For me, it was a book called ‘The Outsiders’ by S.E Hinton. It is known as a literary classic these days, but it was quite hard hitting when it was released back in the 1960s.
In a nut shell; It is about a group of semi-impoverished greaser friends growing up in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma, and all the life challenges they face, and how they react to prejudice against them whilst coping with family issues.
It was the first book that made me realise that some people in society don’t get it easy growing up, and I discovered what it meant to live on the ‘wrong side of town’ and what societal prejudice was. The outsiders was the first novel I read that brought up hard subjects like; domestic violence, alcoholism, street gang violence etc.
It was the first book to shatter my naive way of thinking about the world, at 13 years old! It is still one of my favourite stories to this day, and for all its slightly dark themes, I love the compassionate friendship and brotherhood that is displayed in this book!
Green Mars, the second book in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy.
Now, whilst I thoroughly enjoy the series I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. To say it can be “dry” in places is a bit of an understatement. I tell people it feels as much like a technical manual on how to terraform the red planet as it does a fictional story.
But when I first read it in my early twenties I was having a bit of an existential crisis. I knew Abrahamism wasn’t for me so I had began exploring Eastern religion/philosophy but again that didn’t scratch the itch I had.
And then I read this passage;
And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning.
It caused a mini-epiphany. I stopped searching for a greater truth because that was all I ever needed. It basically taught me to stop worrying and just enjoy existing.
This is what Carl Sagan youtube videos did for me
ooh i love this. i love this i love this. definitely going to get this book, sounds right up my alley.
LOL. I’ve only read his novel “2312” and describe it in a very similar way.
It’s like he wrote a book about how technology and humanity could look in 300 years and thought, “I guess I have to shove a story in there too!”
The actual world is far more interesting than the story.