Books that Changed My Life

[CaddmannQ]

I often feel a bit shortchanged when I read the stories of you fellows going turkey hunting with your dad, or deer stalking the hardwood forests. My pop taught me to shoot, and he gave me guns and ammo, but we never again went shooting together, nor did we ever go hunting.

But we did a lot together. We built things and fixed things, and he gave me all his books. It didn't matter that I was 6 or 7 meandering through a college physics text. I read them as best I could. I still have some of his books. Books were always a big deal for me. I've been affected by many, but one I recall as being particularly influential.

It was titled "How to Repair TV's" and it was wonderfully filled with B&W photos of everything. Before my dad became a computer programmer, he fixed Radar, and knew much of these things. What a boon!

As a kid, I was combing the streets of Duluth, with a wagon, picking up broken TV's for parts or to repair. I scavenged enough stuff in a few trips to build 3 TVs which worked, and may have spent $6 for tubes and solder, and $5 on a 25 watt soldering iron. I gave those TVs to my friends as I found better ones, but I still have a shoebox of vacuum tubes, wrapped in cushions of toilet paper.

I also had a phonograph with about 7 mismatched speakers, mounted in a huge old walnut Magnavox cabinet, with the TV chassis removed.

Anyhow, that one book influenced my entire life. I built sound systems and speakers, and wired cars, and mundane things like lamps and switch boxes.

And I built computers! So now I have the time and money to go shooting or hunting or fishing or whatever.

I just wish Dad was still here to see it all.

 

[ripjack13]

I was never into the technical stuff. But I did like reading animal oriented books. Like "The call of the wild", where the red fern grows, white fang, tawny the mountain lion, those taught me animals are just like us. Just trying to live.
My favorite was call of the wild though. I loved buck. (The charlton heston version of the movie was ok)
And some fantasy books. The lion the witch and wardrobe. (I even have the whole series of them) Splinter of the minds eye. Animal farm was great. Me and my little brain was good. And I really liked the encyclopedia brown books. Those taught me to look for the details, not the big picture.
I spent a lot of time in the library....

 

[John A.]

Funny you should mention missing your Dad too.

Yesterday made 9 years since my Dad passed away. I still think about him nearly every day.

My Dad didn't teach me how to hunt or anything. He got crushed in a roof fall in the mines in 1979 which left him disabled and he didn't trample through the woods a lot. But he did teach me a lot and we fished together a lot.

 

[ripjack13]

I need to find better options than just that "like" button. ....

 

[CaddmannQ]

My dad's been gone since 2002 and Mom since 2017.
My mom was a big reader too, but she was mostly interested in Reader's Digest.
I haven't seen one in many years.

 

[fellmann]

My dad ( may he rest in peace ) was very interested in the Wild West, indians, UFO's and paranormal stuff. He died 2000.
I was about 12 when i started to read / look at the pictures in the books he got - such as Erich von Däniken's "Chariots of the Gods" - That one got me hooked. Thanks dad.. I have learned so much when researching / trying to understand the subject, for the last 30 years...

 

[John A.]

Not sure if it's available there fellmann, but there is a show called Ancient Aliens that comes on the history channel that covers a lot of Erich Von Daniken's stuff. I watch it pretty regularly.

While I don't believe everything is related to aliens, there are a lot of things in the past that we simply don't understand and can't explain. Especially how some of the stone work finish is done.

 

[fellmann]

Not sure if it's available there fellmann, but there is a show called Ancient Aliens that comes on the history channel that covers a lot of Erich Von Daniken's stuff. I watch it pretty regularly.

While I don't believe everything is related to aliens, there are a lot of things in the past that we simply don't understand and can't explain. Especially how some of the stone work finish is done.

I have EVERY episode of Ancient Aliens 14 seasons. But.. IMO.. the series aint as good as it was the first couple of seasons

 

[John A.]

I like the parts that were concentrating on older civilizations. The history aspect of it. Far away locations and many who that had similar beliefs despite likely never having contact with each other. I don't believe in coincidence.

Some of the newer stuff is way out there and hard for me to watch it with a straight face though. I also admit that some of it rubs me the wrong way proclaiming aliens rather than God were responsible for

EVERYTHING.

They can believe in little green men but won't ever acknowledge that God did anything?

That just seems very short sighted and narrow minded.

 

[Sniffler]

I've always been a reader. This is possibly at the top of the list of favorites.


"We don't rent pigs."

Lord of the Rings and the James Herriot books are next. You can see I aren't a scholar.

 

[CaddmannQ]

There was a old story I read that explained all that Chariots of the Gods business in terms of ancient inventions as opposed to UFOs and aliens.

People in the past invented devices and techniques that we have not retained or recovered, or that we simply do not recognize some things for what they are.

Anyhow it was much more likely that we are mistaken about many things than that we have actually been visited by aliens from another planet.

We have no idea how deep the superstitions of ancient peoples ran.

On Easter Island they thought they were the end of the dry land, and they destroyed their entire Island creating huge statues to try and attract their gods (or perhaps other humans) to their Island.

People assume that the huge stitches plowed out on Nazca plain could only be instructions to alien Starships but it's entirely possible these things were for exactly the same purpose.

To attract the Gods and impress them.

Some idiots complain that no one could or would have built something that they could not actually see from their own vantage point.

Any surveyor can tell you that they certainly could, because we do it all the time; and yes, I did have to learn some surveying in college (though I never practiced it professionally.)

People are looking at thousand-year-old Stones claiming they were carved into incredibly complex and smooth shapes when in fact they were simply cast from ancient cement into those complex and Incredibly, impossibly tight shapes.

People today who have never actually done any real heavy physical labor look at things like ancient pyramids and wonder how human beings could have possibly hewn such a thing.

All I can say is, some people have very little imagination. There are some very modern and scientific explanations about how the pyramids were actually built, though they have not necessarily been proven due to large amounts of rejection on the part of the Egyptian authorities.

They are not making enough money off the whole business anymore, so they can't bribe the cooperation that they need from other Egyptians, in order to be successful.

What you stick your hand out like that, everybody finds out that they can do it too.

And what was a handy (and totally corrupt) little money maker for the Egyptian high officials, turns into the trickle-down theory of economics.

 

[CaddmannQ]

. . . Far away locations and many who that had similar beliefs despite likely never having contact with each other. I don't believe in coincidence...

I read Thor Heyerdahl, and what he believed was not in coincidence, but that ancient peoples actually traveled much farther than we believe.

And by God, THOR was an appropriate name for this fellow, because he sailed across the damn oceans in rickety little boats made out of tied Reeds or bamboo.

He almost made it from Africa to South America before they had to tow his waterlogged craft ashore, but if an ancient mariner had had better winds and better luck and a good catch of fish to tide him over, he might have blown across the ocean much nicer than Heyerdahl.

I can't remember the exact names of his books but he sailed the Ra and the Kon-tiki.

 

[CaddmannQ]

I've always a reader. This is possibly at the top of the list of favorites.


"We don't rent pigs."

Lord of the Rings and the James Herriot books are next. You can see I aren't a scholar.

I have never read or seen Lonesome Dove, but it was very well received by my friend.

I have read Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and The silmarillion and farmer Giles of ham and all the rest of that stuff about three times.

Tolkien was a total genius at language and the movie that they made about him , released this year, was pretty impressive.

But I never bothered to learn to pronounce or read the Elvish or runic language of the Dwarfs.

If I'm going to learn another language it is going to be to program a machine to do something that makes money.

I don't think that's quite as much work as what Tolkien did and it pays better.

 

[John A.]

As for reading caddmann, I still enjoy a lot of Samuel Clemens stuff.

He had a rather deep sense of humor that few can appreciate today.

Maybe all these old alien myths were similar because they were made before the continents spread so far apart? Hey, that's what they accredit for native americans all traveling across the land bridge in the Bering straight.

I still think that south American Indians sailed around north east mexico and up into the Mississippi river too. Lots of things that the Cherokee and the south American Indians did were very similar. Like I said, I don't believe in coincidence.

There are lots of stone walls and terraces on our family property.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cherokee+terrace+georgia+mayan&atb=v169-2__&ia=web

 

[CaddmannQ]

II have read much more Dickens than Twain, but I am influenced by both when I write and speak.

But when I think I try to be influenced by Isaac Asimov. I've read about 1/32 of his 200 non-fiction works and essentially 100% of his 400 published fiction works.
Those Winters in the great north woods at the edge of the muskeg were long.

I also read the Holy Bible. Once. Other people read it at me a thousand times. Not so, with Asimov.

He did something so amazing I still am impressed, though he's been dead 30 years.

He started out writing his fiction novels in an unconnected series, linked only by his analytic narrative style and total respect for known science.
He wrote this series and that series and they seemed to be disparate worlds,

But before he died he tied them together in such a clever way that it had seemed planned. But it never was.

Because his stories didn't take liberties with the unknown in any fantastical way, they already bore a rough family resemblance, but he took these hundreds of stories and linked them all into a cosmological genealogy that somehow made them all bits of the same story. The story of Man from the first robots until the (world's biggest frikkin spoiler here so please don't read it until you've read all 200 books) until the robots, or one particular robot, that is, saves mankind from itself by eliminating robots entirely.

 

[CaddmannQ]

@John A.
This a pic of Mark Twain's Cabin (reconstructed) on Jacka$$ Flats.
It's been burned down and re-built a few times. The boards looked quite fresh when we were there in 2009.

This is across the river and up the hill from Angel's Camp where you find the Frogtown Market. I'ts maybe 5' longer than what you see in the photo.

 

[CaddmannQ]

We also rode up there with a group.

 

[CaddmannQ]