Your Ten Books

If you spend much time on Facebook you might have run across this already but I'm really interested in what books influenced the folks on TFP. I cheated a little bit with the Mars series but it turned me towards SF after reading the Hardy Boys series when I was eight and I never stopped.

The rules are:
'List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don't take more than a few minutes, and don't think too hard. It's not about the "right book" or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way. Doesn't have to be in order. Then tag 10 friends and me so I can see your list.'

Farmers Boy by Laura Ingalls wilder
The Glass Teat by Harlan Ellison
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
How To Talk Dirty And Influence People by Lenny Bruce
Rules For Radicals by Saul Alinsky
The Mars Series by Edger Rice Burroughs
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
Telling Lies For Fun And Profit by Lawrence Block

 

Foxe's Book of Martyrs - William Byron Forbush
Hatchet - Gary Paulsen
The Bible (I prefer the NAS or Authorised Version, not a fan of the NIV)
Phantom Tollboth
Foundation Series (first book if I have to choose one) - Asimov
The Hobbit/Lord of the Ring Series - Tolkien
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Don't know about "influenced" but it certainly is unforgettable and sticks in my head despite not reading it for at least 20 if not 25 years.
Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Whole series of books he wrote but this one if I have to choose)
My dad had these on the bookshelves downstairs throughout my childhood and there are compelling read of what can happen with a nightmare government system in place.
88 Reasons why the rapture will happen in 1988 - Edgar C. Whisenant or Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth
Both prime examples of the "imminent rapture" movement, and just one reason I am definitely NOT into premillennialism and think that the idea is bollocks.

 

I responded to this on Facebook last December. Here's what I wrote:

-----

Okay. All of these are books which had a lot of influence on me. At least, these were the first ten I thought of.

[1] Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983)

[2] John Crowley, Little, Big (1981)

[3] Jo Ann Stover, Mr. Widdle and the Sea Breeze (1962)

[4] Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011)

[5] Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices (1989)

[6] Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992)

[7] Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963)

[8] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

[9] Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982)

[10] James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy (1989)

Many thanks to each of these writers.

 

Tough to choose, but these came to mind.

Fiction
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
To Kill a Mockingbird
Exodus
Lonesome Dove
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Non-fiction
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Buried My Heart at Wounded Knee
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

 

My list does tend to shift a bit from time to time. But most of the major players stay the same. Fair warning: I count compendia, series, trilogies, and such as one work. Deal with it.

OK:

1. Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. The Silmarillion, JRR Tolkien
3. The Tanach Mikra'ot Gedolot Edition (Hebrew Bible with numerous classical commentaries on the page), various authors
4. The Talmud, various authors
5. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
6. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
7. The Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas
8. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, authors unknown
9. The Mabinogion or Tain bo Cualinge
10. The Dune pentalogy, Frank Herbert

 

In no particular order,
The Grapes of Wrath ( I hated it in high school though - moved too slowly for me)
To Kill A Mockingbird (read to us by a teacher in 7th grade)
Lord of the Flies
Where the Wild Things Are
The Summerhouse
Flowers for Alernon
Huckleberry Finn
Of Mice and Men
The Bible
The Little Red Hen

 

I should have mentioned the Alexandria Quartet, a tetralogy by Laurence Durrell.

 

Ooh, I could add The Stand to that or as a very close 11. If anything switch that for Lord of the Flies, as I have read The Stand (uncut 1990 version, not the 1986 version) numerous times and still do.

 

I almost had The Stand on my list as well.

 

I had to skip over most of what others posted so not to be influenced. Some of these I read years ago, some I read fairly recently. In decending order of importance:

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, by Betty Smith.

To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.

Papillion, by Henri Charriere.

That Was Then This Is Now, by S.E. Hinton. I read other 'Young Adult' books by Hinton.

---I also read quite a few other 'young adult moral dilemma' books,' but I can't recall any of the authors.---

The Prince Of Tides, by Pat Conroy.

The Road, by Cormac McCarty.

No Country For Old Men, by Cormac McCarty.

Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand. Very honorable mention for Seabiscuit.

Cold Mountain, by Robert Frazier.

 

One of my neighbors praised Foucault's Pendulum so much I finally read it. You're correct, it's not an easy read, it helps if the reader likes to solve puzzles (which excludes me). I really enjoyed The Name of the Rose, and The Prague Cemetery. I haven't started Baudolino, don't know if I ever will.

I saw the movie as a kid, but only read excerpts of the novella in school. I didn't read the full book until fairly recently. I couldn't handle reading it when I was younger, it literally struck way too close to home.

 

hmmm.

for me, off the top of my head, it'd be something like:

Asimov's Foundation
Herbert's Dune
Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land
Heller's Catch 22
Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide
Deighton's Hook, Line, Sinker, Game, Set, Match, Faith, Hope, Charity, and WInter decalogue
McCaffrey's Dragon Books
Julian May's Saga of the Exiles
Pratchet's Equal Rites (the first of his books I read)
Graves' Claudius

Honorable mentions go to Slaghterhouse Five, and Lord of the Flies.

 

Eight of my ten were nonfiction. If I were to focus on fiction, I would start with the two that I included in my original ten (Little, Big and Mr. Widdle and the Sea Breeze), add the Alexandria Quartet as mentioned in my postscript, along with The Casual Vacancy (J.K. Rowling), Snow Crash (Neil Stephenson), Neuromancer (William Gibson), Dhalgren (Samuel R. Delaney), The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon), the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy" (Douglas Adams), and the Harry Potter series (J.K. Rowling). All together, that would make ten items of fiction.

 

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
Dangerous Angels by Francesca Lia Block (super flowery fantasy YA stuff, I read all of her books)
The Catcher In the Rye by J.D. Salinger
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk

 

Flowers for Algernon is a book that I love, but takes me back to my grandmother's decline and death, in my twenties. Chokes me up every time.