By far the most influential books in my life were 50 to 100 books, not one of which I remember, that I read when I was seven or eight, the books through which I discovered that I was a reader. In comparison to those books _The Winters Tale_, _War and Peace_, _Capital_ etc. are so much trivia. From the years under 12 I remember only two texts the content of which influenced me, and which continue to serve to this day as powerful metaphors. One was the last page of an episode of _The Human Torch_ (a comic book of the early '40s) and the story of a man with a wagonload of coconuts in my third-grade Elson-Gray reader.
The next set of influential books were also quite marginal texts, marginal in one of two ways: books by authors who were themselves marginal or worse and marginal books by authors who were not on the whole marginal. Several were by a truly abominable writers. What these books did was either to tell me what I had already been thinking but didn't know I was thinking or to introduce me to the existence of new realms of knowledge to explore. The books were Howard Fast, _Citizen Tom Paine_, Bertrand Russell, _History of Western Philosophy_, Upton Sinclair, the Lanny Budd Series, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, _Heavenly Discourse_, somebody or other, a biography of Bismarck, H.G. Wells, Outline of World History, and (ugh) Will Durant, Story of Philosophy.
These are the kind of books, I suspect, differing for each, that introduced people to reading and to worlds of reading, and that were far more influential on their lives than any of the heavyweight books that gradually get interspersed with such works.
Carrol