I am curious to know what books have had a direct impact on your life - not your favorite books or the best books, rather the books that changed the way you think/behave (could be negatively or positively)
My own in no particular order (spanning a lifetime of reading) :
Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers - R. Sapolsky
Limbo - A. Lubrano
Common Sense on Mutual Funds - Bogle
Our Bodies, Ourselves - Womens Health Collective
The Bible
The Middle Passage - James Hollis
The Odyssey - Homer
New You - Sol Gordon
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Your Money or Your Life - Dominguez/Robin
The Captain's Versus - P. Neruda
8 Weeks to Optimum Health - A. Weil
Fear of Flying - E. Jong
The Atkins Revolution - R. Atkins
Managerial Accounting - ?
Modern Man in Search of a Soul - Jung
The Heart of the Buddha's Teachings - T. Hanh
The Intelligent Asset Allocator - W. Bernstein
The Coffee House Investor - B. Schultheis
Obviously, I am behind in the finance/investment category.
BF
Books with a direct impact on your life?
-
Barefootgirl
- Posts: 2289
- Joined: Tue Oct 06, 2009 7:05 pm
-
Barefootgirl
- Posts: 2289
- Joined: Tue Oct 06, 2009 7:05 pm
@ the moment i'm reading 'Don't count on it'. I like the way its written.
-
Silence Dogood
- Posts: 1447
- Joined: Tue Feb 01, 2011 9:22 pm
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John C. Bogle
The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason
Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
The China Study by T. Colin Campbell
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John C. Bogle
The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason
Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
The China Study by T. Colin Campbell
Last edited by Silence Dogood on Thu May 05, 2011 6:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
-
FrugalInvestor
- Posts: 5687
- Joined: Fri Nov 07, 2008 12:20 am
Re: Books with a direct impact on your life?
Re: Books with a direct impact on your [investing] life?
A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel
A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel
Ignore the market noise. Keep to your rebalancing schedule whether that is semi-annual, annual or trigger bands.
Atlas Shrugged -- Although I don't think the ideas in this book can be applied to a society as a whole (I am much more empathetic that no...people really are NOT born on a level playing field) they are wonderful ideas to model your own life by - I don't push personal responsibility on anyone else but myself - and this book is a big part about what I think I should do in my life.
SlaughterHouse 5 - Vonnegut. Really just love this book, I re-read it yearly. War is awful, and so it goes.
Edited to add: I forgot about both In Defense of Food and The Omnivores Dilemma. Both have powerfully impacted the way I eat.
SlaughterHouse 5 - Vonnegut. Really just love this book, I re-read it yearly. War is awful, and so it goes.
Edited to add: I forgot about both In Defense of Food and The Omnivores Dilemma. Both have powerfully impacted the way I eat.
The Bible
Stop Acting Rich: ...And Start Living Like A Real Millionaire
The Millionaire Next Door
The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy
Stop Acting Rich: ...And Start Living Like A Real Millionaire
The Millionaire Next Door
The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy
Last edited by rec7 on Fri Feb 18, 2011 5:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Disclaimer: You might lose money doing anything I say. Although that was not my intent. |
Favorite song: Sometimes He Whispers Jay Parrack
Boxcar Children at age 10, everything else was just frosting. Nothing political, ideological, religious, just a few kids trying to live independently without grownups. Wow! That was what I wanted at 10 years old and still want. 
"We have seen much more money made and kept by “ordinary people” who were temperamentally well suited for the investment process than by those who lacked this quality." Ben Graham
-
travelnut11
- Posts: 345
- Joined: Wed Dec 02, 2009 9:13 pm
+1 I loved that book and read it at the exact same age.sschullo wrote:Boxcar Children at age 10, everything else was just frosting. Nothing political, ideological, religious, just a few kids trying to live independently without grownups. Wow! That was what I wanted at 10 years old and still want.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrowmindedness ...and many of our people need it solely on these accounts. - Mark Twain |
|
Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing. - Helen Keller
-
V572625694
- Posts: 310
- Joined: Tue Jun 15, 2010 3:43 pm
- Location: San Diego
Re: My List
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Do you mean the US Constitution? Wonderful document indeed, but not book length, which is also part of its power.DarinFred wrote:The Constitution
-
hsv_climber
- Posts: 3969
- Joined: Tue Sep 22, 2009 7:56 pm
I agree I read this 10 years and it has had a tremendous impact on my networth because it helped to conceptualize money as my life energy.mptfan wrote:Your Money or Your Life.
Recently I read 168 hours by Laura Vanderkam and it has (much like your money or your life) caused me to spend my time consciously and make sure I get good value for the time I have on this planet.
Of all the investing books I have read I found that the Four Pillars of Investing by William Bernstein increased my investing knowledge most.
-
Peter Foley
- Posts: 5205
- Joined: Fri Nov 23, 2007 10:34 am
- Location: Lake Wobegon
-
Howard Donnelly
- Posts: 550
- Joined: Tue Dec 14, 2010 3:19 pm
Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill
Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude, by Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone
How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, by Frank Bettger
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Worldwide Laws of Life, by John Templeton
The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, by John Bogle
Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude, by Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone
How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, by Frank Bettger
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Worldwide Laws of Life, by John Templeton
The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, by John Bogle
I enjoyed the Screwtape letter myself.Bulldawg wrote:The Bible
Your Natural Gifts
The Bogleheads Guide
The Millionaire Next Door
The Pathfinder
With No Fear of Failure
The Case for Christ
The Screwtape Letters
The Wealthy Barber
Even educators need education. And some can be hard headed to the point of needing time out.
-
nisiprius
- Advisory Board
- Posts: 42559
- Joined: Thu Jul 26, 2007 9:33 am
- Location: The terrestrial, globular, planetary hunk of matter, flattened at the poles, is my abode.--O. Henry
Re: Books with a direct impact on your life?
As I survey these, the common element is that I happened to encounter each of them by happy chance at the exact moment when I was just exactly ready for it. And all of them had an element of discovery and challenge to them.
Stars, by Herbert S. Zim (a Little Golden Nature Guide, still in print).
A little pocket handbook: F. J. Camm, "Mathematical Tables and Formulae"
"The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam," as translated or interpreted or re-created by Edward FitzGerald.
Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps by Kees Boeke, which inspired Powers of Ten by the Office of Charles and Ray Eames.
Peter Graves and The Twenty-One Balloons, by William Pene du Bois.
The picture on the frontispiece of an out-of-date set of The Book of Knowledge in the elementary-school library, a bunch of train tracks radiating out--from the Earth, showing how look it would take to travel by train to the moon, the sun, each planet, and the nearest star.
The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, by Eleanor Cameron (quit snickering, it was a kids book and it was published in 1954, long before psilocybin).
The first few books of the "Rick Brant Electronic Adventures" series: The Rocket's Shadow, The Lost City, Sea Gold, and The Whispering Box Mystery.
On Being the Right Size, by J. B. S. Haldane
That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis (and I am deliberately juxtaposing him with J. B. S. Haldane, because they could hardly have been more opposite).
McGuffey's New Fourth Eclectic Reader--dad bought a battered copy from a second-hand bookstore out of curiosity to see how my reading ability matched up with what had been expected a century earlier, and I read it from cover to cover and I think it had some rather unintended effects.
The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells; also some of his short stories, notably "The New Accelerator."
Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott.
The book of Ecclesiastes, traditionally attributed to King Solomon
Heaven's My Destination, by Thornton Wilder.
The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien.
Studs Lonigan, by James T. Farrell.
New Numbers by F. E. Andrews.
A collection: "Jack London's Stories for Boys." And later, The Sea-Wolf and Martin Eden.
A couple of pages in some unabridged-dictionary-like science enclopedia--can't remember if it was Van Nostrand or McGraw Hill--that contained a big summary table of units and dimensions, and I looked at it and boing! I got it.
Some purple dittoed set of notes a math teacher gave me from some course she'd taken that explained barycentric coordinates and the rudiments of linear algebra.
Scientific American in the Gerard Piel era, most particularly Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column and C. L. Stong's Amateur Scientist column. Oh, and the Carl and Jerry stories in Popular Electronics.
Complete Plays and Complete Prefaces of George Bernard Shaw. No, I haven't read them all--maybe 1/5th if that--but I certainly dipped in here and there.
The Family of Man, the book based on the exhibit of photographs curated or whatever you call it by Edward Steichen.
Physiological Optics, by Herrmann von Helmholtz as translated and extensively revised by James P. C. Southall.
The People, Yes by Carl Sandburg.
On Growth and Form, by D'arcy Thompson
The Curve of Binding Energy, by John McPhee.
The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need, by Andrew Tobias (circa the 1970s)
A Random Walk Down Wall Street, by Burton Malkiel (circa the 1980s)
Whoops, almost forgot: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex* by Dr. David Reuben.
*But were afraid to ask. By the way, how many people realize that the bus poster in "Sex and the City" is riffing off Reuben's book's title and jacket design?
Stars, by Herbert S. Zim (a Little Golden Nature Guide, still in print).
A little pocket handbook: F. J. Camm, "Mathematical Tables and Formulae"
"The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam," as translated or interpreted or re-created by Edward FitzGerald.
Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps by Kees Boeke, which inspired Powers of Ten by the Office of Charles and Ray Eames.
Peter Graves and The Twenty-One Balloons, by William Pene du Bois.
The picture on the frontispiece of an out-of-date set of The Book of Knowledge in the elementary-school library, a bunch of train tracks radiating out--from the Earth, showing how look it would take to travel by train to the moon, the sun, each planet, and the nearest star.
The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, by Eleanor Cameron (quit snickering, it was a kids book and it was published in 1954, long before psilocybin).
The first few books of the "Rick Brant Electronic Adventures" series: The Rocket's Shadow, The Lost City, Sea Gold, and The Whispering Box Mystery.
On Being the Right Size, by J. B. S. Haldane
That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis (and I am deliberately juxtaposing him with J. B. S. Haldane, because they could hardly have been more opposite).
McGuffey's New Fourth Eclectic Reader--dad bought a battered copy from a second-hand bookstore out of curiosity to see how my reading ability matched up with what had been expected a century earlier, and I read it from cover to cover and I think it had some rather unintended effects.
The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells; also some of his short stories, notably "The New Accelerator."
Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott.
The book of Ecclesiastes, traditionally attributed to King Solomon
Heaven's My Destination, by Thornton Wilder.
The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien.
Studs Lonigan, by James T. Farrell.
New Numbers by F. E. Andrews.
A collection: "Jack London's Stories for Boys." And later, The Sea-Wolf and Martin Eden.
A couple of pages in some unabridged-dictionary-like science enclopedia--can't remember if it was Van Nostrand or McGraw Hill--that contained a big summary table of units and dimensions, and I looked at it and boing! I got it.
Some purple dittoed set of notes a math teacher gave me from some course she'd taken that explained barycentric coordinates and the rudiments of linear algebra.
Scientific American in the Gerard Piel era, most particularly Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column and C. L. Stong's Amateur Scientist column. Oh, and the Carl and Jerry stories in Popular Electronics.
Complete Plays and Complete Prefaces of George Bernard Shaw. No, I haven't read them all--maybe 1/5th if that--but I certainly dipped in here and there.
The Family of Man, the book based on the exhibit of photographs curated or whatever you call it by Edward Steichen.
Physiological Optics, by Herrmann von Helmholtz as translated and extensively revised by James P. C. Southall.
The People, Yes by Carl Sandburg.
On Growth and Form, by D'arcy Thompson
The Curve of Binding Energy, by John McPhee.
The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need, by Andrew Tobias (circa the 1970s)
A Random Walk Down Wall Street, by Burton Malkiel (circa the 1980s)
Whoops, almost forgot: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex* by Dr. David Reuben.
*But were afraid to ask. By the way, how many people realize that the bus poster in "Sex and the City" is riffing off Reuben's book's title and jacket design?
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness; Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.
-
retcaveman
- Posts: 911
- Joined: Wed Oct 21, 2009 8:12 pm
-
letsgobobby
- Posts: 12073
- Joined: Fri Sep 18, 2009 1:10 am
Bury My Heart at Wounded Kneerustymutt wrote:The bible.
Then Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.
to many other books to list, but these two have had profound effects on me.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Four Pillars of Investing
The Road
Cadillac Desert
Lord of the Flies
Manias, Panics, and Crashes
Last edited by letsgobobby on Sat Feb 19, 2011 2:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
When I consider many of the books that have stuck with the me the most--in recent years:
--Blood Meridian (or the Evening Redness in the West)
--Catch-22
--Atonement
--as much as I love them, it isn't really clear to me how they have changed the way I think or live.
In retrospect, I think reading The Grapes of Wrath as an undergraduate changed me. More recently, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil I think has changed me.
But the two works that I think probably changed my life the most, again as an undergraduate, are not books:
--Zeno's Paradoxes (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-zeno/)
--"Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1972----.htm)
--Blood Meridian (or the Evening Redness in the West)
--Catch-22
--Atonement
--as much as I love them, it isn't really clear to me how they have changed the way I think or live.
In retrospect, I think reading The Grapes of Wrath as an undergraduate changed me. More recently, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil I think has changed me.
But the two works that I think probably changed my life the most, again as an undergraduate, are not books:
--Zeno's Paradoxes (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-zeno/)
--"Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1972----.htm)
"Relativity: The Special and the General Theory" by Albert Einstein, and "Treatise on Thermodynamics" by Max Planck.
I read these during summer vacation when I was around 11 years old. Successfully slogging through these books taught me that I really could understand any subject if I studied hard enough. As a result my science classes seemed simple and I began to understand the value of self-development and extracurricular reading as tools for personal growth. Being able to connect those intellectual dots at a young age made a huge impact on my life.
I read these during summer vacation when I was around 11 years old. Successfully slogging through these books taught me that I really could understand any subject if I studied hard enough. As a result my science classes seemed simple and I began to understand the value of self-development and extracurricular reading as tools for personal growth. Being able to connect those intellectual dots at a young age made a huge impact on my life.
-
verygoodthings
- Posts: 78
- Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2011 3:58 pm
there are many books by C.S. Lewis and his friend/colleague J.R.R. Tolkien that have impacted merustymutt wrote:I enjoyed the Screwtape letter myself.Bulldawg wrote:The Bible
Your Natural Gifts
The Bogleheads Guide
The Millionaire Next Door
The Pathfinder
With No Fear of Failure
The Case for Christ
The Screwtape Letters
The Wealthy Barber
" IN GOD WE TRUST " ( official motto of the United States )
This was a question on some of my college application essays: list four or five books which have had the greatest impact on your life, and briefly discuss one of them.
The book I chose to discuss was Calculus, by Michael Spivak. It is a book which covers first-year calculus, but with the rigor of an advanced mathematics book and a lot of supplementary material. This was the first mathematics textbook I used which gave me a real appreciation of what mathematics was like. (The text is occasionally used for an honors calculus class, either in high schools, or as a college class for students who already had calculus in high school.)
Years later, I am still a mathematician, and I just bought the new edition, which sits on my bookshelf at work; I have referred to my old copy so many times that it is falling apart.
The book I chose to discuss was Calculus, by Michael Spivak. It is a book which covers first-year calculus, but with the rigor of an advanced mathematics book and a lot of supplementary material. This was the first mathematics textbook I used which gave me a real appreciation of what mathematics was like. (The text is occasionally used for an honors calculus class, either in high schools, or as a college class for students who already had calculus in high school.)
Years later, I am still a mathematician, and I just bought the new edition, which sits on my bookshelf at work; I have referred to my old copy so many times that it is falling apart.
David Grabiner