What book has had the most influence on your reading taste and view towards books?

[cynara]

When i was twelve i discovered 'gone with the wind' and from then on i was hooked on the nineteenth century. Even though the book was written in the 30's it started my love affair of old books and simultaneously classic literature. It still remains one of my favourite books even if i can now see flaws in my previous literary ideal. So my question is what book has made the largest impact on you?

[JBI]

I Canti, Leopardi. That's probably the reason I study Italian.

[MissScarlett]

Tess of the d'Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy

It's why I love to read tragedy so much.

[Ghuyuran]

I have to say that Goethe's Faust is certainly one of the motivational factor that pushes me to continue studying German. My goal? To be able to read this massive work in the original language.

A year or so earlier, I have to admit that I did not like poetry. Then I had my Poetry Class and things changed. Was it the teacher or had I matured? Too many names come to mind. Needless to say, I was introduced to the great poets and was amazed.

[jinjang]

What a great question!
I was about 10 when I read The Secret Garden that possibly was the key to open the door to my reading. The education system in Korea is such that I was loaded with school work and I read only what was required - I couldn't call it a pleasure - during my middle and high school years. The nationwide entrance examination to universities took most of my time, although I could claim I fooled around, though moderately and nothing serious, more than most of my classmates.

During the long summers between the undergraduate years, I read some translations in Korean of the world classics, including Paradise Lost. Reading became enjoyment again. I was searching for the meaning in life and discovering a religion and so books by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hesse, Goethe were the most influential to me. English writers came to me much later. I tend to read author by author, meaning I read most of each author and move to another.

[mayneverhave]

Hamlet.

This play essentially ruined all other reading for me because it set the bar too high. I have never been content with pretty much everything since reading that play.

[Don Quixote Jr]

What book has had the most influence on your reading taste and view towards books?

This is a really interesting question, but I'm afraid my answer is fairly mundane...
I can't for the life of me single out any one book to answer this question with!

[kiki1982]

The Assault - Harry Mulisch (if it was ever translated I'm not sure). It was my first grown-up book when I was sixteen and I made such a brilliant bookreview that my teacher asked to state my sources.

That book introduced me to reading because it had more to offer than the story. I hated reading. From then on I loved it.

Victorian literature I discovered through Jane Eyre which triggered a love for English literature. Thank you BBC, for your absolutely sh*t adaptation which compelled me to read the original.

[Lokasenna]

Hamlet had a massive impact on me when I first read it - as a slightly melancholic, existentialist 14 year old, I really identified with the Prince.

However, I would say that reading the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer in my first year of Uni was probably the largest turning point for me - I fell hopelessly in love with it, and my career as a medievalist was pretty much decided from that point...

[Rococo]

Probably "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Solzhenitsyn. My ebullient and wonderful English tutor was a great fan of his work - she recommended it to me, and i enjoyed it so much i automatically went on to read many of his other works. And from Solzhenitsyn, who was a great admirer of Tolstoy, i moved onto Tolstoy - which is where my love of Russian literature started!! From then, i've read Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Lermentov...i've read works by Russian poets, too, only i hate reading poetry in translation (yeah, i don't speak Russian - only English, and very rudimentary German) One day, i intend to learn Russian so i can enjoy these works as they were intended - but as yet i haven't had the opurtunity. English schools are pretty rubbish in regards to studying languages: at my school, for example, you can study either French, German or Spanish - what kind of limited selection do you call that!? It's no selection at all!

[Mr Endon]

What a great question!
Interestingly, the book that changed my view towards books is not necessarily the best book I've read: the exquisite Watt, though not my favourite Beckett, made me realise how much I hate pretentious literature. It was quite a shock to read Bowen's Heat of the Day immediately afterwards - a shock from which I may never fully recover.

[PoeticPassions]

Crime and Punishment and Anna Karenina.

I read them both at 12 years of age. The first made me fall in love with Dostoevsky (a love affair that continues to this day, 12 years later), and incited my passion for Russian literature... for psychology even. It opened the door to many things, many works. It led to Anna, it led to Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov... but mainly it led to all of Dostoevsky's novels.

The second shaped my views on what love and passion are, for better or for worse. Anna Karenina shaped many of my world views. I learned what love is. And now I am kind of cursed to always seek out tragedy and suffering in love, and in books. It caused me to believe that love is only pure when tragic... and so on and so forth. Perhaps I have, since that day, possessed a sado-masochistic desire to be someone's Anna Karenina. Though thinking about it now, I resent Tolstoy for portraying her the way that he did. Perhaps it was out of some kind of bigotry or sexism... or perhaps it was his own warped views on sexuality and the consequences of sex.

[Mariamosis]

So my question is what book has made the largest impact on you?

I bought Daniel Keye's 'Flowers for Algernon', and there is where my love affair really began!

[Jeremiah Jazzz]

A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.
It lead me to literature, as elementary as that.

[Chava]

The first book that tought me what it meant to not just read a book, but understand it, was Animal Farm by Orwell. Since then I have had a small passion for Orwell.
The book was given to me by my 6th grade English teacher, since he felt I ought to read some extra curricular material; he also added a few others, Solzhenitsyn, Richard Bach, etc.
But seriously, I remember the moment while reading in Animal Farm that it occured to me that this was not just a story about funny animals, and thus started to develop my passion for literary analysis.

[grotto]

“Siddhartha” and “Narcissus and Goldmund” - Herman Hesse
“Journey to Ixtlan” - Carlos Castaneda
“”Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” – Robert Pirsig
“Island” - Aldous Huxley

I don’t remember which one I read first, (it was over 30 years ago). but I read them all one summer and that was the summer where reading really took off for me.

[Chava]

”Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” – Robert Pirsig

I completely forgot about this. Awesome book!

[prendrelemick]

It was in 1978 reading a Wilbur Smith pulp novel. I think it was called Rage. I was a fan of his. But I had an epiphany during the first chapter. I realized that it was formulaic rubbish! (sorry Wilbur)

From that moment on I sought out "classics" starting with the A' level Eng Lit recommended reading list.

[LitNetIsGreat]

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde as one single work originally hooked me to literature, but there are always little pieces of genius from Shakespeare which sparked my interest at school but which were never fully developed, which remains to this day one of my biggest regrets in life. I remember reading speeches from Julius Caesar and being blown away with them at school but such is the politics of the curriculum that such exposure was very limited and so I would have to wait till later in order to get back on track with it all. It was Wilde who got me back on track, he was my teacher who gave me Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley and the key to immortality.

At the moment however I am very interested in Wordsworth, Milton, Shakespeare as always, Hardy, amongst others, I also must order a complete works of Phillip Sidney, as what I have read of Sidney is stunning, this particular poem has floated around in my head for about four years on a weekly basis:


With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies,
How silently, and with how wan a face;
What, may it be that e'en in heav'nly place
That busy archer his sharp arrow tries?
Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case;
I read it in they looks; thy languished grace,
To me that feel the like, thy state descries.
Then e'en of fellowship, O Moon, tell me,
Is constant love deemed there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be loved, and yet
Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?
Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?

It's from the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella though I have never had the time to just muse around reading the whole lot of them and not doing much else. I think that is how they should be read, and when I get them and am free from work I am going to read them and do nothing else for two weeks, I won't speak to anyone or eat anything, I’ll just float around reading these sonnets, I won't even get dressed or anything, I'll just read these in a daze and the rest of the world can go hop.

[Frankie Anne]

How interesting, cynara, that you named "Gone With the Wind." I think that was the first real "book" I read and I was about 14 when I read it. I read for three days straight during summer vacation! I couldn't put it down. Then came "Little Women" and I've been hooked on older books and authors ever since. "Sons and Lovers" and "The Warden" got me hooked on English literature.

[MissScarlett]

Besides Thomas Hardy, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers absolutely cemented my love for English literature. Thanks for reminding me of Sons and Lovers. :)

[cynara]

Wilde! He's one of my favourite authors, whenever i want a good laugh and beautiful passages i turn to him. He's one of the people i would have loved to have met, i can imagine him so clearly strutting and prancing.

[Frankie Anne]

MissScarlett, Hardy is one of my favorite authors. "Far From the Madding Crowd" and "Return of the Native" are two of my favorite books. My goal is to read all that Trollope and Hardy wrote. :)

[stlukesguild]

Well... I don't think I can limit this to s single book. Dr. Seuss' Sleep Book is the first book I remember reading to myself... over and over. In third grade or thereabout I became obsessed with the Wizard Of Oz books (there's quite a number of them). I remember racing another boy in attempting to finish all of them. From that point on there was no stopping me. Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and Rimbaud's A season in Hell, The Drunken Boat, and Illuminations opened me up to the wonderful world of poetry. A volume of the Collected Works of William Blake (Illuminated) was a revelation... leading me to an absolute obsession with books as visual art objects as well as literature. Finally I would say that J.L. Borges' Labyrinths was equally revelatory... although he worked his magic upon me slowly. The works didn't immediately grab me... but for some reason I kept returning to them until I became obsessed... a true Borgesian. Of all the writers I have read I must credit Borges with leading me to further writers... sometimes obscure... but always fascinating... more than any other writer. Borges certainly opened me up to further possibilities beyond character and plot-driven narratives and led me to continually rethink the great characters and writers with whom I thought I was fully familiar.

[Tsuyoiko]

Crime and Punishment. I've always been a big reader, but before Crime and Punishment I read mostly for entertainment: Science Fiction novels, Stephen King, kid's books. I'd read real literature at school, but I guess since I was studying for many years after that, reading was just an escape for me. I read Crime and Punishment about 8 years ago, and since then I read mainly classics, especially Russian literature. Dostoevsky is still my favourite writer.

[crystalmoonshin]

Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" made me love tragedies. Since then, I've been reading novels with tragic endings, like the Chinese classic "Dream of the red Mansions" which, BTW, inspired me to study more about the Chinese language.

[The Comedian]

Walden -- I read it every spring (currently reading it now) and have about 15-18 reads of the book all told. This book has fed my dominate (but not exclusive) taste in literature: that taste for environmental non-fiction/natural history.

Some other authors in this vein, that I enjoy are Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, Bernd Heinrich, Annie Dilliard, Mary Austin, Gretel Ehrlich and many others.

Along these same lines, I love reading the journals of explorers (mostly American -- not out of any sense of patriotism, though; I just like to read about the places I know best): John Westley Powell, Lewis and Clark, James Boroughs, John Muir, John James Audubon, and others of that ilk.

:)

[Mathor]

The Hobbit. I read this book at the age of 6. I had only just started reading chapter books. It was probably a little bit above me, but I saw it in a book store and mainly i just thought the cover was nice. So I read it, and a lot of the words I did not know but I just used what i now know are "context clues" and I worked my way through it. And when I was done, I read it again, and again and again. Each time it started to make more sense, and was more enjoyable. I have this book and not my English teachers to speak, for without it I would have no vocabulary to speak of (or with).

[Scheherazade]

The Trial and The Plague. I read them one after another within the same month and was really shaken... Still am, maybe (After 20+ years).

[Uberzensch]

Crime and Punishment and Anna Karenina.

The second shaped my views on what love and passion are, for better or for worse. Anna Karenina shaped many of my world views. I learned what love is. And now I am kind of cursed to always seek out tragedy and suffering in love, and in books. It caused me to believe that love is only pure when tragic... and so on and so forth. Perhaps I have, since that day, possessed a sado-masochistic desire to be someone's Anna Karenina. Though thinking about it now, I resent Tolstoy for portraying her the way that he did. Perhaps it was out of some kind of bigotry or sexism... or perhaps it was his own warped views on sexuality and the consequences of sex.

I'd pick Anna Karenina, too. It really took my reading to a different place and rekindled my love for classics.

I do have a question about what you say here, which might be a better fit for a thread on the novel. What about the love of Levin and Kitty? Sure, Anna gets the title, and the wild passion and romance are there, but in the quiet, dare I say boring, love between Levin and Kitty isn't there much less tragedy and more simple happiness?

[Homers_child]

Well, for the longest time I simply read teenage fiction. Oh god, how sad I was. And then I got exposed to Macbeth and the whole world came crashing down. And now all I do is research classics, poetry and plays and pretty much anything with more depth than shallow puddles like Twilight.

[IJustMadeThatUp]

I was given The Red Pony by my Nanna when I was about ten, it really reminds me of her and how she used to encourage me to read by giving me books about horses :) My art teacher borrowed it and never gave it back :(

Then I would have to say Watership Down which was given to me by my aunt when I was thirteen, it opened me up to books with substance.

[oblivion252]

The first book that tought me what it meant to not just read a book, but understand it, was Animal Farm by Orwell. Since then I have had a small passion for Orwell.
The book was given to me by my 6th grade English teacher, since he felt I ought to read some extra curricular material; he also added a few others, Solzhenitsyn, Richard Bach, etc.
But seriously, I remember the moment while reading in Animal Farm that it occured to me that this was not just a story about funny animals, and thus started to develop my passion for literary analysis.

Oh yes same here! When you read the final words (and some earlier in the book), that feeling of realisation, and just general awesomeness, still stays with me today.
As for me, it's a cross between Animal Farm and, strangely, 'The Return of the Native' by Thomas Hardy. This book just sprung me into Victorian literature and since it's been awesome! Also first page of Claire Tomalin's Hardy biography changed my views on writers: it made me realise the trauma and the events occuring underneath the text of books.

[jinjang]

How I forgot Le Petit Prince!

Fox (Renard) and "get used to a friend" (apprivoiser) taught me the responsibilty to the friends I made.

The whole book was a poem. I could go back to it again and again.

[juhuulian]

The book that influenced me most was Flann O'Brien's (Irish) The Third Policeman which is quite crazy but great to read. Thats the book that made me really want to write my own stuff. Its also influenced my style immensly (among with many other things).

[blackbird_9]

Gatsby

[blithe_spirit]

I remember reading Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre at about the age of ten and it was this novel that introduced me to the world of 'grown up' classics. Some years later Tolstoy's Resurrection introduced me to the Russian novel, of which I have been a fan ever since.

[emily00]

Hamlet.

This play essentially ruined all other reading for me because it set the bar too high. I have never been content with pretty much everything since reading that play.

Have you been able to watch a live (stage) production of the play? If not, I urge you to do so!

For me (roughly in chronological order of when read) Paddington Bear...Just William...Catcher in the Rye...Great Expectations...Wuthering Heights...Staying On (Paul Scott)....Tess...John Thomas and Lady Jane...Bleak House...Death of a Salesman...Birdsong...The Handmaid's Tale...

This is impossible!

[Zeruiah]

My book isn't a literature cannon like most people: The Last Samurai (which has nothing to do with the film). It's Helen Dewitt's debut novel. I read it when I was 12 years old, and I believe it to be my first mature novel read for pure pleasure.

It's really a very complex work--and received a lot of censure for this reason--that I couldn't fully appreciate at that age, but it opened my mind to contemporary literature styles and showed me how to read a story for more than merely its plot. I tried to make my own little novella based off its style and get my friend to illustrate it for me. That didn't work out so well. I think I threw it in the trash a year later and forgot about it until just now.

Recently, I picked up The Last Samurai again and found that I still highly enjoy it. All of the small allegories in their non sequitur assortments packed in like a Burroughs novel into the main story create an ecosystem of contradicting, yet balancing stories at once. I could sort of identify with the boy of the story. His interest in languages and classic literature is sort of like my own, except that he's actually achieved something with it.

I recommend it to anyone who's looking for something a little different.

[beroq]

At the age of 12th, I read Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and then The Tortilla Flat. Those two shaped my literary taste, if any, greatly.

[Dr. Hill]

Definitely Crime and Punishment. I feel like that has been my answer to every novel inquiry, but it's the way it is :)

[Dark Lady]

Wow, what a difficult question. I think I'd maybe say Romeo and Juliet. I saw the Baz Luhrmann film and I loved it. I knew my dad had a Complete Works of Shakespeare so I thought I'd have a go at reading it. I was about eleven and, although I devoured books before then, it was the first time I think I struggled through something more 'difficult'. Of course it was also my introduction to Shakespeare! I remember after I read it we had to give a presentation on the last book we read in English. Most of the other kids were reading Goosebumps etc and I felt so smug giving my presentation on Romeo and Juliet (it was probably an awful presentation but that's not the point!).

I'm so glad I read it because - and this may come as a shock - I never once got to study Shakespeare in English at school. I happened to have a teacher who said he didn't see the point in spending weeks and weeks slogging through Shakespeare when we could get through five other texts in that time and have a wider choice for exams. I can see where he was coming from but I didn't get the chance to study Shakespeare in English until I went to university. I was lucky, though, because I did Advanced Higher drama and we studied A Midsummer Night's Dream. I also came across Shakespeare in various other acting groups I was involved in but the emphasis is obviously different when performing it to when you're analysing it.

[Wilde woman]

If I had to choose one, I'd say The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I read it in my sophomore year of high school and though I'd always been an avid reader, this was the first book that had me absolutely awed by its style. And once I was hooked stylistically, I became interested in all the little moral implications Hawthorne drew. That was probably the one book that swayed by decision to go into literature as a career. Ironically enough, I haven't read anything else by Hawthorne until recently, but now that I have I'm rediscovering my love for him.

Also, I fell in love with Poe's essay The Poetic Principle, which I read the same year (very productive year). That text, more than anything else, sparked my interest in the aesthetic aspect of literature.