Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?

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Have Space Suit Will Travel (Heinlein)

Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (one story in the book "Different Seasons" by Stephen King)

Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)

The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury)

Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky)

Frankenstein (Shelley)

Brave New World (Huxley)

Farenheit 451 (Heinlein)

Never Cry Wolf (Mowatt)

A Whale for the Killing (Mowatt)

The Machine Stops (Forster)

Heart of Darkness (Conrad)

Starship Troopers (Heinlein)

The Jungle Book (Kipling)

Lost in the Barrens (Mowatt)

The Republic (Plato)

Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke)

Ringworld (Niven)

The Stainless Steel Rat (Harrison)

The Hobbit (Tolkien)

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson)

The Odyssey (Homer)

The Man who Would be King (Kipling)

The Pearl (Steinbeck)

Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick)

A Scanner Darkly (Dick)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)

Dracula (Stoker)

To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)

The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)

Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)

The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)

A Christmas Carol (Dickens)

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll)

Watership Down (Adams)

Gulliver's Travels (Swift)

Animal Farm (Orwell)

A few come to mind, over the course of my childhood up to and including high-school.

The "Mad Scientist's Club" series

The Great Brain

Those "Encyclopedia Brown" stories

The "The Three Investigators" series

The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

The original Doyle "Sherlock Holmes" canon

The Soul Of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder

The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien

Nineteen Eighty Four

Danny Dunn series

The Catcher in the Rye

Catcher in the Rye, Salinger captures that feeling of being a lost teenager while at the same time thinking that we know everything. It's an amazing book to read as a teen.

Motel of the Mysteries, David Macauley's satire of then-modern America intertwixed with a satire of archaeology and historical and academic understanding, masquerading as a picture book. A remarkable work I still think about today.

https://www.vox.com/22753080/motel-mysteries-book-david-maca...

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey

Well before I could read I was enamoured with my grandmother's National geographic collection.

I was given "The Great Escape" by Paul Brickhill as a teenager (long ago) and fascinated by the Prisoners Of War resourcefulness in not being controlled by their environment. Some innovations included stealing electric wiring to light the long tunnels, making forged `official' documents without a typewriter and hiding the tunnel `tailings' in plain sight. The movie doesn't do justice to the true story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Escape_(book)

When I was pretty young, I was given a copy of The Way Things Work. It had an incredible impact on me and is probably what steered me down the path of engineering. Truly, a fundamental part of who I grew up to be.

The chapters about electronics are obviously quite dated, but I think it still stands up. I'd absolutely give a copy to the kind of kid who has to take everything apart to see how it works.

Carl Sagan's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

Will probably make your children atheists though.

So much of the world still runs on fucking bullshit, just look at the justifications for the ongoing [redacted because it'll probably derail the conversation].

A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

I didn't read it on my own personally, rather, it was read in my eighth grade class from beginning to end. Lots of discussion was had about the foreshadowing and meaning behind Dickens' words. At the time I really didn't appreciate it as much as I should have, but I'm incredibly grateful that my teacher made us read through that.

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brian was another one read in class that I think helped shape my perspective on the world for the better.

Ender's Game and especially Ender's Shadow. I hesitate to recommend OSC at all due to his Problematic™ personal politics, especially as a member of the maligned group, but they had a big impact on the way I see The System in which we all live.

Spoiler-free: based on a shared societal belief in a looming existential crisis, a group of young adults attend a military school whose curriculum revolves around a war game with sports-like rules. The System uses the war game to identify for positions of relative prestige those students most willing to interpret the game rules in creative ways, most willing to question assumptions brought with them from the school-world into the game-world, but naïve enough to believe the game is over once they've “graduated” from it. The books explore the many ways in which the “real world” : school-world :: school-world : game-world.

“The Age of Spiritual Machines” by Ray Kurzweil.

Dune.

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. It's a sci-fi adventure with self-reliance and counter-cultural themes.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

Self help books like "Do It!" (can't find the author) and "The Success Principles" by Jack Canfield. They're simplified to the point that they're basically children's books, but they also provide a wide range of tools to deal with the future, with career and failure, and choosing your destiny.

I have an insatiable appetite for non-fiction - history, geography, politics, etc which I'm fairly certain can be traced back to a series of educational picture books I devoured as a child.

Each would survey some broad topic, for example Ancient Egypt. It would be full of detailed drawings/illustrations and accompanying text snippets. "What did the inside of a pyramid look like?", "How did the Ancient Egyptians use chariots?", and so on.

Mum would always buy me a new one every other week. The topics were diverse & broad, and so never got boring.

A bonus was when a subject I had read in these books happened to come up at school :-)

A wizard of earthsea by Ursula Le Guin The moon is a hash mistress Heinlein Weirdstone of Brisingamen The red car

Just read to them! Every day ! For hours

ABC book, still love reading it on rainy nights