The novel that's had the biggest impact on you
 

Which novel has had the biggest impact on you?

I read a similar thread on another board and it seems like Camus' The Outsider figures high for quite a few people. There must be a lot more Cure fans out there than I realised!

George Orwell - "1984". I was recovering a few days after I'd read that.

Another ones are:

Aldous Huxley - "Brave New World"
William S. Burroughs - "Junky"
Ian Mc Ewan - "The Cement Garden"
Charles Bukowski - "Post Office" and "Ham on Rye"
Albert Camus - "Stranger"
Herrmann Hesse - "Siddharta"
Douglas Adams - "Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy"

Probably Charles Dickens' "Bleak House", but for a totally wrong reason: After reading that book as part of my A-level syllabus at school, I was put off "classic" fiction for life.

William Peter Blatty -The Exorcist

Difficult to say. These are a few for different reasons.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
Demian - Hermann Hesse
Of Mice and Men - John Ernst Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

I read the last two in 6th grade, which made quite an impact.

Stephen King - The Stand

god, I've read that damn book at least 10 times now.

pork: Legion is good too!

Boring but true answer: Wm Burroughs "The Naked Lunch".

im trying to think...

"tom sawyer" because it was the first novel i read as a little kid and it fueled my imagination at an early age

the first book that truly blew my mind wasn't a novel but a book of short stories-- "ficciones" by borges. he never wrote a novel.

hesse's "demian" and "steppenwolf" were huge for me when i was 18.

"the unbearabe lightness of being" and "love in the times of cholera" changed the way i think about sex and relationships.

"neuromancer" in terms of understanding the value of science fiction and how to deal with the future.. it changed my imagination about the future.

there are others but this i recall right now.

---

ps- ha ha toko, we have a couple of those in common!

Zazie in the Metro - Raymond Queneau
Master and Margarita - Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov

These do not qualify as novels, but still...

Le Petit Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Pidgeon - Patrick Suskind
Carmilla - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

dear God, I forgot this:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (+ Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There) - Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

I might add that those books did not "change my life".... I find it hard to explain it, but those are the ones whose lines are sorta "recurring" in my thinking patterns and I find them related to "real life" on so many levels....

Totally.

Indeed. For some reason, most of the books I read when I was at school, stuck to this day.
Another good example was The Wave by Todd Strasser (Morton Rhue).



Edit: nicfit, Le Petit Prince made my imagination run wild as a kid.

Another book of great importance to me was Jonathan Livingstone Seagull - Richard Bach

It think it might have been Colin Wilson's The Outsider we were going on about in the other thread, not Camus' The Stranger (aka The Outsider).
The Myth of Sisyphus, of course, is the essay by Camus that explores his absurdist view...interesting book to read...but, of course, as actual philosophy, it's basically junk.

formative books (only one is a novel)

Colin Wilson, The Outsider
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Frijitof Capra, The Tao of Physics
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (NOVEL)
C.G. Jung, Psyche and Symbol
Plato, Dialogues of Plato
Various (compilation), The Beat Generation & the Angry Young Men
photos by and compiled by David Douglas Duncan, Picasso's Picassos

& not to copy, but
I read just about all of Hesse early before graduating high school...I'll list Narcissus & Goldmund and Demian. I suppose the Casteneda muck and Clarke/Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey screenplay should be in there too as early books that had impact.

not a novel but a play
Chekov - Three sisters. Made me see how classical literature could be as affective as modern.

Chekhov is great.
So is Ibsen.

The 19th century produced some incredibly insightful works of literature.

"Just as Effective?"
19c lit is more "effective" then "Modern" literature.
Stuff nowadays is fairly universally superficial and too cluttered with detritus.
It's as if authors these days have several layers of gunk clouding their mind's eye.

Tolstoy's Anna Karenin. The last chapter had a really profound impact on me.

Yeah, that book is great.

Anna Karenina was the first I read because I had a high school girlfriend that recommended it. But, after that, I read the short stories to test the waters before going on to other Tolstoy. Every once in a blue moon, I'll read one again.

Michael Bond's A Bear Called Paddington (1958), the first in Mr Bond's remarkable series. Everyone should read this book or have it read to them, as early on in their lives as possible. The charm, inquisitiveness and morals of the eponymous hero are already established at this eary stage.



A true classic.

The first poet I read a lot of books by was e.e. cummings. Blake was after that.

I cannot remember any specific children's books besides the "Peanuts" books by Schultz.
I loved pop-up books, especially ones about dinosaurs or space exploration.
I had one of those large storybooks about St. George and the Dragon or something.
I remember an Aesop fairy tales book being on the family bookshelf and a set of "children's classics"
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Last of the Mohicans, Daniel Fenmore Cooper
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Kate Douglas Wiggin
The Old Man & the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson


Never got into the Dr. Suess really or a lot of the other more traditional children's books.

James Herbert - The Rats (the first "grown up" book I read)

George Orwell - all of his books starting with Animal Farm, because I realised for the first time the power and beauty of words (sounds corny, but true)

ha ha, more coincidences. le petit prince was awesome, and my interpretations of it changed as i grew up (obviously), but by that i mean that this book was very close to me for years. jls i read i think when i was seven i remeber feeling quite melancholic when i was done! i still remember where i was when i read it (in a motel, on a trip, and it was raining).

I remember seeing the film musical adaptation of The Little Prince in 1974, but can't remember if it was any good. You?

Some other interesting things about Le Petit Prince (Wiki):

1. In the 1940's/50's, Walt Disney planned to make The Little Prince into an animated movie, but due to some problems, it was never made.

2. In 2005, the book was translated into Toba, an indigenous language of Argentina, as So Shiyaxauolec Nta'a. It was the first book translated into this language since the Bible.

3. The book is one of few modern books to be translated into Latin, as Regulus.

4. The actor James Dean was so fond of the book he actually memorized most of its passages.

L I N K

animal farm the illustrated (one of) that my mum read me as a kid

Reading Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne in 3rd grade turned me into a novel reader.

I am going to say Crime and Punishment because I read it in my basement mostly on a couch with a pile of rags for a pillow in tattered clothes that I was too busy reading to change. I was pretty much becoming Raskolnikov. I've thought about killing someone just to make myself a better person.

Probobly the book "Diffrent Seasons" by Stephen King. It wasn't the first book of his I've read, but I just remember the stories in it really sticking with me. When I read it, "Stand By Me" was the only story from it that had been turned into a film at the time, so this was pre-"Shawshank Redemption" or "Apt Pupil", films. And the book as a whole was unlike anything I'd ever read before, even for Stephen King, and it really inspired me to want to write.

Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on the philosophy side. Definitely my own On The Road.

House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski on the art side... tied with anything by Faulkner of course.


EDIT: Umberto Eco's Baudolino and Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning are also important mentions

Ishmael - Daniel Quinn.

This book recently made me a Socialist... lets talk about it.

The ever typical On the Road story here. When I read some two or so years ago I had to re-read at least twice before I could get over how much I loved it. But Dharma Bums is my favorite kerouac.

1984 or Animal Farm probably.

huh, I know somebody else reading this

sounds interesting but I don't thinkit would make me a Socialist (been there, done that)

1984 was one of the only few required high school books I actually cared to and enjoyed reading.

le moutoun que tu veux est dedans

what does that mean?

the something that you see is something?

no, it says "the sheep that you want is inside the box"

The Rum Diaries - Hunter Thompson
Panama - Thomas McGuane

yeah, I had sworn off Socialism when I picked up the book, but the book put an entirely different perspective on conflict theory and private property. Check it out, it may rekindle something.

Can't quite get it down to just one, as it really depends on the period of life for me.

Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse may be the most lasting though.

Now Wait For Last Year by Phillip K. Dick was major in the acid days.
Then Naked Lunch was very influential on my way of seeing and creating art in general.
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller definitely hit a major spot for me at a time when I was more able to identify with the protagonist. I can still appreciate it now, but I wouldn't want to identify with him any more.

That was Then This is Now by S.E. Hinton, I like that there is a smart character in that movie. It made me realize that smart people are not always those that go to college and get a degree.

Obviously The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I was angsty in High School.

Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg. It made turn my writing into poetry instead of a short fiction. But I was blown away by his words, and everything he wrote.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. It gave me some perspective on what it is to be a woman. Also I felt her alienation.

The Plague by Albert Camus, it made me realized humanity is all for themselves. How each and one of us will go to extremes to survive.

The Stranger by Albert Camus, How people judge people on just pure rubbish, and ostracize them for it.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. It is sad when your own family despises you or treats you differently, cause you are different.

I think that is about it.

SERIOUSLY! Howl is just fun to read and get caught up in.

My first big one (at eleven years old) which really got me into writing was Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" which I have mentioned several times in the forum.
Others as important:
"The Brothers Karamazov" - Fédor Dostoyevski
"The flowers of evil" - Charles Baudelaire
"Complete Works" - Alejandra Pizarnik
"Ulysses" - James Joyce
"Run with the hunted" - Charles Bukowski
"On the road" - Jack Kerouac
"Rayuela" - Julio Cortázar

And there may be more.
*EDIT: Oh you said novels. Well I included a couple poetry books that were VERY influential for me in their time.