Which books have had the greatest impact on the way you think (philosophical-like)?

I reckon Antoine de Saint Exupéry's "The Little Prince" and Dr. Seuss' "Oh the places you'll go!" have gotta be up there.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (all five books)
VALIS by Philip K. Dick
The Principia Discordia
and possibly every Calvin and Hobbes strip I've ever read.

@Danny -- ooh I've never read that but I recently sent a copy to a friend for their birthday. Excellent.

@IceOwl -- All Hail Eris! All Hail Discordja! Her Apple Corps is strong. Always nice to meet a brother discordian.

Dune, The Man Who Never Missed/Matador trilogy, The Deed of Paksennarion, the Prince.

Semiotext[e] USA prolly also had an influence when I was younger.

@garak: it's "everyone poops" by taro gomi.

@electric: OMG I love Everyone Poops!

And CM... Zombie Survival Guide is awesome!

@danny: that book has gotten me through some hard times.

American Psycho

@booknutdc, I've just started if on a winter's night a traveler.
ok... I've opted for greatest impact rather than favorites. There are books I like a lot more, like The Little Prince, like Cosmicomics, like any of the poetry of John Donne, but as far as things I can point to and say -- that changed the way that I think, here's my list right now.

Ways of Seeing (John Berger) and From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Kracauer) -- these were the two books that got me really feeling that I should pay attention in a more analytic way to how I interact with art and movies

The Book of Ruth (the Bible...author? who knows) - I had a child's bible when I was wee, and I always liked the story. The first time I read the real book, I was shocked - mostly by the sexual ploy. But I have never stopped being fascinated by the idea of one person taking on another's religion for the sake of love.

Lynd Ward's silent novel (all woodcuts, no text) Wild Pilgrimage. I can't even articulate what this book has done to me yet -- but it's strong stuff.

Primo Levi's If This Is A Man. Read it in high school, analyzing the hell out of that. In spite of that, it really sank in -- the way Levi goes about it, using the framework of Dante's Inferno to explore his time in a concentration camp.

Jonathan Safran Foer's short story "A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease" I read it when I was twelve, and I'd never encountered such a real depiction of how impossible it is to say the most important things.

The Weird Stories of Zhuangzi. no, they're not actually called that. but they are strange. Makes my brain hurt and makes me giggle too. My kind of philosopher.

I just wiki'd Zhuangzi and I can't believe I haven't heard of him before. He sounds a bit like an eastern David Hume.

ummm.... waaaaaay more fun to read than Hume

huh... (flips through some Hume) I don't remember any of this. I see my notes in the margins, but.... Guess I'll have to do some re-reading there..... little bit embarrassing.

The Acorn People
Mahatma Gandhi in a Cadillac

Oh, and how could I forget - The Satanic Bible

Crime & Punishment, hands down.

If it didn't have that damn epilogue, it might be perfect.

Slaughterhouse Five
The Art Of War
Fight Club
Oh, The Places You'll Go
Super System

@MUPauly: The Art of War - good call. I'll add the Book of 5 Rings.

Pathologies of Power, Paul Farmer.

I mean, to the letter.

"For me, an area of moral clarity is: you're in front of someone who's suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act. "

I guess Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenhait 451 might have also contributed to my philosophy of life, and possibly anything by Hunter S. Thompson that I've ever read. Douglas Adams in general, too, but he is a fellow Discordian.

Zen and the Art of Falling in Love helped me figure out a lot of things, and still does.

I'm not really sure about Roger Penrose's Shadows of the Mind, or the short amount of it that I read, as well as another book I read that was sort of a primer on quantum mechanics and the technology we could potentially build with what we've learned about quantum physics, but I think they helped to cement the current way that I think about just about everything.

I picked up R.D. Laing's "Self and Others" at the Great Glebe Garage sale. R.D. Laing was a Scottish psychiatrist and a critic of modern psychiatry, and his work interests me quite a bit, being a person who has both been a patient of the Canadian psychiatric system and having a mother who has been on antidepressants for several years.

His work consisted of breaking down the old asylum system that basically made psychiatric patients into prisoners not only of an institution, but further prisoners of their own minds. He broke the established concept of mental illness through analysing the behaviour of the families of the patients and discovered that, more often than not, they were the cause of the patients' mental instability, and that putting them back in this situation just made matters worse. He also discovered that, with a minimal amount of talk therapy, most of the patients were not afflicted with what they had been diagnosed with, and could leave the institution they had been trapped in.