What books have had an actually, considerable impact on your waking life?

asalm alaykum brother

Threw me into an extreme and intense pessimism, an existential crisis I couldn’t even recognize. I was definitely too young when I read this.

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i've read Haunted by Palahniuk at 13 and it unironically rearranged something in my head.
dropped my retarded e-girlfriend and stopped acting like a retard myself

Flowers for Algernon made me come to terms with my condition.

What's your condition user?

I have the same thing Charlie does in the book.

I just finished Infinite Jest a few months ago for the first time; kind of slow at the start, but man that was a goddamn brilliant book. Was so sad when it was all over. Truly worth all the hype imo

But for me personally, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy both had immeasurable impact on me.

>the courage to admit you're gay anonymously online

have sex

Honestly speaking literature is all about execution and not about ideas, but Flowers for Algernon concept wise I believe has one of the most original I’ve ever seen in literature.

It's one thing to know --- everybody "knows" --- but it's another thing to realise something and understand it. This is what the value of literature is. To not just know something at face value but realise it by living through the experiences of characters as if through our own experience. To fully integrate a concept so that our most autonomous behaviors are changed.

i'm reading IJ now, i'm at around 300 pages and it's starting to poke at something inside me. i'm 9 days sober now. i think reading about the mad stork and his love for wild turkey really bothered me because i myself was going through about a liter of it a day. with as much shit as IJ catches it really is incredibly clever and well written. it's hard to put down

Well said

I had a similar experience. Read the Brothers Karamazov while getting sober, and it really helped seal a new, healthier mindset in place that, despite my best efforts, hasn't come unstuck since.
Good job on the sobriety. Infinite Jest did the exact same thing to my buddy, and he stayed clean for a long while. Easy to see why after reading it. DFW was a real mensch.

i know this will be really cliché and lame, but...

When I was young I used to grow up on sci-fi stuff like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and Mass Effect (videogame), and also watched a lot of TV channels like Spectrum, NatGeo and Animal Planet. Almost every channel, every film, every TV show was about how great humanity is and how great humanities future will be, and I used to believe it.

Then there was a time when I read 1984 and watched Bade Runner, and I remember that ever since then, I came to think that humanity is spiraling downwards and that our future will be worse, rather than better. Of course it wasn't with one single stroke, rather started out as an idea and it got reinforced with other media I consumed in pursuit of such ideas (such as Black Mirror and Brave New World).

However, if I look back, 1984 was so vivid and so depresing, that it was enough to switch around my personality from optimistic to pessimistic, and that's something that I consider an integral part of my identity. Looking back at it now, it's kind of incredible how a single book and movie was able to shatter an opinion that was pushed and reinforced by every faucet of the media.

Demian single-handedly took away my ability to ignore my depression, so on the one hand, it was amazing, but on the other hand, I may very well kill myself

genealogy of morals

made me realize hating the powers that be and getting angry over shit they do is weak and pathetic

also the quote from BoT about how there is no ethical justification for life but an aesthetic one has made me more comfortable living in a fucked up world

I used to have opinions and coherent thought then I tried learning a second language and now I can't think coherently and have no opinions. So I read a lot of text books and now my life is completely different.

I read Omon Ra at a young age, maybe 13 (my older brother was a russaboo). I immediately reread it with help from him because I didn't get it. I didn't notice at the time but I think it instilled a deep-seated mistrust of government/media narrative authority and a suspicion that I had been a similar victim of propaganda to Omon.
I think it's been a good thing, as most people are unbelievably awful at noticing when they fall for their particularly tailored narratives. More people should read Pelevin. One of his short stories, the one about Shed Number XII, was my first feeling of "holy shit, I didn't know writing could do that," and a point that got me to take books much more seriously.

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It's nice to see people being genuine about Infinite Jest for once. It's talked about so much for a reason.

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what's up with yuroshits obsessing over Americans constantly?

But wasnt David Foster Wallace a gigantic asshole?

Wuthering Heights made me a romancefag

>becoming a romancefag because of 19th century YA melodrama
cringe

dfwfags might be the most delusional people on the planet

blind haters of dfw might be even more delusional

After reading the Brothers Karamazov I started dreaming scenes from it in prose, sometimes I would be “watching” the scene in front of me and other times I would simply be composing it or reading it. One time I had a dream about the section where the dog’s paw gets hurt by the boy throwing the rock and his family watches him get torn apart by the dogs. In the actual book it’s a very brief section Ivan talks about, preceding the Grand Inquisitor chapter, but in my dream it was expounded upon and felt like it picked an even greater emotional punch than the grand inquisitor did. I remember waking up thinking I must go read that section, I did, and found it did not compare to the Dostoevsky I had dreamed up, but by that time I had forgotten so many of the details that I could not capture the words on paper any more.

this

europeans getting nothing but love over here. our women go crazy for your stupid accents

Not European either. There are other countries in the world.

It's not obsessing I think. I believe it's just that America is seen to be constantly in the limelight of the world, and what they do in the limelight is awfully embarrassing, especially as of late.

Something I think the less spastic users of lit can surely agree upon.

Im still trying to find that book :(

>I'm being deadly serious when I say Infinite Jest is one of the first novels to actually change something about me
Cringe

What are you? 12?

I'm 23 and I wasted a lot of time in between now and 17 drinking. What's your story smart-ass?

The structure of that sentence indicates that OP is for a fact not older than 16 years old

Of Mice and Men.
Made me less materialistic over shit that I now know realized negatively affected my life. While I still have trouble getting rid of stuff, mainly, what is essentially garbage, that may have some kind utility but I know I can't be fucked to deal with it. I stopped caring about relationships as a whole and moreso only care about the experiences garnered from them. I don't like it, but I've come to terms with my own mortality and the fact that life is too damn short to hold onto anything. Moreso comfort than fear, as I find that it brings humans together. As Ben Franklin said, "The only certain things are death and taxes" and while I'm not too keen on the tax part, I've interpreted it as a general toll on life, to live you have to give, so to speak. And certain death is the only thing I can truly say I have in common with everyone on Earth, and it's a good feeling. The fact that everyone's story has a definite period at the end.
It has led to me being more open minded, and I feel a newfound appreciation of life and what it entails. I feel, moreso than ever, that this time right now is currently the best time of my life, as there's nothing else I want to be doing, and if I wanted something different, I could do it. I am the author of my own story, and no man can truly tell me otherwise.

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