Most Influential Fiction Book

Most Influential Fiction Book

Bible and Alchemist are my two favorite fiction books.

Proslogion is also a good fiction book.

"Zorba the Greek" has had a profound influence on me for something like 40 years.

I don't know,

I imagine humans are all people of many parts.

Some books we think more on, others we forget, even if they were a slight push to a good or bad view.

Still. . . I would say Grendel by John Gardner.

I've never read it again since High School, but I think on it from time to time.

I think it was a push towards my later Nihilism and Atheism.

But ends are often made of many means.

. . .

I sometimes think of Drummer Hoff by Barbara and Ed Emberley

(Kids book, mostly pictures)

But that is more looking back on, than was pushed by.

As a kid I enjoyed The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein.

My Dad bought a copy and wrote something in it, what? I forget, he gave it to my Mom when they got married I think.

He burned it, when she divorced him.

I recall as a kid, reading the Redwall series by Brian Jacques.

The Animorphs series by Katherine Applegate.

I didn't care for the ending, shall not reread them I think. . . Pity, there were 'some of them I liked, but there was a lot I also 'disliked other than the ending.

In High School on my own, I read The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky,

But I think it mostly went over my head.

Haven't read it since, or thought on it much since I 'think. Such a large book it was for me.

I forget when I read Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, but I thought on it often for some years.

In my mid 20s I think, I read The Sea Wolf by Jack London, did not influence me towards views, so much as reinforce existing views of Nihilism, Atheist, Selfishness, 'Life.

I enjoyed Catch 22 by Joseph Heller the second time I read it in my mid 20s,

I didn't enjoy it when I was forced to read it in High School.

I don't think it 'influenced me 'particularly.

Sometime in my teens I think? Mission Earth (novel series) by L. Ron Hubbard, was a pile of carp, and I didn't care for the ending.

Hated so much about that series, but I was curious of the fate in store for Soltan Gris.

Ah, poor Soltan Gris.

. . .

I forget when I read it first, but I enjoyed Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, find it worth rereading, thinking on.

. . .

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, required reading at 'some point in School I think.

Had 'some sort of effect I suspect, but nothing exact comes to mind.

If any effect, I'm doubtful it was a positive influence.

Same with Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

Why had so many books required as reading in school, had to include such suffering and misery, negative view of life?

. . . Or uncomfortable descriptions of sex.

I really think humans ought have more self monitoring installed in/beside them in life.

Hard to 'know oneself, if one forgets who/what/when/where/why one has been.

Green Eggs and Ham.

It made me really ask the question, "Who am I?" My parents named me Samuel when I was born, but everybody called me Sam. That's who I am. Sam, I am.

This book also made me come to grips with what I really like and what I don't like. I don't like green eggs and ham, for example. It doesn't matter whether the eggs are green, the ham is green, or they're both green. If they're green, I don't like them.

Sadly, the most pivotal to my ideological development was probably Night by Elie Wiesel, which my English teacher assigned us in freshman year.

I had been suffering prior to reading this, but mostly surrounded by normal children, I thought of my suffering as singular, personal, and not something the other was afflicted with. This book plunged me into depths I had hitherto not dreamed of, and guiltily, I found it almost cathartic, because it was proof the other did suffer, and it grappled outright with misery, despair, and hopelessness, which I had learned were unspeakable topics in polite society and certainly not something it was seemly for a 15-year-old to talk about as if she were familiar with them. Ideologically it sent me further on a trajectory toward the problem of evil, nihilism, a brush with Nietzschean philosophy, a teenage phase of angry pop atheism and all that Four Horsemen stuff, which would fade with time. What did not fade was a firm belief that there can be no moral justification for the totality of suffering on Earth, which would remain my deepest reason for being an atheist.

Green Eggs and Ham.

It made me really ask the question, "Who am I?" My parents named me Samuel when I was born, but everybody called me Sam. That's who I am. Sam, I am.

This book also made me come to grips with what I really like and what I don't like. I don't like green eggs and ham, for example. It doesn't matter whether the eggs are green, the ham is green, or they're both green. If they're green, I don't like them.

This is deep, bruh. Sam-I-am really didn't respect the dude's boundaries, proud of you for finding yours. fr fr 🫂

My favorite fiction is a tie. First was Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence, then second, and current favorite is Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.

The Art of the NoDeal?

At young age many of the Doc Savage novels influenced me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Doc_Savage_novels

In recent years, Anthony Tollin's Sanctum Books, initially in association with Nostalgia Ventures for the first 16 releases, has reprinted all 182 (including the initially unpublished The Red Spider) of the Doc Savage stories from the thirties and forties, usually at least two to a volume, using Baumhofer covers, and some Bama covers for variant editions. The reprint project, 87 volumes in total, was completed in 2016.^[6]

The Bible.

Well, it's more of a mythology, interwoven with fantasy fiction.

A bit like Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.

>influential fiction book

>chooses a book about the holocaust

what did she mean by this????

Lmao. Forgot it had to be a fiction book

Idk if it influenced my worldview much but I recently read The Inheritors by William Golding and I don’t think I’ve had my mind tripped so much by a book in a long time. It’s a book about first contact between Homo sapiens and a group of Neanderthals and the ensuing disaster. Most likely not accurate to what actually happened, although it could’ve happened exactly like the novel in isolated pockets. Or with a different hominid species.

It portrayed what it would be like to have to contend with an *overwhelmingly* technologically and intellectually superior enemy very well. The portrayal of a fundamentally human but still alien mind was excellent. I don’t really know how to describe it other than to take my hat off to Golding

One thing I liked about the book is that it would’ve been extremely hackish to have the POV character be some type of savant but he was actually, if anything, he was dumber than average and his mate better understood what was going on. It was difficult to even understand what was happening a lot of the time because the POV character is effectively portrayed as an alien mind AND he himself is confused, so you’re working against two filters. But that made it feel very real and true to life, the process of trying to figure out what was going on put me in the same position as the characters.

and there’s zero buzz on this book even though Golding (author of Lord of the Flies) considered it to be his finest work. Even when I tried to strike up a convo with ChatGPT about it it just hallucinated a bunch of stuff. Looking at Goodreads it seems somewhat polarizing and I can see why but I personally loved it and will definitely be rereading

Towards the end the POV character, having discovered/incorporated into his mental architecture the concept of “likeness” for the first time, despairingly compares the “new people” with God (their version of it)…I found that so powerful. An enemy so overwhelmingly superior they may as well be God like in their power. It may not have happened in the clashing of species (although it probably did) but there’s plenty of examples in human history of this sort of thing

anyway it was a good book that basically nobody has read

also I’ll be rereading Wuthering Heights in anticipation of the 2026 film so we’ll see how that goes

The Bible.

Well, it's more of a mythology, interwoven with fantasy fiction.

The Bible.

I’ve been thinking about the mythology of Genesis for a few years now. For a while I was totally fixated on this part in particular:

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;

    through painful toil you will eat food from it

    all the days of your life.

¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you,

    and you will eat the plants of the field.

¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow

    you will eat your food

until you return to the ground,

    since from it you were taken;

for dust you are

    and to dust you will return.”

It’s bizarre how in a way that is exactly what happened…if you compare the lifestyle of an animal at the top of the food chain (what human hunter gatherers basically were) to life in settled society. Especially the horrible, grinding, Malthusian, agricultural civilizations that dominated for millennia after that verse was written…yeah it really does seem like the price of knowledge is toil. Did Neolithic people view farming and agriculture as an irreversible mistake?

Genesis is the oldest and deepest thing we have. These stories are so old, they were clearly passed around for a long time before being written down. Imo Genesis is not ripping of Mesopotamian folklore like Gilgamesh but rather they both have a common ancestor that’s much older

also the worldwide flood myths are pretty probably about the post ice age sea level rise imo. Most of the places humans lived would’ve gone underwater

It’s too late. May as well change your avatar to a Groyper

I’ve been thinking about the mythology of Genesis for a few years now.

I’m old as dirt and I was saying the same thing decades ago, let me warn you, it doesn’t stop, if you’re anything like me you’ll still be saying that decades from now. But hey, finally somebody who can have an intelligent conversation about Genesis, it’s about my favorite subject, especially late at night after a couple gummies, so I’ll apologize now for my verbosity.

For a while I was totally fixated on this part in particular:

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;

    through painful toil you will eat food from it

    all the days of your life.

¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you,

    and you will eat the plants of the field.

¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow

    you will eat your food

until you return to the ground,

    since from it you were taken;

for dust you are

    and to dust you will return.”

It’s bizarre how in a way that is exactly what happened…if you compare the lifestyle of an animal at the top of the food chain (what human hunter gatherers basically were) to life in settled society. Especially the horrible, grinding, Malthusian, agricultural civilizations that dominated for millennia after that verse was written…yeah it really does seem like the price of knowledge is toil. Did Neolithic people view farming and agriculture as an irreversible mistake?

The Genesis 2 narrative is about the genesis of human consciousness, the fundamental change in the inner life of an animal that literally transform it into the first human being, Adam was not a proper name, it was the ancient Hebrew word for mankind. In the natural world, it was the birth of something new, it was a new beginning that represents a new life, with new potential and new opportunities to move beyond all previous limitations and constraints, and along with that new life came the deepest truths of human essence, and mankind was born. It is therefore a necessary preface to the Bible that introduces the birth of “free will” and sets an explanatory stage for exploring its attendant consequences and associated moral responsibility. It describes that event explicitly.

Animals know, but humans are a unique animal because we don’t just know, we know that we know, we possess self-reflective knowledge, and how that occurred, and the effect it had, is the story Genesis 2 is telling.

The fact of "knowledge" would be unaccountable without a distinction between subject and object, knowledge requires a distinction between the knowing subject and the reality known and our access to self-reflective consciousness achieved that, but when we ate from the fruit of that tree, we necessarily separated ourselves from perfection , we were no longer perfectly attuned to, and One with nature, we were "cast out of the garden of perfection", so to speak. The first humans were the first animals to image reality in a detached and symbolic manner, and everything that is distinctively human, language, culture, science, technology, it all followed from that "break" with the true reality we were once part of. We are separated from reality by this bifurcation of things into “us” and “not us”, by this “illusion” that reality is not an unbroken whole, the illusion that the whole is not greater than the parts, and the illusion that we can somehow stand outside of and apart from reality and face it. Genesis tells us that we stand apart from it and look upon the universe "as if we were Gods", seeing a “reflection”, an inverted and artificial image of ourselves as beings that are separate from reality. This made us detached who represent reality to ourselves symbolically, from this foundational change came a new world that would evolve into, morality, science, technology, art, philosophy, and religion, in short, produced the world of human culture.

Interestingly, evolutionary theory tells us that this “change of state” caused an unprecedented explosion in brain growth which resulted in something believed to be unique to humans. Because the brain explosively grew faster than the evolution allowed the female’s body to accommodate that growth in brain size, we alone have painful childbirth, and as a consequence “we conceive in sorrow”, so to speak.

Genesis is the oldest and deepest thing we have. These stories are so old, they were clearly passed around for a long time before being written down.

Good point, most people can’t understand Genesis because they don’t understand what it is, it is indeed a myth, a rich repository of wisdom that was an oral tradition handed down through the ages through narrative story telling. To understand it, we must recognize that Genesis was not originally linguistic in its true nature and it was never meant to be read in a linear, analytical fashion, as story telling it was fundamentally meant to convey images that take place in the inner world.

Our neural ability to process new ideas is dependent upon first being able to process new imagery, new ways of seeing precede new ways of thinking.

By viewing it through its imagery, with both hemispheres of thought involved in processing the narrative, we engage more of our brain’s interpretive mechanisms and learn to see in new ways. Consequently, the myth is activating generative forces at work in the brain and psyche to expand our awareness and enlarge our perception, which is what gives it the ability to promote personal growth and spiritual awakening.

Imo Genesis is not ripping of Mesopotamian folklore like Gilgamesh but rather they both have a common ancestor that’s much older

Genesis was never intended to be a literal description of events, it is a myth that symbolically expresses mankind's codified memory of events that occurred in our distant past. It is not literally true; it's more profound than that, rather it is the mythical embodiment of a deeper truth, an expression of an ultimate reality that just couldn't be expressed in any other way, especially 3500 years ago. Fundamental truths that resonated with every civilization as the stories evolved in time and space.

also the worldwide flood myths are pretty probably about the post ice age sea level rise imo. Most of the places humans lived would’ve gone underwater

No doubt, the historical sources were clearly the catastrophic floods at the end of the last ice age, to civilizations around the Black Sea, and especially Doggerland, they would surely be seen as global, whole Earth type events that persisted in our psyche for ages.

I suspect the ancient Greek myth of Atlantis is also based on these events.

Night.

Well, such is an interpretation of an old God hypothesis of unknown provenance.

Certainly written billions of years after the moment of creation, by an evolved life form that came to be known as man.

Thistles and thorns and plants of the field sounds much later European to me.

And extreme weather and flood events are not uncommon and are readily and dramatically recorded, especially when there is little clue as to why such things happen.

Humans have a known propensity for not quite remembering events accurately, whilst at the same time adding inaccurate drama to those events.

None of it worthy of the intellect of an omni-sensible, omniscient GOD/Universal creator.

It’s too late. May as well change your avatar to a Groyper

Noooo

I change my answer to The Giving Tree, it really fucked me up

The book 1984. When I was a kid, I read it in 1982, and the world was caught up in the Reagan hysteria. That book changed me forever.

To kill a Mockingbird.

To Kill a Mockingbird is consistently named among the greatest works of American fiction due to its Pulitzer Prize win, enduring sales, frequent inclusion in school curricula, and powerful themes of racism, justice, and empathy. The novel's enduring relevance, rooted in its coming-of-age narrative and compassionate portrayal of complex moral issues through a child's eyes, has cemented its status as a classic. 

Thank you, unfortunately I’ve been traveling and will be again soon but intend to reply. Great post

Genesis records how the first humans brought a curse by God on themselves and their generation for disobeying God. It does not include other animals. They were spared. But unfortunately the curse spread to them because of human contact.

Thank you, unfortunately I’ve been traveling and will be again soon but intend to reply. Great post

I just got back from out of town, went to the International Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough TN, it was a fantastic, good time, I highly recommend it.

Thanks, look forward to discussion.

Trump’s right hand is on the child’s buttock.