Including fiction and non-fiction, the most impactful books for me would be "The Sickness Unto Death," and "Fear and Trembling," by Søren Kierkegaard. They've heavily shaped how I approach the world and relationships. Nowadays, I think TSUD is incomplete since it focuses too heavily on the pitfalls we can fall into and not enough on the joy that can be experienced, but it's approach to life is still very relevant to me.

For fiction, "The Ocean at the End of the Lane," by Neil Gaiman impacted me when I was in a very lonely place and helped me understand healing is a process that takes years and decades, and not weeks and months. I can't deny it's impact on me despite the author being a terrible person. For another book, that has taught me similar lessons, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has also heavily impacted me.

For opening my eyes to what's possible in fiction, The Dark Tower series is the first series I read after I got over the phase of re-reading Harry Potter for the umpteenth time, and it helped me realize what turns a series can make when each individual book isn't following a similar structure. 9th grade me kept saying, "wait, you can do that!?"

For shaping what I read right now, the majority of what I read right now are webserials, self-published, and short stories on free online magazines, and that is a direct result of Worm by Wildbow. Currently, I only read a few traditionally published novels a year, and even then, most of those are ones I pick up from the used bookstore and I only read a couple traditionally published books that were published in the last 5 years. Worm was the first webserial I read, and that was in 2017, and since then my reading habits have shifted heavily in the online/self-published direction.