1 1.Bible 2.Enders Game 3.Sword of Truth Series 4.1984 5.Animal Farm

2

No particular order:

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (Livermore)
Fools Die (Puzo)
Lord of the Flies (Golding)
The Fountainhead (Rand)
Invisible Man (Ellison)

Hard to pick just five.

3

Stranger in a Strange Land

Papillon

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Job: A comedy of justice

Zane Grey books, I can't really narrow it to one.

4 Wait. Jaws was a book?

5 This is not an "endorsement" list, but an influence list.  Also, I don't usually like to read fiction.  I like my fiction all 'splodey on glowing screens.  Probably has something to do with hating all the crap I had to read in high school.  Come The Revolution, I will be conducting a ceremonial book burning of "Wuthering Heights".

Beast And Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Mary Midgely)

The Red Queen (Matt Ridley)

Republic (Plato)

Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

The Prince (Machiavelli)

6

1. And Quiet Flows the Don

2. A Prayer For Owen Meany

3. Advanced Flyfishing

4. Moby Dick

5. Conscience of a Conservative

7

Joe, you liked the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius? Now I'll have to try it again.

I got that book and it's mostly annoyed me. I keep putting it down.

 It seemed to me that it was one of those books that people think are cool because of who wrote it.

I mean, besides Clau-Clau-Claudius, how many Roman emperors wrote books?

8 1. The Forgotten Man
2. Good Calories, Bad Calories
3. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
4. Time Enough for Love
5. Awaken the Giant Within

Yeah, I actually read #5, and it really did affect my thinking.  I also hated a lot of #4 while I was reading it, because I dislike the notion of polyamory, but the setting was nonetheless captivating and thought-provoking.

9 Veeshir, get the Hicks translation of the Meditations, which is a much easier read.  It is so different from the standard translations that they re-titled the work "The Emperor's Handbook".

10 In no order:

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress - Robert Heinlein
Time Enough For Love - Robert Heinlein
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Prometheus Rising - Robert Anton Wilson

and way too many others.  Moby Dick recently, but not in my youth when I was too dim to grasp its import.

Hermit Dave: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator?  I thought I was the only one who had read that.  Add that book to Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, and you have everything you need to know about the financial markets and the insanity that recently ensued.

Look at the preponderance of Heinlein on the lists here.  Who'd of thunk it?

11 Linky to the Hicks translation of the Meditations.

I've also read "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator", fwiw.

12

I already got the Folio Society edition, I'm not sure who translated it.

The first 20 pages or so seemed trite and obvious, the sort of thing a  bunch of sycophants would say, "Oh how brilliant Sire".

Dammit, now I have to read it more.

 

The Folio Society is cool (but pretentious) if you like good books in hard cover. It's basically the Columbia House for snooty readers.

You get a bunch 'free' and then have to buy 4 more. I got Churchill's history of WWII for $20 and had to pay about $250-$300 for 4 other books, so for less than $300, I got 10 nice books.

They send you an offer every year, I haven't been a member for a few years, but I see they have Gibbons' Fall of the Roman Empire and an Oxford English dictionary and thesaurus for "free" and you need to buy 4 more in a year for roughly $40-100 each.

13

1.  The Bible

2.  Stranger In A Strange Land

3.  The Marching Morons and other stories

4.  A Scanner Darkly

5.  A Creed For The Third Millenium

14 My general take on the Meditations is that it's more about being in a certain state of mind rather than about specific advice.  But yeah, some of it is obvious, and some of it is repetitive.

Marcus Aurelius wasn't the most rigorous Stoic philosopher... more of a high profile practitioner of the Stoic life.

15
Atlas Shurgged
The Torah
Animal Farm
Plato's Republic
The Prince - Machiavelli

And for extra measure - The Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.

16 1.  The Bible
2.  The Gulag Archipelago
3.  Plato's Republic
4.  The Art of War
5.  The Prince - Machiavelli

It is difficult to explain how profoundly my thinking was impacted by The Gulag Archipelago.  The congruence of time (mid 80's) and place (college where my favorite professor's son in law was a released Soviet Christian minister who bore obvious scarring from torture in Siberia) maximized the impact.  More than anything else, that is way I hate Communism and Socialism.  I saw for myself that the words I was reading were true.  You could not tell me that the Soviets weren't torturing Christians for the crime of Christianity when I knew a man who lost an eye because of precisely that.   

17 1. Anything Asimov 2. Anything Heinlein 3. Anything Orwell 4, Anything Rand 5. Anything Johnstone And yes, all of those are favorite authors, of whom I would have an extremely hard time picking which writing would be my favorite, and of whom I've read almost anything they've ever written.

18

Hmm.  This is a really great question.  In no particular order, completely subject to change at a moment's notice, I will go with:

The Amber Chronicles - Zelazny
Anthem - Rand
Also Schprach Zarathustra - Nietzsche
Friday - Heinland
Snow Crash - Stephenson

Although, if I filled this out in a few day's time, I'd probably choose completely different works.

19

The Odyssey, Homer

All The Trouble In The World, P.J.O'Rourke

A big pile of David Drake's work

Animal Farm, Orwell

River Out of Eden, Dawkins

Outline of History, H.G.Wells

Considering how many semesters of discreet mathmatics i took i ought to know the difference between five and six.  Haven't looked at the world the same reading Thucydides' Pelopenesian War, with Athens falling under the sway of smooth-talking sociopathic jerks.  That would make it seven, or eight counting Hoff's The Tao of Pooh.  Jeepers, five certainly is a small number today.

 

20

A lot of authors I could have included have shown up in others lists here, particularly O'Rourke.  One other book I wanted to mention as I had completely forgotten about it:  Inferno (Dante).

As for Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, every single person I know who has ever sat on a Wall Street trading desk has read it.  We used to require traders in training to read a number of books, that being one of them.  It's great for a lot of reasons, but I like it most for what it says about human nature (Livermore eventually went broke one too many times and killed himself).

21 HD, try reading Inferno by Niven and Pournelle. They just re-released it for some reason so it's easy to get.

It's actually pretty much just a modern-American-English translation.

22

Atlas Shrugged

Stranger in a Strange Land

The Stand

The Amber Chronicles

the 5 book Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy trilogy

and Ember??

"My mother was a test tube and my father was a knife."

23 Veeshir -- read it many times.  I've read everything Niven has ever written (whether alone or as a co-author).  I wouldn't include any of his stuff on a list like this though, as I wouldn't say he's influenced my thinking much, with the exception perhaps of Oath of Fealty.

24 I don't read good, but I do like Dr Seuss.

25 I did not know that chad, thanks. Although the review didn't look promising, "but fans of Inferno may find that the landscape and the plot are a little too familiar."

Of course, I usually disagree with reviews, so maybe that's a good sign.
I'll let you know next week.

I do wish Pournelle would finish Janissaries instead of writing an unlooked for sequel though. It pisses  me off whenever I see those three books.
He and Forstchen and Newt Gingrich of all people are on my shit list for starting series and not finishing them.

26

and Ember??

"My mother was a test tube and my father was a knife."

Fixit, you're awesome.

I have to ask, though, as a huge fan of the Hitchhiker's Guide - you really feel they had the most influence on you?  Because, while they're probably some of my favorite books, I don't think that Douglas Adams really had much influence on the way that I think and act.

Certainly not the way that Amber did, anyway.  I majored in philosophy because of The Amber Chronicles.

27 Well Ember, it may not have influenced me as much as the others, but I ALWAYS know where my towel is ;D

28 I cannot argue with that impeccable logic.

29 The books listed here demonstrate an astonishing intellectual level.  Actually, not so astonishing, after all. 

What might you find on a liberal's top five list?

Rush Limbaugh Is A Big, Fat, Idiot - Al Franken
Dreams From My Father - William Ayers Barack Obama
It Takes A Village (to Raise A Thief) - Hillary Rodham Clinton
The Motorcycle Diaries - Che Fucking Guevara
Das Kapital - Karl Marx (not that any liberal has actually ever read it, it's just on the shelf to impress smelly liberal chicks with hairy armpits when they come over to "look at the etchings")

30 *snicker*  My mother owns all of those, Wicca ...

31 Anthem
1984
Animal Farm
The Diary of Anne Frank
Atlas Shrugged

32 Ember - I agree, The Amber Chronicles are excellent.

I forgot to add one book that is a MUST read by everyone here.  (Yeah, I know that makes more than five, but in my universe all numbers are divisible into 5.)

The Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz.  Get it, read it. The true story of a Polish cavalry officer captured by the Russians early in WWII, only weeks after his wedding (he never saw his wife again).  He was sentenced by a Soviet kangaroo court to a Siberian work camp. 

He and a handful of others escaped from the camp, then walked
across the Siberian tundra, then
across the Gobi fucking desert, then
over the fucking Himalayan mountains
into India.
On foot.

They left the camp with only an axe head and a loaf of bread, and it took them a year and a half to make the trek, living off the land the whole way.  Unbelievable that this hasn't been made into a movie.  Oh, that's right, it is the story of courage, persistence, and a fierce will to be free, and is highly critical of the Soviet system.  Of course it hasn't been made into a movie.

33 Chad, you'll note that the Rand book I listed was Anthem, not Atlas Shrugged.  The revelation at the end of Anthem of the meaning of the word always stuck with me.

34 I listed The Fountainhead, but never made it more than 50 pages into Atlas Shrugged, despite numerous attempts.  It seemed to me to be just more of the same philosophy as in The Fountainhead, but with even more words.

35 The Fountainhead was a truly awesome book, Hermit Dave.  I really, really loved that one.

36

1. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (unabridged)

2. Hobbit/Lord of the Rings

3. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

4. The Complete Sherlock Holmes

5. The Grand Sophy

Why Verne, and why first? - It was the first "adult" book I read as a child. In the 5th grade (it was some special deal the teacher arranged with the local JC library, and that was the thickest biggest book in the lending box, which was the only reason I picked it out ...but I loved it). And it was the introduction to - and solely responsible for - my life-long love of sci-fi.

I had entire chapters of Tolkien's books memorized (I can't say how many times I read them; lost track at around 40 times ...and that was before I was out of high school).

My early politics were informed by Heinlein, and in particular Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, along with Asimov's Foundation series (I still believe in the concept - at least - of "psychohistory"); I never [politically] recovered.

I've read Doyle about half as much as Tolkein, but it's the only "early" book on the list I still break out for a weekend read every couple of years.

The last one, The Grand Sophy? You've never heard of it? - Georgette Heyer's finest regency. So very delightfully charming and funny. I've read it a dozen plus times (and writing that, I realize it's been awhile, so I'm going to read it again, soon). It introduced and informed me on the genteel.

(When you have to choose from thousands of books ...well ...hard list, that.)

37 PS - Yes, I understood the list was about "forming the way you think". ALL of these profoundly influenced ...or significantly changed in some way ...how I looked - and still look, in some cases - at the world. (IOW: this wasn't particularly a list of "my favourite books" ...though they are that, too.)