There's this popular theme here, "A book that changed my life." So, reading a book actually changed the course of your life? Sounds a little, uh, hyperbolic to me. Well, I'm the last guy in the world who gets to complain about hyperbole, but I'll tell you a book that changed my life. And very nearly ended it.
That book is "Sailing Alone Around the World", by Joshua Slocum, the first man to circumnavigate the world alone in a sailboat; a man who boasted that if stranded alone on a desert isle with nothing but a tree and a clasp knife, he would sail away from it. And I believe him.
Oh. And. He writes as well as he sails.
I read the book in January 1969, dropped out of UT Austin grad school, and used all my money to buy a 26-foot sailboat hull complete with sails and rigging. I had it shipped to a boatyard in Corpus Christi, where I put three thousand pounds of lead into the keel, and built in a cabin with a galley and head, with the plan of sailing it seven hundred miles straight across the Gulf to Isla Mujeres, Mexico. There was this girl there. You know.
Keep in mind that this was long before the days of GPS. For me, navigation was a thirty-dollar plastic sextant, a star chart, a shortwave (receiver only) for accurate time, and a copy of the current navigation tables.