10 Books that Stayed With You

The idea is to post the ten books you have found most influential on your life. Ideally these will all be by different authors, and can be fiction, non-fiction... just books which have left their mark on you.

Mine:

The Waves - Virginia Woolf
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
The Dog Stars - Peter Heller
Dubliners (specifically The Dead) - James Joyce
The Sound of Her Wings (The Sandman # - Neil Gaiman
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus - Ludwig Wittgenstein
This Way For The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen - Tadeusz Borowski
Watership Down - Richard Adams
The Outsider - Albert Camus

What are yours?

The Magic Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton
Vanity Fair - William Thackeray
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Faith of the Fallen, Naked Empire - Terry Goodkind
Abnormal and Clinical Psychology - Paul Bettet
Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography - Marion Mead
7 habits of Highly effective people - Steven Covey
Every Terri Prachett book ever written... (that counts as one right...)
The Tropic of Capricorn - Henry Millar
The Art Of War - Sun Tzu


A real mixed bag and SO hard to chose my top 10

I would go with those:

Lilith – G. MacDonald
The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath – H.P. Lovecraft
C. Kavafis poems collection
Les Grands Initiés – Edouard Schuré
Absent Fathers Lost Sons - Guy Corneau
The Power of Now – Ekhart Tolle
The Lesser Mysteries – Annie Besant
Anabasis – Xenophon
Works & Days/Theogony – Hesiod
Elric of Melniboné – Michael Moorcock

p.s. can I squeeze Dune into the list...?

Here are mine:

1. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
2. Demian by Hermann Hesse
3. Magick in Theory and Practice by Aleister Crowley
4. The Magic of Thinking Big by Dr. David J. Schwartz
5. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
6. Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
7. Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho
8. Veronika decides to die by Paulo Coelho
9. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
10. The Bible (various authors)

Oh, man. Ten books that stayed with me? So many books have stayed with me over the years. Every book in this list may not be amazing, but they're books that changed the way I saw the world or changed me in some manner.

(listed alphabetical by author)
The Black Cauldron - Lloyd Alexander
When Gravity Fails - George Alec Effinger
Dune - Frank Herbert
The Tao of Pooh - Benjamin Hoff
Gateway - Frederik Pohl
Secrets of Shamanism - José & Lena Stevens
Change We Must - Nana Veary
The Art of Learning - Josh Waitzkin
A Midnight Clear - William Wharton
Quantum Psychology - Robert Anton Wilson

tzb wrote: The Sound of Her Wings (The Sandman # - Neil Gaiman

That is such a great issue! Easily one of the best comics I've ever read. Who wouldn't want that version of Death to guide them through the veil?

If comics are acceptable, then I'd also like to toss in the entire run of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. So good.

I'm terrible at things like this but want to participate so badly! lol

In no particular order..

The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck
Pavilion of Women - Pearl S. Buck
Eastern Body Western Mind - Anodea Judith
Servant of the Bones - Anne Rice
Dialectical Behavior Therapy - McKay, Wood, Brantley
The Jedi Path - Danielle Wallace (due to the fact that because of it - I found TOJO)
Vanity Fair - William Thackery
The Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
And.. this is going to sound really odd, I'm sure.. but there are two books I read as a child that I think about often....
One of them was about an introverted boy and at the time I had no idea what an "introvert" was, only that I thought something was wrong with me.. reading that book changed me.. and I was so young that only the ideas and memories of the book remain in my head. I've tried looking it up several times.. as well as the other book I can't remember that I also read when I was quite young about a girl with a severe eating disorder.
Not very helpful at all, but I have to list them as they are two books that have influenced me the longest... and at the time I had no idea that would be the case.

Youth is wasted on the young..

I wasn't sure there were ten books I had even read let alone try and come up with a list. As I stood in front of my bookshelves I began thinking, "Oh, that one!!! And that one!" And the list quickly grew...

But after thinking about it, these are the ones I have always carried with me. Whether it be in my bag, going on a trip, from home to home or in my heart... they are always there.

Bushido, The Warriors Code
Inazo Nitobe

Way of the Peaceful Warrior
Dan Millman

The Original Adventures of Hank the Cowdog
John R. Erickson

Honor, a history
James Bowman

The Art of war
Sun Tsu
Translated: by Dallas Galvin

The Boy Scout Handbook
William Hillcourt

The Hobbit
J. R. R. Tolkien

The Book of Five Rings
Myomoto Musashi
Translated by: Ashikaga Yoshiaru

Hagakure
Yamamoto Tsunetomo
Translated by: William Scott Wilson

Everybody’s Outdoor Survival Guide
Don Paul

Let's see...No particular order other than I the order of thought lol

1. Dune by Frank Herbert (and the rest of that set)
2. The Obsidian Trilogy by James Mallory and Mercedes Lackey (three book series. Love love love it)
3. A Wizard of Earthsea (The Earthsea Cycle) by Guin, Ursula K. Le
4. The entire X-wing series by Stackpole, Michael A., Allston, Aaron
5. The Legend of Drizzt by Salvatore, R.A.
6. Mistborn Trilogy by Sanderson, Brandon
7. The entire Ender's Game books by Orson Scott Card (except for the prequels because I haven't read them yet)
8. Codex Alera series by Butcher, Jim
9. Nearly all of the books I read on Jedi from Star Wars
10. Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis

Is it cheating to include series? LOL I couldn't pick A book out of the sets haha

1. Celestine Prophecy - James Redfield
2. The Way of the Peaceful Warrior - Dan Millman
3. Conversations with God - Neale Donald Walsch
4. Fatherland - Robert Harris
5. The Final Blackout - L. Ron Hubbard
6. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series - Stephen R. Donaldson
7. The Elenium series - David Eddings
8. Band of Brothers - Stephen E. Ambrose
9. Patriots - James Wesley Rawles
10. The Bible - King James version

In no particular order:

• The Giver By Lois Lowry
• Shane (formerly titled 'Rider from Nowhere') By Jack Schaefer
• The Outsiders By S. E. Hinton
• And Then There Were None (previous titles are a bit racist) By Agatha Christie
• Tao of Pooh (And, Te of Piglet. I consider them a set.) By Benjamin Hoff
• Tao Te Ching By Lao Tzu
• The God Delusion By Richard Dawkins
• Letter to a Christian Nation By Sam Harris
• Freehold By Michael Z. Williamson
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle