I think you can figure out a lot about a person if you know what books have had the most impact on them.
Lou asked about people’s most impactful books. There are so many ways I could take “impactful”: books that changed my mind? books that influenced how I live? formative books that somehow shaped me?
Picking one approach didn’t feel right, so I’ve broken my list up into a few sections. Some books used to be important to me but have lost their luster with time and age. Some were just the right book at the right time. This isn’t a list of the books I think are “most worth reading” by anyone else — it’s less recommendation and more personal history.
Formative books
Books that really struck me when I read them, that I vibed with.
- The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander
- 1984 by George Orwell — long and boring, would not read again, but what I learned from it is invaluable — it anchored a year-long political satire project I did twenty years after I read it
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach — I’m sure this one hasn’t aged well — but I love the concept of bioregionalism — this inspired my AIM username 😄
- The Doubtful Guest by Edward Gorey — I was Very Into the Gorey aesthetic
Perspective changing books
- A Friend of the Earth by T. Coraghessan Boyle — I read this in 2005 and still think about it regularly — I learned how to accept the prospect of failure in environmental work
- Real Self-Care by Pooja Lakshmin — made me rethink self-care
- How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell — I legit was so inspired by this book I ran a year-long political satire project — it felt like it was written for me
- Any Duchess Will Do by Tessa Dare — I realized that romance had a lot of emotional depth and I’d been judging the genre without giving it a try (see also: How has reading romance changed your reading approach?) — now I write romance 😂
- The Suffragette Scandal by Courtney Milan — I. Love. This. Book. 😍 — this changed the way I think about political progress from all or nothing despair to focusing on small wins rather than the “impossible” bigger task (see also: Genre fiction is political)
- Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman — this makes clear that there isn’t enough time for everything, but also that maximum efficiency and productivity aren’t the answer to a good life
Books that informed my life choices and lifestyle
To some extent the reason these books were impactful was because I nudged myself their direction — I was building that way through other media, and this book is what I can point to in tipping me over the edge in times I was stuck or solidified fomenting thoughts, but might not have landed the same without having read, say, a bunch of Get Rich Slowly first.
- Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin — calculating my “actual hourly wage” back in 2009 was a shock
- Choose Yourself by James Altucher — I didn’t think this was great but it did help convince me to take a new job that meant gambling on myself
- Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson — I started a zero waste wiki inspired by this (and her blog), later worked on a recycling team
- The 100-Mile Diet by Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon — tried to eat like this for a while, it was way too hard, now I’ve found a mellower place of supporting local food systems where I can but not being too rigid
(I nominate Alex and Pablo to share their lists, should they wish to play along 😉)
See also: So Many Books
My Reading Philosophy in 17 Guidelines
How to read more books
Why I track my reading
I read 167 books in 2024, funnily enough the same number as in 
In total I spent $661 on 30 physical books and 11 ebooks.
