Your most formative books

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Wait... what's the cutoff age here?

Niven, Lovecraft, Analog magazine, The Story of O...

I was posting stuff I read mostly between 6-10, but I guess whatever you consider formative?

[LMNO]

ok, that was mostly Dahl, Encyclopedia Brown, Earthsea, et al.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I almost forgot about John Christopher and the Tripod trilogy... man I loved those. Creepytastic.

I read The Book of the Dun Cow, Watership Down, and Duncton Wood in rapid succession in first grade, and since then have spent 32 years looking for Duncton Wood because I misremembered the title as The Silence of the Stone. Somehow, miraculously, I finally found it. I'm still a little confused about the title, and whether that is actually the book I read.

[the other anonymous]

The Babysitter's Club #1-80

Through the Looking Glass by Molly Flute

The Secret Garden

-toa,
didn't read anything cool until... ever

[hooplala]

TOA, are you female?  I've always assumed you were male for some reason.

Not that it matters, just curious.

[the other anonymous]

TOA, are you female?  I've always assumed you were male for some reason.

Not that it matters, just curious.

Male. All the books in my house were either my Mom's or my sister's.

-toa,
knew who Fabio was before the not-butter incident

[hooplala]

The bird incident is MUCH funnier.

[the other anonymous]

The bird incident is MUCH funnier.

Larry Byrd and Fabio!? SRSLY?

[leonard koan]

i was a late bloomer when it came to reading. i started reading when i was eighteen. someone gave me a copy of The Bridge by iain banks then i got into aurthur c clarke, because A Space oddysey had been my favourite film from early on. i gained an interest in physics and read stephen hawkins a brief history of time, which led me to Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe (which is a blinder of a book, by the way, though i can only appreciate string theory aesthetically. unfortunatly my math skills aint cut out fot it) then someone, i can't remember who, reccomended me schrodinger's cat by john gribbin(which i still haven't read. that's when i first came across robert anton wilson, but i strayed away from it- conspiracy theorist at the height of political turmoil, seemed a bit cliched so i ignored it. ) .from there into hard scifi like gregg egan et al. then i got into italo calvino and georges perec of the oulipo group, both fantastic writers. from there i spiralled into an obsessive collection, of which i have only actually read 50% of through to the end, and now i have settled into a confused reading habit, sometimes i can read through 2-3 a week and sometimes i don't read at all for months -which i have to sort out.

[leonard koan]

fuck you if you think my writing's confused aswell...i did it on purpose...

[LMNO]

Easy there, kiddo.

[AFK]

My favorite book was "The Carriage Returns" by N. Terbutton 

[leonard koan]

I see you have a quote from a bulgakov book; did you ever watch the series? i wouldn't say i hated it, but it was a dissapointment, i was expecting it would translate to a short t.v series quite well, but the translator seemed to rip the soul out of it in it's conversion to a series - it just seemed a little flat.

[Pope Lecherous]

GOOSEBUMPS


$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

[Corvidia]

I'm still finding them, but I'm counting this from 18 down.

Under 14:
The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
The Harry Potter series (it stopped being so formative at book three )
The Narnia Chronicles
Little House on the Prairie, Little House in the Big Woods, et al.
Lord of the Rings
Greek and Roman mythology
Fairy tales
Aesop's Fables
Lanterns and Lances
Tales of Benjamin Bunny
The Thurber Carnival
Touch the Earth
Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass
The Goops ("The goops they lick their fingers, the goops they lick their knives. They spill their broth on the table cloth...")
The Giver
Wind in the Willows
The Crow Boy
Audubon Game Animals

14-18:
Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett
American Gods
The Cobra Event
Grapes of Wrath
Animal Farm
No Exit
The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain
The Yellow, Red, and Blue books of Fairy Tales
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Signal to Noise
Freaknomics
Mexifornia
The Language Police
Like This by Rumi
Reviving Ophelia
Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future by Neil Postman
One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Old Man with Wings
Man's Search for Meaning
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the rest of the series
Tyranny of the Status Quo
Candide
The War Prayer
Good Omens
Death Be Not Proud
The Dwarf
And a story by Mark Twain. I CANNOT remember the name of the story, but a man meets and kills his conscious (which is a twisted little dwarf) and ends up with a collection of dead hobos in his basement, which he offers for sale in the last line.

Not books per se but still formative for me: Wishbone (a kid's TV show that introduces all the classic stories) and stories my friend's mother told us about La Llorena and chupa cabras.