What Book had the biggest influence on you?

[LuvNewcastle]

241. When I think about it, a few very different ones come to mind.

One book that my mind returns to when I think of big influences on my life is a book called "Irrational Man." I don't know if it's still in print, and I lost my copy of it long ago. I was in high school when I read it, and I remember it as being a very dense book. It took me a while to get through it. It kept me in the library looking up words and sources. Hell, for all I know, it might have been a book made of someone's masters or doctoral thesis. It might have been re-edited and released as another book or, as I said, could be out of print.

Due to the book's density, I can't call it a very well-written book, although I wasn't a very well-read teenager at the time, and I might not find it dense at all if I read it today. Anyway, it was about existential philosophy, something that was very hard for me to grasp at the time. It reminds me of what I think about string theory today: I'm leaning about it and I can tell you a lot about the concept, but I still don't have the subject down in my mind.

The most important thing the book did was introduce me to a lot of authors: Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Sartre, Shakespeare, and a lot of other European writers in particular. I also began to look at literature much more as fun instead of as a chore to be read for a class. I started seeing it in a brand new light, as something I could learn from and apply to my real life. That was revolutionary for me, and that's why I think it was an important book in my life.

That's also an important lesson about books. Good books teach you something unexpected about another subject besides the subject written about in the book. It's always fun to sit and think about what that thing might be. If a book doesn't teach you anything besides its subject, it's no better than a how-to manual.