Way too many to count.

Reading was a problem for me until Jr. High School. It was a combination of just poor eyesight and slight youthful dyslexia. But, I was always interested in stories. My parents used to read to us when I was quite young, but with an ever expanding family, story-time didn’t continue. They were always too tired or otherwise engaged.

Between the ages of 12 and 14, I started to earnestly try to read titles in the family bookshelf that piqued my interest. I started with ‘The Last of the Mohicans’, by James Fenimore Cooper, then ‘David Copperfield’, by Dickens. For the next couple of years, I read some Plato, Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, and ‘Meditations’ by Marcus Aurelius, then read and memorized the Fitzgerald translation of ‘The Rubaiyat’ by Omar Khayyam.

I used to read at the kitchen table and ask my Mom to define whatever I didn’t understand. She finally got tired of that, went to the family bookcase in the hallway and brought back the Funk & Wagnalls dictionary, slammed it down on the table beside me and told me, “look it up yourself.” So, I did. For a few years, I read with the dictionary next to me. My vocabulary exploded exponentially. But, I’ve already detailed all this in snippets of my Memoir, which I’ve previously posted.

Of all the books, what 3 have made the most impact? That’s a tough one. Certainly, The Rubaiyat inspired a more poetic perspective for viewing the trials and tribulations of my  life and life in general. Another that helped with my overall perspective was ‘The Book’ by Alan Watts. I’ve also been highly influenced by Laozi’s ‘Tao Te Ching’, also the Bhagavad Gita and that genre.

So, I guess the three that influenced me the most, at least early on, were:

1. The Rubaiyat
2. The Book
3. The Tao Te Ching

I’ve also been heavily influenced by my readings of Epicurus, Thomas Paine, Bertrand Russell, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Marx, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxembourg. Not to mention all the SciFi, fantasy, and mysteries I’ve consumed over the years, though most of it is in the form of audio books in recent years. I can’t focus on text for more than a few minutes anymore…

–LE – 6/3/25