What is one book that positively shaped who you are as a person and how did it influence you?

[rmiddleton@mastodon.art]

@ShaulaEvans @bookstodon Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein was assigned to me in a first year college seminar. It broke my brain in the best way. My lifelong struggle is with meaning, expectations, "shoulds." This book length prose poem is "abstract writing" or dada or deeply symbolic. Or all or none of that. I can understand that some may hate (be disappointed in) abstract art. To me it's life affirming. Time spent playing with thoughts is valuable. Art for art's sake.

[rmiddleton@mastodon.art]

@ShaulaEvans @bookstodon

I love it so much I made a fedi bot that posts it @tender_buttons

[cainmark@mstdn.social]

@pdcawley @ShaulaEvans @afewbugs

That's beautiful.

[inkyschwartz@mastodon.social]

@ShaulaEvans @bookstodon Hmmmm. No one book, but a lifetime of reading has set me down a path that brings me to who I am at present.

[samueljohnson@mstdn.social]

@ShaulaEvans @bookstodon Teach Yourself the Slide Rule by Saffold and Smalley.

Random find in local public library as a late teenager. Without acquiring the knowhow I wouldn't have survived first year physics at university (new subject for me) in the last year calculators were still banned. The failure rate was 50%. I scraped an honours, avoided repeats, spent the summer in NYC.

Still have that slide rule.

[hc@mastodon.africa]

@ShaulaEvans @bookstodon George Orwell’s Animal Farm. I first read it in high school, and it made me deeply suspicious of “liberators”. It should be mandatory reading in #SouthAfrican schools.

[skleefeld@retro.pizza]

@ShaulaEvans @bookstodon New Mutants #45
The story is about a kid who commits suicide after years of being bullied. His eulogy is performed by a girl he met once because none of his actual classmates ever bothered to get to know him. She uses the platform to excoriate hate just because someone applies a simplistic label like "geek" or "mutant" or "Jew" to someone else.

I first read it in high school; I was maybe 15. I was in a very homogenous area where ANYTHING perceived as different (like myself) was mocked and bullied, and the story really resonated with me, making me really understand and appreciate how insanely stupid labels like that are. I judge people on who they are as an individual, not on some broad categorization.

[afreytes@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@ShaulaEvans @bookstodon As a kid, my desire to understand every word (English is not my first laanguage) in this book was the beginning of a fulfilling path for me.

[satsuma@dice.camp]

@ShaulaEvans @alicemcalicepants I’m in the UK but I think we might have a connection via Prof Mark Donnelly who started the group I was involved with before moving back stateside

[satsuma@dice.camp]

@davidramirer @ShaulaEvans @bookstodon @alicemcalicepants I got started with an online lecture series from MIT that introduced some of the ideas

https://youtu.be/lWZ2Bz0tS-s

[catselbow@fosstodon.org]

@ShaulaEvans @bookstodon

I feel like the books that I most treasure are the ones that slotted perfectly into voids within me. They didn't change my shape so much as they gave me substance.

[printdevil@dice.camp]

https://www.barbaraheller.org - at any bookseller really.

@Frantasaur @kgjengedal @ShaulaEvans @bookstodon