What are some influential books that you have read?

Black like me.

Hardcore Zen, by Brad Warner. Buddhism had shown me a new way to view life. Hardcore Zen showed me a new way to view Buddhism.

@talljasperman

I was thinking about picking that one up from the library. What are your impressions from it?

@darth it’s been 30 years since I read it. I don’t know. I liked it as a kid.

Strange thing for a kid to read.

~ I was a strange kid. It was the only real book in my grandpa’s house other than porn. So eventually I read it.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. The lesson I learned: be more tolerant and take opinions into consideration instead of dismissing them.

MARX for Beginners. It was a hard cover comic book handed to me by a girl who held my interest when I was young and silly. The book is still in print and I’ve given away better than a dozen copies over the years. I read the thing in one sitting, and understood immediately why nothing the man said was ever mentioned by any teacher in my previous 15 years of schooling.

“Ulysses,” by James Joyce
William Butler Yeat’s poems
Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, by Paul Fussell
Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Some of Robert Frosts’s poems.

Brave New World & Brave New World Revisited (Aldous Huxley), A Vindication of the Rights of Women (Mary Wollstonecraft), Letters from the Earth (Mark Twain).

@gailcalled You mean to say you have actually read Ulysses ;)

Warped Passages by Lisa Randall got me into science, which has pretty much shaped my life.

@Adagio: Yes. I audited a 6-week course devoted to just that novel, given at the school where I worked. The 11th and 12th graders were smart and interested and the teacher wonderful. It was a pleasure.

^^ I was able to read and enjoy, in its entirety. “Moby Dick,” the following year under the same program. I could participate in class discussion and skip the papers, quizzes, and exams.