Reading high quality fiction and non-fiction books will be the greatest source of knowledge in your life. By devouring books, you change who you are and how you interact with the world. By reading, you gain much more life experience and you enrich your life. You are impacted by the narratives of a good work of literature, or affected by the information in a well researched and well written piece of non-fiction.
The books on this list are great pieces of fiction, and like any good book, they will leave a mark on your life. So much so, that they will shift who you are and have a big impact on your personality.
8 Books That Will Have A Profound Impact On Your Personality
1. East of Eden – John Steinbeck
(Featured in 9 Thought Provoking Books Everyone Should Read)
East of Eden is for those who think, who care about who they are and who they want to be or ought to have been. People have talked of its being depressing. It’s not. The Biblical tale of Cain and Abel sets the tone as we are introduced to two sets of brothers. Each tries to win the love of his father in different ways. The story of why one brother succeeds while another feels unloved is beautifully told.
2. Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit – Daniel Quinn
It is a general rule that any particular culture can only be understood by someone outside of it – a neutral observer, unaffected by prejudice or indoctrination. This is the reasoning behind Quinn’s choice of a gorilla named Ishmael as the main character of this novel, who conducts a series of dialogues analyzing the whole of civilization itself.
3. Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse
(Featured in 10 Epic Books Every Man Must Read)
A spiritual book bases loosely on the life of Buddha, Siddhartha tells the story of a Brahmins journey in search of ultimate reality. This beautifully simple book has touched millions with its integration of Eastern and Western mythology and philosophy. Along with Demien, this book is a must read for any Herman Hesse fan or anyone interested in Buddhism philosophy.
4. Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes
(Featured in 10 Books That Will Absolutely Blow Your Mind)
This is a wonderful and highly original novel about a mentally challenged man named Charlie who wanted to be smart. One day, his wish was granted. A group of scientists selected him for an experimental operation which would to raise his intelligence to genius level. Suddenly, Charlie found himself transformed, and life changed.
5. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
(Featured in 6 Banned Books Which Are Now Best-sellers)
In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s classic, frightening vision of the future, firemen don’t put out fires–they start them in order to burn books. Bradbury’s vividly painted society holds up the appearance of happiness as the highest goal–a place where trivial information is good, and knowledge and ideas are bad.
6. 1984 – George Orwell
(Featured in 7 Best Lines From Books Which Will Stay With You Long After You Read Them)
Orwell tried to depict a totalitarian state, where the truth didn’t exist as such, but was merely what the “Big Brother” said it was. Freedom was only total obedience to the Party, and love an alien concept, unless it was love for the Party. A terrifying glimpse into the future that could be, or already is.
7. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
(Featured in 7 Greatest Books Ever Written by Debut Authors)
In J.D. Salinger’s brilliant coming-of-age novel, Holden Caulfield, a seventeen year old prep school adolescent relates his lonely, life-changing twenty-four hour stay in New York City as he experiences the phoniness of the adult world while attempting to deal with the death of his younger brother, an overwhelming compulsion to lie and troubling sexual experiences.
8. Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert A. Heinlein
The plot is deceptively simple. The first manned mission to Mars never made it home to Earth. The second mission, twenty years later, found Valentine Michael Smith, an infant born on Mars and the only surviving member of the ill-fated first mission. Having been raised by Martians, Smith is literally a stranger in a strange land when he is brought back to earth with “miraculous” abilities and a Martian philosophy of life.
Once he feels that he understands humanity, he undertakes to educate humans in the philosophy of “Thou art God” in such a way that the truth of that statement is a provable tautology
