tqbf wrote:
"Cosmos" and "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynam" probably had a good bit to do with me getting a PhD in chemistry.
Brave New World was a big influence on my politics (this was still during the cold war). I found it infinitely more frightening than 1984. Give me Victory Gin over soma any day.
"A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," Kafka's "The Trial," and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," probably contributed to general life-long existential angst.
Those were all in high school. I don't think my mind's been all that malleable in the years since although I just read "On Bullshit" and think maybe I could adopt it as a manifesto.
I never read "Cosmos" but I have watched the series twice. It definitely affirmed by atheism.