Interesting. I found My Ishmael was the weirdest book I ever read. Glad your journey was made successfully all the same. I was lucky to be born before the cult of popular opinion became all pervasive so knowledge from many books steered me along. My parents provided a very large, mostly non-fiction,...

i have heard that Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" is like that but i've yet to read it

Ishmael also had a big impact on me at a similar age. I gifted it to my younger sister w a lengthy note on the inside cover that she still has and I read once in a while. Another book for me at that time was the Tao of Pooh.