Just because you read a book younger does not mean that it has more influence on your life, conscious or unconscious.  A person has to be ready for a book in order for it to influence them. I didn't jump into this because to write about books in my life is to write a very complicated history.  But Carrol's post has made me step back and wonder about the continuing influence of... Freud, perhaps, on our culture.  There is a small sense that the whole idea of a piece of writing "influencing" one's life has a religious flavor about it.  And often these list comparisons have a bit of competitive one-up-manship about them.  The fact is, for reasons we don't know, stories and literary works are "real-life" experiences for human beings.  They don't simply allow us to experience the work but rather they deepen our experiences of human relations.  I don't think that most children under the age of thirteen are ready for this "deepening" through the written word.  This is just a guess and I won't be dogmatic about it.  I read a lot books when I was about eight years old and a lot of poetry good and bad.  The influence was probably next to nothing.  At that age, as far as words were concerned I was influenced by the stories I heard... from my Italian greatgrandmother, from the people at the dinner table, etc.  We have to realize how damn unusual it is that most of us on this mailing list read lengthy pieces of literature before we became adults.  My greatgrandmother never read a whole book until she became an adult and yet her wealth of stories exceeded most people I know.  I think that even with all of the new technologies, oral story telling is far more important and influential than reading, for children under 12, even for those of us who are privileged enough to have learned to read by age 5 or 6.   I read Edgar Allen Poe at eight, short stories and poems, and Sherlock Holmes, and Robert Louis Stevenson...  But I was more influenced by Raymond Chandler and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, which I read at ages 13 and 14, than the books I read at age eight.  And I was influenced by books such as "The Other America" and, Erich Fromm's "Escape from Freedom", and, yes, Marx's "Capital" and Plutarch's lives and "The Prince" which were on a book shelf, (a real book case, the first I knew, in a home!) of a friend of my father's.  These and a few other books (especially Russell's popularization of "Relativity Theory") I read through my high school years, had more influence than the books I was not ready for that I read before hand.   But the story does not stop there.  Trotsky had an extremely detrimental and wonderful influence on me in my college years and probably led me to many stupid life-mistakes, which I feel I helped to correct by coming upon Chomsky's "Towards A New Cold War" and his writings on linguistics after college.  There is no reason why Chomsky should be a correction for Trotsky, but life is strange.  In fact I am still coming across books that change my mind, but in truth I think you have to be a young man or woman in order for any work of art or literature to have real life-changing influence...  Except in matters of religious conversion, of course. But before age twelve I don't care what books I read, they would have had only a very small effect.  I think in my early years I was mostly influenced by movies... good and bad.... Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.... Humphrey Bogart... "The Three Faces of Eve" which I watched at least 7 times at age 6 because I lived in a town that played the same movie twice a day for a whole week.  Oh, well....  Jerry .