Which book has affected you profoundly and why?

The cave of time. The first choose your adventure book.

Gosh. Son Rising when I was in my 20’s. Little House on the Prairie series as a kid. Sacajawea in my 20’s.

The cave of time traumatized me and taught me how to cheat. One of the first books that I read. Scary endings. Really spooked me when it said “The End”. The one ending where you get bitten by a scary cobra and you die horribly, was too much. The picture still spooks me out even though I don’t have the book anymore. Jumbo sabretooth cobra.

In This House Of Brede by Rumer Godden.
It’s a profound story of loss and redemption and difficult choices.
Godden is a stunning author, and this one is one of her best.

“In Search of Ancient Astronauts.”

A course in miracles a handbook for inner peace. I read it in university. Also a book on emotional intelligence at the same time. They helped me to have the ego strength to continue past all of the b.s. at the time.

When I was a student I came across a book of Chinese philosophy called Chuang Tzu. The English translations are easy to read and often poetic. I had never read anything like this before. The author’s outlook on life, though coming from a very different time and place, was mine and expressed convincingly and clearly. I don’t read it anymore as the ideas have sunk into my psyche.

Edward Gibbon, “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. A long historical tome, but I still peruse his volumes now and then. A lot of his history is very reflective of things happening now, today, in our own society. Who was it who said, “Those who don’t learn from history, are bound to repeat it”? I also learned a lot from his veiled critique of the origins of Christianity. We have to remember, he was writing in the middle of the 18th Century, and the Church still held a lot of clout. The guy had to be very careful.

If you’ll indulge me a moment, here is a snippet of Gibbon, and I love this particular passage: “But how shall we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and philosophic world to those evidences which were presented by the hand of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to their senses? During the age of Christ, of his apostles, and of their first disciples, the doctrine which they preached was confirmed by innumerable prodigies. The lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, daemons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church. But the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and, pursuing the ordinary occupations of life and study, appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral or physical government of the world. Under the reign of Tiberius, the whole earth, (194) or at least a celebrated province of the Roman empire, (195) was involved in a preternatural darkness of three hours. Even this miraculous event, which ought to have excited the wonder, the curiosity, and the devotion of mankind, passed without notice in an age of science and history. (196) It happened during the lifetime of Seneca and the elder Pliny, who must have experienced the immediate effects, or received the earliest intelligence, of the prodigy. Each of these philosophers, in a laborious work, has recorded all the great phenomena of Nature, earthquakes, meteors, comets, and eclipses, which his indefatigable curiosity could collect. (197) Both the one and the other have omitted to mention the greatest phenomenon to which the mortal eye has been witness since the creation of the globe. A distinct chapter of Pliny (198) is designed for eclipses of an extraordinary nature and unusual duration; but he contents himself with describing the singular defect of light which followed the murder of Caesar, when, during the greatest part of a year, the orb of the sun appeared pale and without splendour. This season of obscurity, which cannot surely be compared with the preternatural darkness of the Passion, had been already celebrated by most of the poets (199) and historians of that memorable age”. (200)

And “Chariots of the Gods.”