Wednesday, February 24

Books that influenced you as a teenager

While chatting with some friends, I asked about the list of books which they read which made a big impact on them while they were teenagers. I have one myself and thought of collecting the suggestions so that people are take a view and I can also read the ones which I missed. Thanks to all who helped :)

Here’s the list, do comment if I have missed out on anything. Seems like we do have most if not all books at home, so eldest cost centre has some reading to do. But when I asked him, he seems to have gone through about 30% of them. Lets see what he says…

    • Agony and ecstasy, Irving Stone
    • The Gita,
    • Alistair MacLean’s entire lot.
    • PG Wodehouse's entire lot,
    • Giovanni guareschi Don Camilo books
    • Ayn Rand’s lot
    • Dale Carnegie's 2 books on public speaking and influencing people,
    • Leon Uris’s Exodus and other books of his.
    • Discworld (Terry Pratchett). 
    • "The catcher in the rye",
    • "The lord of the rings". 
    • Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole series
    • Jules Verne,
    • Alexander Dumas
    • Dickens.
    • Carl Sagan's "Cosmos". 
    • Bill Bryson's "A short history of nearly everything". 
    • Isaac Asimov's books, or at least the Foundation series. 
    • Frank Herbert's "Dune" and "Dune Messiah".
    • Waldo_ by Heinlein
    • Dogs of the Captain_ by Max Brand.
    • The Tao of Physics
    • The Bourne Identity,
    • Illuminatus trilogy
    • Several books by Harold Robbins, notably _Dreams Die First_ and _A Stone for Danny Fisher
    • Osho,
    • Bible,
    • Ramcharitmanas & Mahabharata
    • Jeffrey Archers’s lot,
    • Sidney Sheldon,
    • Louis l'amour
    • Sudden (Oliver strange)
    • Poirot
    • games people play
    • Shakespeare
    • Frederick Forsyth
    • Tintin and Asterix
    • Irwing Wallace
    • Roald Dahl
    • Sherlock Holmes
    • Advise & Consent by Allen Drury
    • Lord of the Flies
    • Tao of Physics
    • Discovery of India
    • Things fall Apart
    • Sandman
    • R.K Narayanan's The Guide
    • The old man and the sea
    • A Clockwork Orange
    • Metamorphosis
    • Ponniyin Selvan
    • Madame Bovary
    • A lot of Saki,
    • O. Henry
    • Adventure series by Willard Price.
    • Trainspotting
    • Catch 22
    • John Grisham's lot
    • Lady Chatterley's lover
    • Watchmen
    • Midnight's children
    • Dr Zhivago
    • Grapes of wrath
    • Tagore’s work
    • Camus, The Stranger
    • Upamanyu Chatterjee, English August
    • Saki
    • Maupassant short stories
    • Satyajit Ray’s book
    • Three Investigators series by Alfred Hitchcock.
    • Mrityunjay by Shivaji Sawant
    • Little Women by Louisa Alcott
    • Chandrakanta
    • Count of Monte cristo, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, Catcher in the Rye, To kill a mocking bird

Update: 24/2, 1700 hours (from Girish)

George Orwell: Animal Farm
Desmond Morris: The Naked Ape
Germaine Greer: The Female Eunuch
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems
T.S.Eliot: Collected Poems 1909-1935
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: 100 years of solitude Stephen Jay Gould: Ever Since Darwin
Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil
James Joyce: Dubliners
Karl Marx: Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
D.D.Kosambi: Introduction to the Study of Indian History Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Abhinavagupta: Abhinavabharati

From Dickon

I would add Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, Raymond Smullyan's What is the Name of this Book, Aleghieri's Divine Comedy, Richard Bach's Illusions, Gleick's Chaos, Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave, almost any non-fiction Asimov, all of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, Carlos CasteƱeda, Pirsig's Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Mythical Man-Month, Codd's database books, Kurt Vonnegut's oeuvre (but he'd hate that word!) and quite a few others besides!

Update: 24/2: 2000 hours (From Nila)

Flannery O'Connor and Faulkner for landscape, Mailer for shock value, Garcia Marquez for the headiness of magical realism (before magical realism became a bad word), a whole slew of SF and hard science writers for the ideas, Bibhutibhushan and Manto closer to home for different views of the human condition. There were so many writers --Heller, Salinger, Burroughs--who made me go, "You can do *that*? It's allowed?" And perhaps that's what I was looking for most as a teen.

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