Have you ever read a book that impacted you in some way? Not just, "I like Dr. Suess," but something deeper.

For example, "The Swan," by Roald Dahl, always stuck with me. Two kids bully another kid and one day the bully gets a rifle. He and his friend tie the poor kid to a railroad track and the kid barely survives by digging himself into the ballast, or the rocks the tracks sit on. Then, they throw him in a lake and shoot a swan near him and shoot him in the leg. He begs them not to but they do. Then the bully cuts the swan's wings off, ties them to the boy, and he basically jumps out of a tree into his mother's backyard. The bully laughs saying he brought the swan back to life.

The boy is taken to a doctor, who cuts the wings off.

I remember reading that as a kid thinking, "What in the world is this?"

It stuck with me every since.

Have any of you read anything like that? I'm curious to see what books stayed with you all this time since your childhood.

When I was in school, in my first year of secondary education (seventh grade in the US?), we were given a special book to read. Said book was a "pocket version" compiling two books from renowned writer Agatha Christie: Thirteen at Dinner and Murder in the Calais Coach (man, the American names are so different from the ones we use here!).

I don't remember for sure, but I think we were told to read just the second book as a mandatory reading, and we even had an exam about it. I was so fascinated at the book that I read the other one as well and decided to read more of Agatha Christie. Besides that key book I still own, I've gone to gather several more, and they are among the very few books I actually read (I've always been more prone to comics and manga).

I think I preserve a few more books from my scholar years, though none is as important to me as the one above. That one still remains the only instance I actually enjoyed a mandatory reading and didn't mind an exam or any kind of homework about it. It also shaped my taste for the detective stories, without it I would probably have never read a book on my own in my early teens.