What novel blew your mind?

The novel that blew my mind as a kid was The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman. For many years I struggled to make sense of the Viet Nam war, which I watched on TV while I grew up. The book shows both the unassailable stupidity of war and the mind-bending effects of time dialation. I still read it now and then. I liked both the first published version and the grittier uncut text released years later.

A few years ago I read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Holy smokes. It's a slice of life, perhaps showing both the unassailable stupidity of war and the huge change possible in a short span of time. I hadn't thought of that before posting this. The battle scenes are confusing, horrifying and frustrating, quite realistic. I found the relationship play fascinating! When I think of W & P, the first thing that comes to mind is families riding in horse-drawn sleighs Christmas Eve.

It's worth it to write down the names so you can keep track of everybody. Russians carry their given first name, then a middle name derived from the first name of their father, followed by his last name. That might help make sense of their use of both as "last" names.

Funny that I had resolved to slog through the entire book, no matter what. When I started the first page, I laughed, sat back surprised, then enjoyed the entire novel immensely!

Jason Bourne... I can't find a MC that i want to be more... Reinvented, spy, all around badass. The movies were good too but can't compare. The plot doesn't even match up

OOO i almost forgot. The Game (Penetrating the secret world of pick up artists) by Neil Struass. I actually found out about this book while i was in tent city, arizona's version of a jail. Bought it for myself for my 21st birthday and turned getting laid into a game not an awkward and mostly failing attempt at being cool.

Through the Looking Glass. Others have been mentioned already.

Rag and Bone Shop by Robert Corm. Read it in one sitting and the last line is haunting.

OhTheHorror said:

Clive Barker's The Great and Secret Show. There are countless books that stick out in my mind, but those two made me fall in love with reading when I was a kid.

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I was coming here to post that exact book. Definitely one of my favorite books of all time.

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein is a more recent addition to my keep-it-on-my-Kindle collection. I read it through and then promptly read it again to savor it.
It by Stephen King, because of the story and the mind boggling size of it that makes me wonder how the heck he managed to keep the details straight. (Same goes for the Dark Tower series...)
The Last of the Breed by Louis L'Amour, my mother's favorite author and the one book she made me read that I adored.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley because I was expecting a monster book and I got something much better.
The Color Purple by Alice Walker. I love books that break open places and reveal people who are different and yet so much the same. (Did that even make sense? )
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. Because it was beautiful, that's why.
Er. And many more! (Maybe my mind gets blown too often...but that's all right, I'm happy in my little, amazed world! Hahaha)

Classic fiction- Frankenstein. The moral questions are quite interesting. It requires extreme thought and much analysis to truly understand this novel. Which is why I love it.

Modern- Man, do I love 'Salem's Lot. It's commercial fiction, sure, but it's damn fine. Whether or not you like the writer (over the past year I've expressed several times that I do) you will love (or at least enjoy) this book. I say that it's the best vampire book ever written, barring Stoker's Dracula.

Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny. Wit, poetic voice, and the best definitions of immortality and fantasy I've ever encountered, tossed off just in passing.

On Stranger Tides, by Tim Powers. Pirates, Ponce de Leon, and the real nature of the Fountain of Youth. A real mind bender.

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon. Not for the squeamish.

1984, and I see others mentioned it. I read it in high school, and again twenty years later while deprogramming myself from a cult. If you can confuse a person about 2+2=5, you can make them believe anything.

The Five People You Meet In Heaven. It's a short novel and I read it fast. It seems I enjoyed the writing style of the author, but I definitely enjoyed the story (just so you know, it's not like the traditional Heaven). I think it affected me in just the way the author intended.

The Mind's I edited by Richard Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett. This is a combination of fiction and non-fiction, and relates to the then new (1980s) field of Cognitive Science. It's a collection of short stories and essays, many science fiction, that (among other things) provoke unexpected emotional reactions. The editors write about their interpretations after each story.

frankiebrown said:

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He's also credited with coining the term "time machine". Where would we be without that?

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Using the term "time gadget?"

Dracula, Bram Stoker. Just read this last month and it was so good.

The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien. I was 12 and I love it now as much as I did then.

Everything by Roald Dahl. His writing style is like crack to young impressionable minds. I also read his short stories for adults when I was 12 and they were as breathtaking as his children's classics. I wonder if the short stories will still hold up now that I'm an adult?

Maskerade, Terry Pratchett. I was 15 and it was my introduction to the Discworld. I'd never read anything like it and I loved it.

The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger. I didn't expect to like it, but there was this growing sense of horror as I read it and then when it got to the end, it made sense! It was all the more profound to me, since I was going through my own battles with anxiety and depression at the time.

A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin. I don't think I've said "oh my God" so many times while reading a novel. However, A Feast for Crows falls into the "thrown across a room with force" category.

gingerwoman said:

The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe when I was six lol and THe Magician's Nephew. Wished the other books in the series lived up to those two but they don't really.

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The Magician's Nephew changed my world! That was another mindblowing book - I think I was 10 or 11 when I read it. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe was a complete anticlimax after that - I think it's overrated. Maybe if I'd read them the other way around I'd feel differently.

Wolf Hall. First time of reading the hairs prickled on the back of my neck because the writing (and the storytelling) was so good. I had not known such things were possible - such perfect control of prose and mood. Bring up the Bodies was also wonderful, and I know several critics thought it even better, but you can't have that visceral shock of pleasure twice.

This might sound contradictory, but 1984 blew my mind, but I also call it the most over rated novel as well. Story wise its as dark as I had hoped, but the ending was meh. I might get the DVD though.

As I read through some of the responses, I realized there are actually a lot of novels that blew my mind that I had forgotten about. The top one on my list, though, is Hamlet (okay, I know it's a play, but overall it's easily my favorite writing that I thought I would absolutely hate.) I never knew how much I loved Shakespeare until I had my senior year English class and it was the first thing we learned.

But, to agree with some of the above posters, To Kill a Mockingbird is fantastic, and Ethan Frome as well. I think I had lesser expectations for EF, but by the time I finished it, I wanted to read it over and over again.

And I guess I would also put Stephen King's 'Insomnia' on my list. When I first picked it up, I thought it was too long for my taste and I actually wasn't all that interested in the blurb, but I love Stephen King so I figured I'd give it a shot. Easily in my top favorite books of all time.

Oh, and as someone else said, Brave New World. Fantastic book.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson. I could pick up that book and be nourished by any single line.

Dream Boy by Jim Grimsley. It's not just a story about growing up in a household dominated by violence, it's a portrait of the inner world created by that environment. Reading it left me speechless. There aren't words to describe that place, but Grimsley captured it perfectly.

When I was younger: A Wrinkle in Time. It was just so smart and interesting and it didn't really feel dated even though it had been published long ago. I've reread it several times since and I still love it.

More recently: Island by Jane Rogers. It was the first 1st person POV that I'd read in a long time that I actually liked. And I'm usually pretty good at seeing where a story is going, but this one kept me guessing to the end.

I really liked the ending to The Blue Adept. Around the middle of the book the main character and his rival have a massive battle that takes place between two worlds, yet their final battle is a simple one on one competition in bed.

For me, one above all is A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. A stunning, epic work that speaks to the heart of all humanity. Tremendously tragic and horribly humorous, it left me gasping for air after emerging at the end. I've been hesitant to pick up the book again in later years, for fear of diluting my fond memory of it.

Books that blew my mind
upon first reading*

Charlotte's Web - E.B. White
A Wrinkle In Time - L'Engle
Watership Down - Richard Adams
Emma - Jane Austin
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Go Ask Alice - Annonymous
The Outsiders - S. E. Hinton
In Watermelon Sugar - Richard Brautigan
Catcher In the Rye - Salinger
I Never Promised You A Rose Garden - Joanne Greenberg
The Electric Cool Acid Test - Ken Kesey
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
Tropic of Capricorn - Henry Miller
Little Birds - Anias Nin
White Noise - Don Delillo
Wasted - Marya Hornbacher
The Collected Stories - Amy Hempel

*vastly shortened list per space requirements...

Tolstoy's War and Peace for certain. He reveals the thoughts and emotions of his characters in a way that is so clear and sublime you forget they're not a part of your real life. And is there a more quoted novel than Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities?

Zadie Smith's White Teeth. She has incredible empathy and insight into the human condition, and the function of society.

What a great thread!

For me, Watership Down (a novel about courage, leadership, and reality), Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (about life: love, loyalty, betrayal and everything important), Sea of Poppies (a brilliantly written novel loosely based on the Opium Wars and England's role), and One Hundred Years of Solitude (my intro to magical realism, beautifully written and long-remembered).

As a child, I loved, loved The Secret Garden. As a teenager, I read and reread Exodus by Leon Uris and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough
I Know This Much is True, Wally Lamb
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
Summer Of Night, Dan Simmons

...

Mind-blowers, in the order that I read 'em:

Woody Woodpecker and the Meteor Menace - can't remember the author's name
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Twain
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
To Have and Have Not and The Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway
The Friends of Eddie Coyle - George V. Higgins
Of Mice and Men - Steinbeck
The Town and the City - Jack Kerouac
Sometimes a Great Notion - Ken Kesey
Moby Dick - Melville
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
The Call of the Wild - Jack London
The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe

flapperphilosopher said:

The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov-- I'd never heard of it, but was intrigued by the blurb... and wow, what a book, should be much more famous than it is!

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Oh, yes yes. The Master and Margarita blew my mind. A friend recommended White Guard over it, but TMM was the clear winner for me.

I'm going to be that guy and add Infinite Jest, because I'd never before encountered a book I wanted to work so hard for. I know it has its fair share of detractors, but it'll never age for me.

And I'd also like to millionth Watership Down. I re-read it every year, and the story of El-ahrairah still makes me cry like a baby.