What's the most influential book you read in college?
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What made you slam down your café au lait (beer, bourbon, etc.) and set out to conquer the world?
P.S. The book doesn't have to have been required reading for a class.
(HT to Slate)
On The Road by Jack Kerouac. It wasn't required reading for class or anything and I can't exactly remember why I picked it up. Probably because I had heard so much about the author and I wanted to be hip.
It wasn't what I expected.
Kerouac turned out to be an intellectual, spiritual, sensitive guy who yearned for a closer relationship with Something Bigger Than Himself. I found it intriguing that one could find spirituality while living the earthly life of girls, parties, pot, hitchhiking and what not. Up to this point, I understood spirituality to be something you attained after you had put all that behind you. You know, the Billy Graham school of godliness. Kerouac showed another way.
I'm not sure the book inpired me to "conquer the world." But not long after finishing the book I tucked it into my back-pocket and hitchhiked from Ann Arbor to San Francisco. I don't exactly know why or what I was looking for. But during my first evening in town, I did manage to bump into Allen Ginsberg at a poetry reading at Fugazi Hall in North Beach.
Didn't everyone?
- Nineteen Eighty-Four
- The Road to Wigan Pier
- Animal Farm
- Homage to Catalonia
- Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist
- Living My Life
And Dante's Inferno, although that ain't really a book.Oh, wait. Book, singular. Nineteen Eight-Four.
No, wait. Homage to Catalonia. Good thing there wasn't a volunteer war against fascism in Southern Europe when I read it, or I would have been on a plane, rifle in hand.
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Fisher, Ury and Patton.
Here's a handy outline.
Not quite the most romantic or inspirational book ever written, but by far, at less than 200 pages, the most useful little afternoon read you'll ever spend ten bucks on.
That was a Prof's recommendation in Grad School and helps me earn a living, but it will never send you on a mission to cure cancer or anything.
For inspiration in my young impressionable days, it was Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, (of course), all of which were assigned in my senior high novels class.
But for sheer pleasure, romance and inspiration on how to enjoy what time we have, it's got to be the tales of the immortal Lazerus Long by Robert Heinlein, especially, Time Enough For Love.