Name one book/movie/art which influenced you substantially

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: Descartes

Books:
1) Guns, Germs and Steel

 

[Orsorum]

Books
- The Collected Poems: 1956-1998 by Zbigniew Herbert (I know, it's a book of poetry, still)
- Caravans by James Michener
- The Once And Future King by T H White
- Demian by Hermann Hesse
- The Red Pony and In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck

Movie
- 12 Angry Men, the 1957 original

Music
- Tom Waits, all of his albums made from 1975 to 1980
- Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here
- Kenna, both of his studio albums were absolutely mind bending for me

 

[Soundmanred]

"The Secret" that I got from my Oprah Book Club.
It made me believe that I could do anything I put my mind to.
It only lead to me getting slapped by a whole lotta women that I should have had if I put my mind to it and believed, and not being able to take a bullet without losing my left arm.
Lies. All lies.
Or maybe I didn't believe hard enough.
I'm thinking of reading Dianetics next, see what's up with that, but it's hard to read with one arm.
I always did want to be a robot, so maybe scientology is for me.

/end sarcasm.

 

[spittledip]

I am not sure if any book changed my life, but some have definitely influenced my thinking.
In Dubious Battle by Steinbeck

 

[Epic Fail]

Milton Friedman - Free to Choose

 

[dawp]

Heinlein-Starship Troopers - just the whole concept of not being a real citizen until you serve in government in some form, and can't vote until you serve. movie is not anything like the book.


the whole first album by Hawkwind - true stoner music.

 

[seemingly random]

Hard to assign the most significant, but:

"Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert A. Heinlein

Other authors: Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Harry Harrison, Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Frank Herbert, Jonathan Kellerman, John Irving, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Charles Dickens, and pretty much all other authors mentioned in other posts here.

While making this list I realized that it probably wasn't any particular book that was stimulating but any stimulating book read when I was young and impressionable.

Movies: "To Kill A Mockingbird". "A Clockwork Orange", "Contact".

Music: "The Rite of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky

Art: "The Garden of Earthly Delights" by Hieronymus Bosch, "The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dalí , "The Scream" by Edvard Munch

Originally posted by: KarenMarie
Don't know if I would say it changed my life, but The Long Walk by Stephen King... I found it so friggen disturbing that it haunted me for ages.

QFT - it was unimaginable to me at the time that anyone could be this desparate but some 20 years later have seen several real-life examples. This was almost as disturbing as "Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs.

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

Music - Tool

Art - Alex Grey

Books - "Seth Speaks" by Jane Roberts

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

 

[zerocool1]

the fountainhead
self-reliance

 

[intogamer]

superbad

 

[Canai]

Originally posted by: Fullmetal Chocobo
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Yeah that's my travel book. I have a nearly destroyed copy of the Ultimate Guide that I read whenever things aren't right in my life or when I'm traveling.

 

[cherrytwist]

Some of these were already mentioned but here goes:

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
Demian and Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
Illusions - Richard Bach

Life Lessons - Short film by Scorsese included in New York Stories

Pretty much anything done by Di Suvero
and Richard Serra.

Same with Robert Rauschenberg.

 

[mattlear]

Books:
The Tao of Pooh
Christopher Moore's Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff (VERY funny book!)
Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time

 

[natep]

Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit

 

[trOver]

Originally posted by: Ns1
fight club

 

[SViper]

Originally posted by: DougK62
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

I'll 2nd this book.

 

[Xstatic1]

influenced me enough to never read another book by that author---"The Road"

 

[PrinceofWands]

Starship Troopers.

 

[sobriquet]

Art: the work of Rothko and, to a lesser extent, Miró have had a large impact on the way that I think about visual perception.
Music: Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg at first sounded terrible enough to me that I decided I had to know what the hell was going on. After listening enough and uncovering the reason behind the rhyme, I grew to love it and as a consequence decided to devote quite a bit of my life to the performance and study of "contemporary" music.
Cage's 4'33" was also rather influential for me, as a philosophical question rather than as a piece of music per se.

 

[ponyo]

One Up On Wall Street : How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In The Market
by Peter Lynch

I read this book in my senior year in high school and this got me interested in stocks and investing. Bought my first stock that summer after reading this book. Reading this book financially changed my life.