What book has had a real impact on you.

[Longlive]

I have just finished Under a Java Moon. A based on a true story about a child in an internment camp in Java during ww2.

I was brought up in Singapore and always remember a friend of my mother's who would save all her left overs, which in that heat was unusual.

I asked my Mum once why and she explained her friend had been a child internee. To start with I was confused as I had just read Anne Frank and thought she meant her friend was Jewish and had been caught up in the Holocaust. My Mum then explained about the Japanese Internment camps. In Singapore 30 years later as a child I knew nothing of them and my mother quietly educated me, saying I wasn't to ask her friend as she didn't like to talk about it.

This is the first book that I've read from that childs view, and was blown away with how a child, no less a newborn could live through it.

Aldous Huxley: Point Counter Point. It was the book that opened a door in the wall. I grew up in rural Essex and went to a crappy state school. The people I grew up around talked about cars and sport and where they'd been on holiday, etc. Huxley showed me a different world, where people sat around having brilliant, witty conversations about art and Shakespeare and philosophy. Really set my mind on fire (even though I couldn't understand most of it). Wilde's Dorian Gray had a similar effect.

Other books that had a big impact:

Roald Dahl: Boy
Woolf's Mrs Dalloway
Edward St Aubyn's Melrose novels
Pride and Prejudice (read it in adolescence – say no more).

Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything was a big book for me. I suddenly 'got' science (failed it at school).

Robert Graves: Goodbye to All That
Dickens: David Copperfield
Joseph Campbell: Hero with a Thousand Faces
Harold Bloom: The Western Canon (Bloom had a massive impact on what I read)

Secret Hunters - Ranulh Fiennes

• set in WWII. The theme that stood out was how the ordernary German viewed what was going on in their country, and let it happen, or were powerless to change what was going on. It made me question what I would do in the same situation. The Boy in Striped Pjamas had a similar theme.

Hi OP, have you read A Town Called Alice? it's a novel that partly covers that period and what happened to some women caught up in the Japanese invasion.

Pachinko

Animal Farm, by George Orwell.

A short book which completely destroyed my naive, youthful flirtation with communism in the few hours it took me to read it.

Jean Plaidy's Young Elizabeth - read it when I was 7 so I really resonated with the protagonist - after reading about the translations that she made for her father and Katherine Parr as presents I was inspired to go on and study Latin and Greek as well as History at A level and to learn to play the virginals

If this is a man by primo levi

Black Beauty

Illusions by Richard Bach.
Helped with a way of understanding the world and letting things go. First read it as a teen 40 years ago or so.

As a child Jill's Gymkana by Ruby Ferguson which was followed by my lifelong obsession with horses
As an adult I love Harry Potter, the morality resonates with me and it's both gripping and comforting and helps me think that eventually good will triumph which is something I need a lot in these awful days we live in

@MrsDanversGlidesAgain my mother gave me that book to read when I was about 13. I went on to read all Nevil Shutes books.

Do they hear you when you cry. By Fauziya Kassindja.

It totally changed my opinions on immigration from what my Daily Mail reading family taught me.

Coram boy by Jamila Gavin.

There’s a book called ‘Our Holocaust’ by Amir Guttfreund and it’s about kids growing up in Israel with parents, grandparents and neighbours who were in the holocaust. It’s so powerful and moving, I think about it all the time. I’d recommend it to anyone.

L'Assommoir by Zola - its quite depressing. Describes the spiral of poverty and drink very well though.
Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy.
Still makes me question the extent of what my mind thinks is real.

Yes I’ve read all of Shute’s books. Great author, On the Beach still haunts me. The Handmaid’s Tale is brilliant and completely captures the lives of women the world over.

'The Blind Watchmaker' Richard Dawkins
I had already lost my Christian faith but didn't really grasp that the world didn't need a creator. Reading this book opened my eyes to the reality of evolution.

Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4069.Man_s_Search_for_Meaning

Well, 'Animal Farm' was our set book for 'O' level, and I think it had an impact on me.

Later, 'Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust' - I knew a little about concentration camps but I hadn't heard much about the forced marches between them. One person said when they were walking through a place, silent others who lived there held out food/bread to them. I don't know whether they had to do it unseen. I guess so. Also, the voices were from so many different places and backgrounds.

I have not read my copy of 'If this is a man'. Is that awful of me? There is a poem at the front of it. Every 27th January I read it out loud.

'1066 and all that'. Edward the Confessor confessed to everything - or something like that.

The Executioners Song by Norman Mailer - the whole Gary Gilmore story is a bit out there.

The best war books - All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, The Thin Red Line by James Jones and Mailer again with The Naked and the Dead.

Gore Vidal's American historical stuff is great plus Julian, Live from Golgotha and Myra Breckenridge.

A Dance to the Music of Time did it for me as well. Anna Karenina, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, The Forsyte Saga, I Claudius and Claudius the God

Just so many

We Speak No Treason, by Rosemary Hawley Jarman.

Followed by reading The Daughter Of Time, Josephine Tey. I became a convinced Ricardian and am still a member of the Richard III Society!

Quite a few books by young Black women have really brought home to me how privileged I ( & my daughters) are to be more or less white and middle class. Like Queenie, Americanah, We Need New Names, Home Fires, Maame, Lustre and Such a Fun Age.

When I was about 10 I read a book about a girl in Afghanistan who married a grown man when she was a kid who beat her up everyday the book chronicled her life and Afghan recent history russian invasion, Taliban, USA invasion etc. She was infertile and he married a younger prettier fertile girl when she was older. The whole book was really depressing for a 10 year old i read some other weird adult stuff to but that really stuck out to me. I still wonder why books don't have age ratings like dvds do 🤔

Edit: the book was called thousand splendid suns if anyone's interested