What books have influenced you most?

[blamb425]

Night by Elie Wiesel is one...I'm sure there are more, but I haven't seen this one mentioned yet.

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Life? Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
Investing? The Intelligent Investor (Ben Graham)

 

[Locut0s]

Night by Elie Wiesel is one...I'm sure there are more, but I haven't seen this one mentioned yet.

My father loved that book, will have to read it, I understand it is very powerful!!

 

[foghorn67]

Benjamin Franklin-Walter Isaacson....hard work, persistence, being more approachable by being humorous, using pragmatic reasoning.
Genghis Khan: The Birth of an Empire: Conn Iggulden....resolve, thinking strategically.
Without Remorse: Tom Clancy...helping those in need, helping the defenseless, keeping focus.

There are others, but they were sunk into my conscience in a more subtle manner.

 

[Locut0s]

Life? Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
Investing? The Intelligent Investor (Ben Graham)

eewww... But then I'm a far left liberal.

 

[Perknose]

Influenced? I'd have to say reading most of Dickens ouevre from our living room library at age 10-11 expanded my vocabulary and sense of the magic of the English language like nothing else.

Also, for whatever reason -- Hey, I was 10! -- there's a romantic passage in The Scarlet Pimpernel that has stuck with me all these years in the exact same way the end of the movie Doctor Zhivago, where the guy catches a glimpse of Julie Christie going away on a street car. It just struck a chord in my heart that somehow still vibrates today.

The late Richard Farina was my original American Hero! When I was 16, I read his lone book before his death in a motorcycle accident, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, and it made me want to hang out my thumb and go see the damn world and all it's magnificent craziness from the street level view . . . so I did.

Farina predated all the other intensely and uniquely Amercian "gonzo, picaresque" writers like Thomas McGuane, Hunter S. Thompson, John Irving and Tom Robbins.

Thomas Pynchon said it came on "like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch... hilarious, chilling, sexy, profound, maniacal, beautiful and outrageous all at the same time..." :biggrin:

Other than those earlier influences, some enduring personal faves:

The Bushwhacked Piano -- Thomas McGuane
Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon
White Noise -- Dom DeLillo
Speak, Memory -- Vladimir Nabokov
Murphy, Molloy, and Malone Dies, a trio of novels by Samuel Beckett
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead -- Tom Stoppard (a play)
The Sot Weed Factor -- John Barth

Also, many, many poems from a panoply of poets, most of whom very few of you guys would know.