Books that Changed My World View

Top 10 Books that Changed My World View : V for Vendetta, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, The Canterbury Tales, Lord of the Flies, The Jungle, The Prophet, Speaker for the Dead, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Tao Te Ching

V for Vendetta
AuthorAlan Moore
ISBN1401207928
"Remember, remember the fifth of November..."

A frightening and powerful tale of the loss of freedom and identity in a chillingly believable totalitarian world, V for Vendetta stands as one of the highest achievements of the comics medium and a defining work for creators Alan Moore and David...
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
AuthorDee Brown
ISBN0805066691
Now a special 30th-anniversary edition in both hardcover and paperback, the classic bestselling history The New York Times called "Original, remarkable, and finally heartbreaking...Impossible to put down."

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's eloquent, fully documented account...
Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
AuthorTerence McKenna
ISBN0553371304
This book is trash.

I picked up this book because of an interest in drug culture and history. The premise sounds interesting enough: we stopped doing shrooms and got worse as a society.

I'll summarize the book in case the premise sounds interesting to you, so you can get the gist without...
The Canterbury Tales
AuthorGeoffrey Chaucer
ISBN0140424385
The procession that crosses Chaucer's pages is as full of life and as richly textured as a medieval tapestry. The Knight, the Miller, the Friar, the Squire, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath, and others who make up the cast of characters -- including Chaucer himself -- are real people, with human emotions...
AuthorWilliam Golding
ISBN0140283331
At the dawn of the next world war, a plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of schoolboys. At first, with no adult supervision, their freedom is something to celebrate; this far from civilization the boys can do anything they want. Anything. They attempt to forge their own society, failing,...
The Jungle
AuthorUpton Sinclair
ISBN1884365302
For nearly a century, the original version of Upton Sinclair's classic novel has remained almost entirely unknown.

When it was published in serial form in 1905, it was a full third longer than the censored, commercial edition published in book form the following year. That expurgated commercial...
AuthorKahlil Gibran
Kahlil Gibran’s masterpiece, The Prophet, is one of the most beloved classics of our time. Published in 1923, it has been translated into more than twenty languages, and the American editions alone have sold more than nine million copies.

The Prophet is a collection of poetic essays that...
Speaker for the Dead
AuthorOrson Scott Card
ISBN0812550757
Now available in mass market, the revised, definitive edition of the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning classic. In this second book in the saga set 3,000 years after the terrible war, Ender Wiggin is reviled by history as the Xenocide--the destroyer of the alien Buggers. Now, Ender tells the true story...
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
AuthorCarlos Castaneda
ISBN0671227424
You may find this book has a lot of chaff on how they prepare peyote and other drugs, mundane descriptions in diary... yet when you less expect it, they hit you with a boulder of wisdom that leaves you freezed.

There is ONE core idea in the book that makes the price tag disappear. You cannot pay for...
Tao Te Ching
AuthorLao Tzu
ISBN0679724346
The Wisest Book Ever Written...
Complete on Audio...The Entire 81 Chapters (and Introduction to) Stephen Mitchell's exquisite new tradition of Lao-tzu's Tao Te Ching, or Book of the Way -- the classic manual on the art of living revered as one of the wonders of the world. Dating from the 6th century...
Slaughterhouse-Five
AuthorKurt Vonnegut
ISBN0385333846
There are some terrible reviews of SH5 floating around Goodreads, but one particularly awful sentiment is that Slaughterhouse-Five isn't anti-war.

This is usually based on the following quote.
"It had to be done," Rumfoord told Billy, speaking of the destruction of Dresden.
"I...
AuthorJ.K. Rowling
ISBN0545010225
Harry Potter is leaving Privet Drive for the last time. But as he climbs into the sidecar of Hagrid’s motorbike and they take to the skies, he knows Lord Voldemort and the Death Eaters will not be far behind.

The protective charm that has kept him safe until now is broken. But the Dark Lord is breathing...
Aesop's Fables
AuthorAesop
ISBN0192840509
Aesop's Fables or Aesopica refers to a collection of fables credited to Aesop (620-560 BC), a slave and story-teller who lived in Ancient Greece. Aesop's Fables have become a blanket term for collections of brief fables, usually involving anthropomorphic animals. Many stories included in Aesop's...
Animal Farm / 1984
AuthorGeorge Orwell
ISBN0151010269
This edition features George Orwell's best known novels – 1984 and Animal Farm – with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens.

In 1984, London is a grim city where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind.  Winston Smith joins a secret revolutionary...
The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
AuthorMiguel Ruiz
ISBN1878424505
In The Four Agreements, don Miguel Ruiz reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering. Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, the Four Agreements offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness,...
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
AuthorRobert M. Pirsig
ISBN0060589469
Maybe it's unfair to give a poor rating to a book I read in high school. However, I like to think that I was wise beyond my years and knew a phony, self-congratulatory, pretentious buffoon when I saw one. On the other hand, I did wear baggy overalls with Birkenstocks every day back then and wondered why I didn’t...
Kaffir Boy: An Autobiography
AuthorMark Mathabane
ISBN0684848287
The Classic Story of Life in Apartheid South Africa Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa's most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness...
Where the Sidewalk Ends
AuthorShel Silverstein
ISBN0060513039
Where the Sidewalk Ends turns forty! Celebrate with this anniversary edition that features an eye-catching commemorative red sticker. This classic poetry collection, which is both outrageously funny and profound, has been the most beloved of Shel Silverstein's poetry books for generations.

Where...
Out of the Silent Planet
AuthorC.S. Lewis
ISBN0007157150
In the first novel of C.S. Lewis's classic science fiction trilogy, Dr Ransom, a Cambridge academic, is abducted and taken on a spaceship to the red planet of Malacandra, which he knows as Mars. His captors are plotting to plunder the planet's treasures and plan to offer Ransom as a sacrifice to the creatures...
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
AuthorChristopher Moore
ISBN0380813815
The birth of Jesus has been well chronicled, as have his glorious teachings, acts, and divine sacrifice after his thirtieth birthday. But no one knows about the early life of the Son of God, the missing years—except Biff, the Messiah's best bud, who has been resurrected to tell the story in the divinely...
Infidel
AuthorAyaan Hirsi Ali
ISBN0743289684
One of today’s most admired and controversial political figures, Ayaan Hirsi Ali burst into international headlines following the murder of Theo van Gogh by an Islamist who threatened that she would be next. She made headlines again when she was stripped of her citizenship and resigned from the...
Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales
AuthorH.P. Lovecraft
ISBN0575081562
All right, with this one under my belt, I think I can safely say that I’ve read everything Lovecraft has ever written in his life. I will then skip introducing the author––who doesn’t need any introduction, anyway––and go through a rundown of some of my most beloved horror stories of his,...
Qurʾan / القرآن الكريم
AuthorAnonymous
The Quran (English pronunciation: /kɔrˈɑːn/; Arabic: القرآن‎ al-qurʾān, IPA: [qurˈʔaːn], literally meaning "the recitation"), also transliterated Qur'an, Koran, Al-Coran, Coran, Kur'an, and Al-Qur'an, is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims believe to be...
The World's Religions
AuthorHuston Smith
ISBN0062508113
Originally titled The Religions of Man, this completely revised and updated edition of Smith′s masterpiece, now with an engaging new foreword, explores the essential elements and teachings of the world′s predominant faiths, including:
Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam,...
To the Lighthouse
AuthorVirginia Woolf
The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and...
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
AuthorGregory Maguire
ISBN0060987103
When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's classic tale we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious Witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil?

Gregory Maguire creates...
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
AuthorRichard Bach
ISBN0743278909
This is a story for people who follow their hearts and make their own rules...people who get special pleasure out of doing something well, even if only for themselves...people who know there's more to this living than meets the eye: they’ll be right there with Jonathan, flying higher and faster than...
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