The following is a collection of the 8 books which have had the most impact on my life, which changed the way I see the world, or which serve as touchstones for specific moments in time. They are listed in the order in which I read them.
1. The Hobbit
J. R. R. Tolkien
“You usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”
2. The Doors of Perception
Aldous Huxley
“The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.”
3. Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Carl Jung
“My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious.”
4. The 48 Laws of Power
Robert Greene
“Win through your actions, never through argument.”
5. Beyond Good and Evil
Friedrich Nietzsche
“The strength of a person's spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.”
6. On the Road
Jack Kerouac
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn…”
7. The Sorrows of Young Werther
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Frankly he thinks they can't hold a candle to him, and he might be right, but that doesn't do him any good…”
8. Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“A strange period began for Raskolnikov: it was as though a fog had fallen upon him and wrapped him in a dreary solitude from which there was no escape. Recalling that period long after, he believed that his mind had been clouded at times, and that it had continued so, with intervals, until the final catastrophe.”