QotD: Life-Changing Books

What are five books that changed your life? 
Inspired by Ms. Genevieve.

Five, huh?  OK, I'll try.

1.  The ValueTales, which is a series so maybe that's not fair.  I can pick two, but not one.  The Value of Believing in Yourself:  Louis Pasteur, and The Value of Fairness:  Nellie Bly.  Nellie Bly kicked ass.

2.  Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche.  Because this is all frighteningly true.  And the philology involved is pretty impressive, too.

3.  Being and Time by Martin Heidegger.  Because he's right, just so right.  And that has to affect you.

4.  A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin.  Because it taught me something important about the way I want to live.  Is it worth it to hike 500 miles out of your way to see a painting?  Fuck, yeah, it is.

5.  Some book by Martha Grimes, I think it was The End of the Pier.  I don't usually like Grimes that much, and actually I can only remember one thing about the book which was the thing that changed my life.  She keeps quoting from a Wallace Stevens poem, "The Idea of Order at Key West."  It happened that until that time I had not been exposed to any poetry I liked, and so I thought it was all totally gay.  Then I read that poem, and, yeah, it changed my life.  It opened my eyes to a whole new kind of reading.  I love Stevens, and that remains one of my favorite poems of all time, ever.  From that one poem I moved on to all of Stevens, then to WC Williams and Pound, of course, then somehow to Rilke and Baudelaire and so forth.  And when you're talking about Stevens and Rilke, you're talking about some of the most meaningful, dense, and beautiful words ever put to paper.  That has a way of changing your life. 

Damn, that poem still just shakes me.