The strongest message (for me anyway) that I got was that despite temporary setbacks (which can be really severe) the human condition continually improves - however slowly.
On a somewhat related note since it was also very influential for me - did you ever see the video series “The Ascent of Man” by Jacon Bronowski? Is was a really powerful series tracing the history of science, technology, art, philosophy and other associated things over the centuries.
For many reasons, Toffler’s Future Shock.
Tale of Genji
It may be the first novel. Certainly the plotting and pacing will be familiar to the modern reader, although the characterizations and culture will be unfamiliar. For the first time reader, I recommend the Waley translation.
Almost all the characters are in some way ‘stuck’ in their life due to their status of birth, appearance, gender, or political position. Only a handful of people have the opportunity to change their life. Everyone else wait saround for something to happen. I can’t tell you how fascinating it all is. And it’s 1000 years old.
That does sound interesting, I’ll have a look to see if I can find it online, thanks 
Oliver Sack’s book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”. This book blew my mind when I read it years ago. It revealed how much of our ideas about how our brains actually work is an illusion.
This was also a huge influence on me, and the way I thought about brain function. It lead me to read all of his other works, as well as Luria, Ramachandran and others. It affected not only the way I thought about neuroscience, but also the way I taught my math students.
How to Win Friends and Influence People. As an Asperger’s sufferer a lot of human interaction was a complete mystery to me. This book changed my life for the better.
metrophage by Richard khardey (last name might be spelled wrong) 20 years ago he predicted everything that’s going on today and and the good days bou they were terrible…it shows that things are better now but a lot stays the same
Lord of the Rings has always been a favorite of mine (the book more so than the movies, the latter of which were too violent and dark while the former was all poetic and noble as well as a damn good read). I read LotR every ten years or so.
Runners-up include Stephen R. Donaldson’s great 10-book series, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and Stephen King’s The Stand.
Richard Kadrey, probably best known for his terrific Sandman Slim series.
The Fellowship of the Ring
I would have said The Hobbit, but I didn’t read it, it was read to me and the rest of the sixth grade class I was in.
Reading that book got me to reading other fantasy, and especially science fiction books. And this was the year ST-TOS debuted. I’ve been shaped by all the reading I did in the next couple of years, and ever since. And I met people, and went to cons, and have had a tremendous amount of fun.
“Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond.
The ideas in that trickle down. On it’s surface, it’s about how civilizations rise and fall, but the underlying thesis is that all of mankind is the same; they are just adapting to their environment. It ended up coloring my thoughts about everything including illegal immigration, refugees, modern geo-politics, and even the Black Lives Matter movement.
The Bible, and on a related note, C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity.
Also a fairly obscure sci-fi novel called The Sun Destroyers by Ross Rocklynne, which taught me the nature of faith, although it’s not a Christian work specifically.
Also, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Because of a passage in particular. The hero, Shevek, is describing one of his experiences where he saw someone terribly burned and dying in an airplane crash. Shevek cannot even touch the dying man to comfort him, because the skin flakes off and makes him scream. All Shevek can do is be with him as he dies.
And one of the people hearing Shevek says, (quoted from memory) -
Regards,
Shodan
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Alexander, Ishikawa & Silverstein
Not just essential for how I look at the built environment & urbanism, but also how I look at life.
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. It definitely helped me understood how the divide arose between the baby worshippers like my mother and the strong, adult women of my grandmother and great aunts generation and what women need to do to fight for our rights as human beings not just mothers.
Because, of course, your grandmother etc. had far more rights, better regard from spouses and society, and unlimited access to birth control.
Or maybe they were “strong” because they were going to stay home and pop out babies whether they liked it or not, and the “weak” all died in the process, and your mother had the choice to be a “baby worshipper,” just as you have the choice to opt out of Earth’s gene pool.
I’d just like to point out that I am no longer the only person in this thread who cited Christopher Alexander.
Hmm, I wouldn’t have thought of Tolkien, but “The Fellowship of the Ring” is probably the most influential book I’ve read, too. My father read “The Hobbit” to me, and took me to a play of it. So I picked up “The Fellowship of the Ring”, and spent the next several months reading it. I was in second grade, and went from painfully sounding out words to reading fluently over the course of reading that book. I learned how sentences work, and how paragraphs are constructed. (Because I realized I didn’t want to put it down in the middle of a paragraph, an entity no one had explained to me prior to that.) I suppose I would eventually have learned how to read without that book, but it gets the credit. And few things have affected my life as much as knowing how to read.
I read the “Lord of the Rings” cover to cover every year from then through graduating high school, so I’m sure it influenced me in other ways, too.
The women of my grandmother’s generation were the ones that fought for those rights, better regard from spouses and society, and access to birth control (there is now nor has there even been unlimited access). Too many women in my mother’s generation were the ones that turned their back on all those gains to worship babies.
None of whom were in any majority.
Yours may be the most fascinating and twisted form of self-loathing I’ve ever encountered. Seriously.
You also seem to have completely misunderstood 1929-1950 as a time of cultural shift.