need for the rest of my life. As it is, I look to (Russian) fiction to enlighten me about cultural norms past and present.

 

[Midnight Crossroads]

Probably Jurassic Park, as it was the first real novel I ever read. Crichton is also good at training a person to plow through bricks as half of his books are mostly page after page of nothing but technical jargon.

 

[Ldude893]

1984. The book's now a standard on how far a government has to go to be a true dystopia.

 

[CarpathianMuffin]

The Sorrow of War, while not the most immersive or coherent of novels, impacted me quite a lot by portraying the... well, sorrows, of war faced by a soldier in the North Vietnamese army.

 

[sheic99]

Assigned reading + overenthusiastic teacher = epic fail

Read something about which you'd like to have a conversation. If you like shooting smack, read a book about that. If you like bragging about your conquest of alien mutants, then read about that.

I'll look but TBH reading in general has never interested me as a leisure activity. It's always been something I've done to gain information on something. That's why my library is 100% full of shop manuals and magazines on RC, cars and computers.

That's still reading. Despite what your teachers may have told you, reading doesn't need to be just novels.

OT: The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Utterly fucking depressing post-apocalyptic story, but very enthralling.

 

[Kimarous]

I can't think of any specific novels that have "impacted" me. I saw the animated Lord of the Rings films long before I ever read the books... same with the BBC production for the Narnia series. If those serials impacted me any, I attribute that to television more-so than literature. Nothing else really comes to mind otherwise; they were either just good reads or bad ones.

 

[Super Toast]

Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. I am never touching drugs after reading that book.

 

[-=Spy=-]

Why is Level 7 never mentioned within these threads? If someone wants, I'll elaborate, but I'm amazed it never is.

 

[Gomithrus]

Hero of our Time by Lermentov and Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, I found the characters to be very believable and relatable to in these novels.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

I suppose there have been several. Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk made me consider, the first time, just how difficult it is to be objective about anything. A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, unlike the other dystopian novels I was forced to read in High School, taught me that a control mechanism need not be brutal to be insidious. And, I think Atlas Shrugged is likely my favorite book in terms of a personal ideology if not philosophically. The real complaint I have about this one is that it plods on far to long, especially near the end when it just punches you in the face with objectivist nonsense.

 

[tobi the good boy]

Probably very predictable but i'd say lord of the flies gave me an intresting look at the concepts of good and evil and if they truely do exist

 

[thylasos]

I've loved Albert Camus' L'étranger since I first read it; sensual and philosophical. It can only be read with a bottle of red.

 

[wolfshrimp]

The Malazan Book of the Fallen Series by Steven Erikson- such a massive scope yet you are given a chance to really connect with individual characters so that when they die you feel the pain and sorrow. Also his descriptions of fights and battles are cinematic in the way they grab your emotions; makes my hair stand on end.

And the Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave also struck a chord with me, a coherent way of shifting perspectives and narrators set in a messed up but totally believable world.

 

[Kermi]

Stranger in a Strange Land has taught me the values of tolerance, understanding and compassion. The willingness to learn more about the things I don't understand so that I may come to accept them. The willing to appreciate that there will be things about humanity and the world we live in I may never understand, and that I should still love them, because I am a product of this world and by holding those things in contempt I am only revealing that I hate myself.

 

[Koroviev]

Assigned reading + overenthusiastic teacher = epic fail

Read something about which you'd like to have a conversation. If you like shooting smack, read a book about that. If you like bragging about your conquest of alien mutants, then read about that.

I'll look but TBH reading in general has never interested me as a leisure activity. It's always been something I've done to gain information on something. That's why my library is 100% full of shop manuals and magazines on RC, cars and computers.

That's still reading. Despite what your teachers may have told you, reading doesn't need to be just novels.

OT: The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Utterly fucking depressing post-apocalyptic story, but very enthralling.

That one's been recommended several times, and I actually have it lying around, so it'll probably be the next book I read or close to it. Maybe it will put me in the mood for Fallout 3 like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

 

[Koroviev]

Ulysses, but not in a, "I'll never look at life in the same way," deal, more of a, "Fuck you and your bullshit, James Joyce," way. The same can more or less be said about the Tale of Genji and the Sound and the Fury by Faulkner.

The opposite can be said about Faulkner's Light in August and As I Lay Dying. Also, Rushdie's Satanic Verses (not all that Satanic really), Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Shusaku Endo's Silence, Mishima's the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, and I suppose I should give a shout out to Henderson's novels Native and Augusta Locke, just because and a bucket/several bookcases I don't feel like listing.

I need to give Thus Spoke Zarathustra another try, I think I was a little too young when I read it and it went right over my head.

 

[Koroviev]

I've loved Albert Camus' L'étranger since I first read it; sensual and philosophical. It can only be read with a bottle of red.

I love that book! The only trouble is that I found that the style was not conducive to immediate rereading. I'll read it again eventually though.

 

[Koroviev]

Stranger in a Strange Land has taught me the values of tolerance, understanding and compassion. The willingness to learn more about the things I don't understand so that I may come to accept them. The willing to appreciate that there will be things about humanity and the world we live in I may never understand, and that I should still love them, because I am a product of this world and by holding those things in contempt I am only revealing that I hate myself.

So hippy sci-fi, eh? I have a friend who highly recommends this, and it does make some "BEST SCI-FI EVAR!!!" lists haha.

 

[vanthebaron]

a good novel MUST immerse you, hold your attetion.