My dad stated that one of the key influence to him seeking an engineering career was The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne, where a bunch of people, including a

My dad stated that one of the key influence to him seeking an engineering career was The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne, where a bunch of people, including an engineer, get stranded on an island after escaping a situation on a balloon and caught in a storm. The engineers, thanks to one of the character's on-time watch, and some solar observations, which are described in the book, calculates their latitude and longitude so that they can send messages and guess at their chances if they build a boat (one of the character was a navigator). Many characters have useful skills, but the engineer really shines. At one moment he leads the people into a geological expedition to find interesting chemicals and ends up doing explosives so that they can dig a good stone shelter. That was written in the 19th century with the specific purpose of getting kids interested into acquiring knowledge and it was a blast. A bit sad it states wrong things that were considered true at the time (namely, that land masses form from the accretion of coral) but that's actually an excellent lesson in the process through which science states hypothesis that are sometimes wrong in order to find the truth.