Raise High The Roof Beams Carpenters
It's actually a novella (ie a long short story) by JD Salinger - a profound meditation on life, family, sadness and love. It's also really funny in places.

I have read it so many times. It is like a ritual when I am feeling down. At the end I am always glad to be human.
(MostlySunny, Mon 19 May 2008, 11:33, Reply)

Martin Amis
A few years back I bought a book by Martin Amis - The Information. I enjoyed it. It was cleverly-written, humorous, a bit sick at times (I am a b3tard after all) and had a decent storyline.

Admittedly, it was a bit heavy going at times, as Amis tends to use 'big' words and very long sentences, which are a bit unnecessary and just confuse the reader. But that's his style.

So I bought another of his books - Yellow Dog.

Now I've read books on quantum physics, cosmology, relativity and so on (Hyperspace by Michio Kaku, for example), and while I can't claim to have understood every word, at least by the end of the book I have gleaned some useful knowledge and information from it, and come away with some concept of the content of the book. Not Yellow Dog though.

Despite the fact it's a novel, and therefore should have a plot etc, I finished that book and had no idea what it was about. I missed the point entirely. I would re-read it but it I found it to be so much pretentious bollocks that I couldn't face it again.

I went back to crime fiction after that. Harlan Coben, David Baldacci et al. Still thought provoking but much more enjoyable.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Mon 19 May 2008, 11:21, 8 replies)

Far From the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy's epic story of love and hardship in the Dorset countryside of the nineteenth century.

Or, thanks to a remarkable mix-up between the Wessex Bard's literary classic and the 1973 Sun Football Book for Boys, I grew up thinking this was the story of a retired footballer getting away from it all.

Live and learn.
( Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Mon 19 May 2008, 11:12, Reply)

What I learned from Sellar and Yeatman...
Has anyone mentioned 1066 And All That yet?

When I was in my teens, this little book made me love history. If by "love" you mean "violently do a bumsex on", that is.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Mon 19 May 2008, 10:44, 9 replies)

I'm prejudiced

Not on topic at all really, but am I the only b3tan that would rather eat dirty live worms than even open a Jeffrey Archer book? It may be my age or political leanings or something less tangible but it's strange nonetheless; as strange as the fact that in EVERY SINGLE charity shop in the land, there are at least two of his books - in hardback - on the 'top shelf' of the book section. What does this mean? There are many thousands out there willing to pay good money for a hardbacked copy of his books, but very few that value them enough to keep them I suppose.

By the way, I got down my 'Roads to Freedom' trilogy on Saturday in their Penguin Modern Classics paperback finery - covers featuring Picasso oils - to discover I'd bought them in 1982!!! Still, a bargain at £2.25 new.
(Che Grimsdale Best before:, Mon 19 May 2008, 10:27, 4 replies)

Innogen's post reminded me.
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - probably my favourite book of all time. I don't know if it changed my life, but it almost definitely led to the development of my bizzare sense of humour, which in turn caused me to meet most of my current friends.

Reading this has made me sad - I've realised how little of my time I devote to books these days. I feel like I don't have the time for fiction, but the only non-fiction books I seem to read now are programming books and car workshop manuals.
(Half of Stephen Fry's right buttock pissed on your dog on, Mon 19 May 2008, 10:20, Reply)

One I reccomend, One I want to own
I enjoyed reading 'As used on the famous Nelson Mandela' by Mark Thomas. It's a book on his investigation into the arms trade which may sound quite dull, but it's very funny- if you know who Mark Thomas is you can guess why. The part where he gets the Israeli bloke who's built an automatic stoning machine to give a presentation to the arms firm he set up as an after school activity with a bunch of teenage girls from an Irish convent school is hilarious and bizarre in equal measures. It also got me thinking that I could start up my own arms business.

I am also planning on buying Atlanta Nights. Not for the quality of the book itself*, but the fact that this book was nothing but an in joke by a bunch of Sci Fi writers to show the stupidity of PublishAmerica and its alleged review of manuscripts policy (PublishAmerica also mocked SciFi authors at one point) .

*The book itself is woeful with missing chapters, characters die then suddenly reappear without any explanation, two chapters that are the same (word for word identical) placed in different parts of the book and a chapter written by a computer program that generated text.
(mon bison powered by magnets, Mon 19 May 2008, 10:18, 5 replies)

I don't care if it's been done before
In fact I see it was done a few answers down, but not expanded on at all.

The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks

This book changed my life.
After reading it I changed my lifestyle quite a bit...

I lived on the first floor of a house, and kept a sledgehammer by my door. This was so I could destroy the stairs if I had to, to stop them getting up to me.

I had several hundred pounds worth of tinned food and bottled water in my wardrobe.

I slept with a katana next to my bed, a commando knife under my pillow, and a hefty blunt object in every room.

I learnt to use a bow and arrow, as the noise of a gunshot would bring more of them to me.

I'd lost my wife and children, the judge said that I'm "dangerously and illogically paranoid".

I had to quit my job, as the office wasn't secure enough to provide protection in the event of an outbreak.

I'm writing this from Broadmoor Secure Hospital.
I'll be out when I'm 87, if I behave well.

Going to Lakeside shopping center after watching Dawn Of The Dead, and not sleeping for a week was a mistake.
I now know that they were morons out shopping for tracksuits and tacky gold jewellery, not zombies.

I'm happy here though, no way they could get me in my cell.
( Cawl, Mon 19 May 2008, 10:13, 30 replies)

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
This book is the epitomy of the phrase :-

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose
(The more things change the more things stay the same)

Published in the mid nineteenth century but it's history and examples can go back a few hundred years before that. It's a compendium of ridiculous human folly and stupidity, mixed in with a healthy dose of satire and analysis. If you want to understand that history repeats itself and there really is nothing new under the sun (concerning human behaviour) then read this book. It covers popular fads and social obsessions that, if you changed the names, are happening all around us today. The South Sea bubble, Tulipomania, witchhunts, catchphrases, spiritual healers and mediums, all in our modern world in different guise but Charles Mackay gives examples of what they were like in the past and anyone with a keen sense of understanding will see that it's all just same shit different day.
After I finished reading it, the world was never the same as I could see through a lot of the culture for what it was, just a bunch of monkeys fucking around with sticks.
( Brandy_Bumwinkle, Mon 19 May 2008, 10:07, Reply)

Tom Swift
I was a clever wee bugger as a lad, sometimes too smart for my own good. When I was in primary school my teachers could never find things for me to do, as I was invariably finished the set work before some of the slower kids had even started. So in P7, my teacher brought in a pile of books which her son had read when he was young. They were based around the adventures of a boy called Tom Swift who devised and used, with his father Barton, a series of wondrous electromechanical contrivances to save the day. A bit like McGyver-meets-Scotty-from-Star-Trek, if you will.

I loved them. I read every single book that she brought in. I wouldn't say that's what inspired me to be a scientist, as I'll already made my mind up by that point, but it certainly did nothing to change my mind.

It also kept my teacher happy, as I was stuck with my head in a book most of the time and she could get on with teaching the rest of the class.

Not exactly classic literature, mind you.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Mon 19 May 2008, 9:45, 2 replies)

Parasite Rex
Okay, so there's this fluke. It lives in ants and cows, and to get from one to the other takes a bit of work. When it infects an ant, the ant changes its behaviour: it climbs to the top of a blade of grass and sits there, waiting to get eaten. If night comes, it climbs back down and goes back to being a normal ant - forages for food, etc - then at sunrise it goes up some grass again.

In terms of 'changed my life', you couldn't do much better than this book: it completely altered the way I look at nature. Basically it's a study of parasites, how they work and how they affect ecology. It's satisfyingly icky (some great pictures of threadworm-infested legs and ants with fungi growing out of their heads), and contains some mind-blowing facts (as well as the above-mentioned fluke, there's a barnacle that eats a crab's reproductive organs, deposits its own eggs in the same place, then hijacks the crab's reproductive behaviour by getting it to wave the eggs away into the sea with its back legs, and another fluke that crawls into a snail's horn and pulsates to look like a tasty caterpillar) Can't recommend it enough.
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Mon 19 May 2008, 9:41, 13 replies)

Looking Inside Busy Places
www.amazon.co.uk/Looking-Inside-Places-David-Sharp/dp/B0015V9GXU

Sounds rude, but it was a quarto-format hardcover book with beautiful cut-away paintings of various large buildings, including airports, hospitals, railway terminii, even the Pyramids of Giza! I got it when I was about 4 and visually devoured every image.

Now I am an architect.

Perhaps lucky, as apparently at age 3 I announced I wanted to be a 'Vulcanologist' much to the bewilderment of my parents.
(corinoco is waiting for the revolution., Mon 19 May 2008, 3:54, Reply)

Delta Of Venus - anais Nin
because you need fitlh in literature.and boy! did that girl know filth.i'm surprised she had enough time to write the story in between all the orgasms.
jesus.
-spits-
(Fuckpig "That's not even a pound a midget.", Mon 19 May 2008, 1:22, 1 reply)

I can't claim to having one book change my life.
It was more the stack of high-quality german spank mags I found in the garage at 14.
( Spider Fucking Riviera got stiches for a knife wound for the first time, Mon 19 May 2008, 1:06, Reply)

My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday
My older sister handed this to me when I was 14 - it's porn with an intellectual/feminist veneer. Started me on a lifetime of literary wanking. Thanks, Kathy!

Mort

Oh yeah, here's the link:

www.amazon.com/My-Secret-Garden-Nancy-Friday/dp/0671019872
(mortdubois lacks imagination, doesn't play well with others, Sun 18 May 2008, 23:59, 1 reply)

as a teenager I read a French existential novel
which was later made into an American film (although the film lost some of the nuances of the original). It's called "Dude, Why's My Car?".
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Sun 18 May 2008, 23:27, 1 reply)

Honestly?
It was 'Where the wild things are'

One of my earliest memories is sitting in the 'carpet corner' of my nursery, aged 3, with this book spread across my lap. I couldn't read a word of it. I couldn't read.

The pictures were so evocative and exciting that I made it my sole mission to learn. Fast.

Tomorrow morning I sit my first of my final exams in Anthropology at Oxford. And I'm shit scared.

I never returned to that book as a child, or indeed, an adult. I'll read it when I finish my exams... Just to find out what the appeal of weird beings on an isolated island really was.

Fuck Malinowski.
(hahasnakes, Sun 18 May 2008, 23:24, 3 replies)

The book...
..that changed my life, was the one I wrote.

I would link to it on amazon, but then my precious B3TA anonimity would be gone forever, but I did write one, honest I did.

Anyway, cos of writing I met my current girlfriend who is perfect in every way and makes me happier than I've ever been, and we're getting a place together soon.

And then it got really silly and we've written a book together, and it's on shelves in September. Oh, and I've got my second book out next month which I wrote all on my own with hardly any plagiarism at all.

Er, except I can tell you which one it is either, cos then, y'know, B3TA, anonymity, all that....

I'm not very good at this publicity malarky - my publisher hates me.
(inflateable, Sun 18 May 2008, 22:10, 6 replies)

The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks

I'll be ready, will you?
(chrisdood Why yes, I am the shizzle, Sun 18 May 2008, 22:09, 11 replies)

The Giant Under The Snow - John Gordon
This is one book that seriously freaked me out at about 10, with its tales of Viking warriors buried in Norfolk, waiting to emerge and fight again when their giant leader is resurrected during the Winter Solstice. To prevent this, three schoolkids must locate and hide artifacts that a warlock needs, but things don't go as smoothly as hoped. They do have a good witch on their side, who gives them the ability to fly...

For years I forgot the book's name, but remembered the author. Last year I tried again, found that it had been reprinted, and so I picked up a copy on Amazon. Not quite the same impact, but if I was 10-15 I think it would blow me away again.
( bnt what, me worry?, Sun 18 May 2008, 19:17, 1 reply)

I'd have to say Of Mice and Men
It was the last book I've read properly (bar Harry Potter when it came out, and failing to finish LOTR ~hangs head in shame~). That was when I was doing GCSEs, and I really enjoyed the book, and didn't at all mind going over it, and writing about it (which I usually didn't like doing, I'm more sciency). Since then reading's slipped away from me. Sixth form brought more schoolwork to do plus a job at weekends, and the sudden ability to get served in pubs, and Uni's been more of the same. I really should get back into reading this summer..
( greedyostrich Cheese is evil! Cheddar is VOODOO!, Sun 18 May 2008, 17:51, Reply)

So many books, so little time
I couldn't choose just ine book that changed my life, and since no-one else seems worried about here are a few of my best. I will ask to be buried with these, as I will want them in the afterlife:

War of the Worlds and the Time Machine by HG wells - Fantastic books, such imagination for his time! They inspired me in my late teens.

Guards, Guards! by Terry Prathett - Vimes is a brilliant character, very beliveable and completely cynical.

1984 by George Orwell - A classic that was on the curriculum as a kid, and I hope still is.

And pretty much anything by Agatha Christie and Roald Dahll.

I thank my mum who taught me to read early (I was top in my year ^_^) and my dad who taught me to read car manuals.

I think it is awkward though, some books I couldn't tell you why they changed my life, they just did at the right time in the right place, and it probably wouldn't have the same effect for anyone else.

/end ramble
( VandenPlas can't think of anything clever - no change there!, Sun 18 May 2008, 17:43, 3 replies)

The Dark by James Herbert
Now i no longer sleep...
(By George I Think He's Got It! It's not fucking Sheep is it?!, Sun 18 May 2008, 17:42, 4 replies)

Ok, I've been loathe to post this for obvious reasons
but there is one book that really did change my life.

Girl, Interrupted.

I was sexually abused by my stepfather for years, and it culminated in a gang rape when I was 18. By this point, it was known that he had been abusing me and I was trying to get my head sorted and get my life sorted.
I was 22 when I read Girl, Interrupted and I spent hours reading it and re-reading it. I totally related to Daisy......
After re-reading it for probably the 5th time in 24 hours, I finally realised that I could possibly end up like that unless I made concious decisions not to allow the abuse to shape my thoughts, my actions and ultimately my life.

I took positive steps towards becoming an active, healthy member of society and now....well I'm doing alright. Actually, I'm doing great. I have a great job, wonderful friends who have seen me through some of my darkest times recently and things are looking good for my new relationship.

Life throws shit at you, but it is possible not to let it get you down.

Edit:
Wow. Thank you all for the wonderful responses. Believe me, I thought long and hard before posting this - I'm not ashamed of it and my closest friends and my family know of it. It's just kinda hard to write on a messageboard, you know? I hope that by posting this story, some young 'un out there will be inspired to speak out, too.
( Batshitmentalist is sane for once, Sun 18 May 2008, 16:47, 14 replies)

what else....
well, the tenth famous five book, five go on a hike together. this because i found it in my brother's bookshelf when i was really tiny (my mum was a teacher and she taught me to read when i was about 2, i've always loved it. geek that i am) and it was the first long story book i had ever read by myself. i realised that i could just get a book off the shelf and read to myself without needing to wait for my parents or a teacher.

gone with the wind, the world's biggest mills and boon, which my dad bought for me when i was about 10. i still love this book. it was the first really long book i'd ever read, which was a milestone. a lot of it went over my head, but i still loved it. funny how when i read it at 10, i identified furiously with scarlett when she gets ostracised but missed all the romance, where as reading it as a teenager was quite the opposite.

and jude the obscure. i fucked up my oxford interview on this stupid book, have loathed it ever since! it's the only thing in my life i am still a tiny bit bitter about... gah.
( rachelswipe with a fork, Sun 18 May 2008, 15:46, 1 reply)

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
awesome

made me read more and more of the type of book i didn't really read before, taught me a lot about humanity and nature
(Darth Vodka, Sun 18 May 2008, 14:58, 1 reply)

"The warrior trilogy: Warrior: En garde. Vol1" from the Battletech series
The first sci-fi book I ever read, come on. It was one of the first books I enjoyed in a personal level, and not just "ok, I read a book and it was nice." It's not entirely about the book. Ok, maybe because of that book I discovered the battletech series, the true pleasure that is reading, and entered the science fiction world. But it's more about the memories I have of the times I read it.

I don't know how old I was, probably nine or ten, and I borrowed it from my brother. Why? No idea. I'll ask him if he remembers.

One afternoon on my school's library I decided to start it. I remember that afternoon so well. Every time I read the prologue I imagine things the same way I did the first time. (Even after reading it a second time and finding out that the descriptions didn't fit what I had in my mind, like, i've always imagined a character with dark hair, when the book clearly says he's blonde, but apparently i didn't notice the first time and now its too late to change that detail)

I remember one of my friends sitting in front of me, after browsing through the books of the library, and bored because she couldn't find anything that interested her. She saw me reading the book with great interest, and asked me where I took it from. I said I had brought it from home.

It's been years since I've been to my old school, and I stopped seeing that friend years ago (and i'm glad about it.) More than the story and the content of the book it's the book itself, everything.

I have it in my hands right now. It's only ten years old, but for me it's an eternity. It still has the price label in pesetas, the spanish currency before the euro xD The page 331 has always been broken, and I could never read what happened there.

I guess this could also fit in last week's QOTW, because now that i think about it I want to keep this book. I hope that when my brother finds a place of his own he lets me keep these books...
(Nissun, Sun 18 May 2008, 14:47, Reply)

The Book That Changed My Life..
.
hasn't been written yet - but it will be.

Let me explain. I'm a bibliophile. It's not illegal (yet). I've read at least 70% of the books mentioned on this QOTW so far and I'll probably end up reading about 90% of the ones I haven't so far read. But I'm straying off the subject again.

Anyway. The Book That Changed My Life will be a series of books written by me. It'll be a (mostly) true, novelised, account of the things I've either done, witnessed, or been told about. The working title will be:

On The Piss In *****

And the first one will be set in Amsterdam.

And, and I say with absolutely no sense of shame, I'll be ripping off large sections of QOTW answers, to populate my pages.

Rakky and the prawn "money-shot" is just too good not use...

Humpty-Dumpty and:
it's 1:16 am here.
have just shagged my mate's girlfriend on the balcony.. 'not good. not good at all.
miniskirts: great
too much drink: bad.,

Is just begging for a scene setting and, best of all, is anything from the "Heckles" QOTW. Pure comedy gold...


Cheers

Am i really will write this book. Honest. I just need the time....
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Sun 18 May 2008, 14:36, 3 replies)

Hmmmm
Nothing in the world saddens me more than when I suggest to my bored students to take up reading and I get the reply...

"What would I want to read a book for?".

If only I could show them this QOTW, and they'd see differently.

Living in the armpit of North Sheffield as I did when I was a sprog, a book was a cheap and interesting way of getting your head out of the squalor that surrounds you.

If I had my way, Roald Dahl would be on the National Curriculum - if it wasn't for the likes of The Twits, The BFG and Matilda, I'd have been another of my generation lost to reality TV and celebrity magazines. These books fired my imagination, made me laugh and most of all, changed my outlook on life.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not totally elitist - and hey, who doesn't like a regular view of a Big Brother drop-out with their breasts on show in a cheap glossy - but if I was ever stuck for anything to do, or to take my mind off things, I'd read a book.
(scentless_apprentice takes two bottles into the shower!, Sun 18 May 2008, 14:31, 3 replies)