The Razor’s Edge, by Somerset Maugham. I credit it with giving me the gumption to leave Texas and get out into the world.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Not so much for the book itself, but for all the other books referenced which I ended up reading: Hesse, Heinlein… It was a turning point in my reading and in some ways my life.
If I had read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman when I was in high school or college, I’m sure that it would have been most influential on my life. But, regrettably, it hadn’t been written yet.
So I’m thinking either James Randi’s Flim Flam, which provided me with skeptical tools that I’ve used throughout my life, or possibly James Steranko’s History of the Comics, which made me realize that my passion for the comic book medium was not unique, and revealed to me the rich legacy of what has become a lifelong obsession.
I read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse as an early teen, around the same time I was introduced to Buddhism in general. I read lots of books on the subject at the time, but that’s the only one that expressed itself as a fictional novel. It helped a lot of very new ideas really click for adolescent Fuzzy Dunlop.
Both, I guess you could say. Within two years of reading it I was an active member of a revolutionary socialist organization I stayed with until I left the States (and still actively support), and the whole perspective of Marxism I’ve tried to deepen myself in and understand further since then has helped me figure out where I stand on some very thorny issues (both current events and more generally philosophical ones).
Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
The singularity is near by Ray kurzweil.
It is arguably religion for smart atheists.