This was actually the first book that I thought of upon seeing the question. The Brothers Karamazov was the first… I don’t know what to call it, classic or perhaps intellectual book that I read when I was in high school and it got me out of the habit of reading nothing but sci-fi books. I still consider it to be among my favorite novels.
The Demon Haunted World is also a major one for me.
Not sure that they fall under the strict category of books but I have read both Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and The Essays of Percy Bysshe Shelly enough times that I can quote fairly accurately from both.
I have a lot. I was one of those precocious children who knows far too much about the world from reading and not nearly enough from actually experiencing things.
Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories
Russel Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child
Little Women - Gawd, I was Jo, weren’t we all?
Austen - all of them, but I had a special love for Elinor Dashwood, and always related to her quiet longing
Dumas - My grandfather’s editions, which I still have. I read the entirety of the Three Muskeeters series of novels, and then La Reine Margot, repeatedly in high school and college. For sheer force of emotion there is NOTHING like reading the original novel and then working your way through to the pain and loss and disaster in Twenty Years After and The Man in the Iron Mask. When I was done reading them at sixteen, I felt like I was sixty and had seen all the hopes of youth crushed.
Lolita - I would read it before class to try to scandalize my high school English teacher, which was kind of dumb, and then I kept reading it because… wow. I have a battered copy that I bought to replace the battered copy I had to give back to Mum. A non-battered copy just doesn’t seem right.
Catch-22 - Heller blew my tiny teenage mind. It’s just so fucking heartbreaking, and yet I couldn’t stop laughing.
There are other bits and pieces that haunt me. Guy De Maupassant’s story The Necklace still makes me want to build a freaking time machine and go kick his ass for writing it. Oooh. I hate that story with a passion, and I don’t appear to be able to let it go, so I guess it’s part of the furniture now. William Gibson gets me not specifically for any one book, but for colouring my sense of style and desire with all the luscious cyberpunk worldbuilding.
Chills, you give me chills. Although* Black and Blue Magic* has to be my favorite Keatley-Snyder, but The Egypt Game . . . wow, alltime masterpiece.
Anyway, mine, inevitably leaving some out:
Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker
Halldór Laxness: Independent People
Knut Hamsun: Hunger
Sigrid Undset: Kristin Lavransdatter
Pär Lagerkvist: The Dwarf
Charles Dickens: David Copperfield
Ursula K. LeGuin: Four Ways to Forgiveness
. . . that’s trying to limit myself to one book per author, although all of these authors appear on my unedited lifelist many, many times.
These are the ones I can think of, just off the top of my head:
The Harry Potter books, all 7 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Oathbound trilogy by Mercedes Lackey (wish I was Tarma, but turned out more like Kethry, only without her powers) Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler Women who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Her prose gets a bit precious at times, but the underlying message is what counts, to me. Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. I wonder if they’ve made a manga version of it yet?
Idlewild, let me know once that time machine is up and running; I’ll be happy to hold Guy de Maupassant down while you kick his ass, and then I’ll stomp on whatever’s left of him when you’re done. I’m still mad at him for “The Necklace” and “A Piece of String.” :mad:
Dune - Frank Herbert
Flowers For Algernon - Daniel Keyes
1984, Animal Farm and Keep The Aspidistra Flying - George Orwell
Stranger In a Strange Land - Heinlein
Ecclesiastes
Marcus Mote in God’s Eye was brilliant. Had a copy once but it got stolen and haven’t read it since but the Moties still linger.
All of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Every one, since our school “library” had little else on its shelves. “A Princess of Mars” was the first scifi I ever read. Marvelous stuff.
Little Women. Anne of Green Gables. A naughty “Kitty”. The Little House books.
Jane Eyre. Pride and Prejudice, then the rest.
Georgette Heyer, I think “The Grand Sophy” was the first one I read.
Dickens: Great Expectations. Thackeray: Vanity Fair. Trollope: The Warden.
John O’Hara: The Doctor’s Son and other stories.
The Lord of the Rings. I read it first in 1966, when I was 22, and I’ve read it 3 or 4 times a year since then.
Alice Munro: The Lives of Girls and Women.
Kristin Lavransdattir.
And on forever, since I still read 2 or 3 books a week, week in and week out.
The Egypt Game is fabulous. So is almost anything by Elizabeth George Speare, epsecially Calico Captive and The Witch of Blackbird Pond.
This is a very interesting list. So many different genres, and such different favourites.
Oh, I should have included The Left Hand of Darkness. And The Seven Storey Mountain.
I’m glad I have company in the Great Guy de Maupassant Ass Kicking Adventure. Somehow avoided reading “A Piece of String”, on googling the synopsis, it seems I should be thrilled by that, but he’s still for it.
Two other favorites, although I read these later in life than the ones I mentioned earlier: Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon.
Samuel R Delany’s Babel 17. Another one of those that catch you as a teenager and stay the course.
Ann McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series. Whatever you can say about the quality and style of the writing, Pern and its dragons are embedded as a permanent part of my memory.
Zeke N. Destroi, as you say it is the same with the Moties - once met not forgotten!
This is fascinating in the range of tastes shown. Has anybody compiled the results? My - totally non-scientific - feeling is that Heinlein has the most individual nominations and that F & SF in general have a slight predominance. Is this right?
Anybody care to speculate on whether - if there are more SF books than any other genre - this says something about Dopers or if is something to do with the worlds F & SF writers create?
A lot of what I read in my teenage years has already been mentioned, but I’d like to add these:
Here be Dragons by Sharon Penman
Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books
I read a tremendous amount, from a very early age - my mother used to despair of me ever having real friends when I was a kid because I’d spend so much time in my room with a good book or three. It finally reached a point in the long summer holidays when I was banned from going to the library more than three times a week!
If you mean the passage where Shevek describes trying to comfort the dying man who was burned so badly he couldn’t be touched, then we agree on one of the most important.
Some of the others -[ul][li]The Bible, especially the Gospel of Matthew[]Pretty much everything C.S. Lewis ever wrote, especially The Chronicles of Narnia[]Beat to Quarters, by C.S. Forrester[*]A novel called The Sun Destroyers, which was my first conscious experience of philosophical science fiction[/ul][/li]
Regards,
Shodan
So many good ones here, I have a reading list to last me until 2009!
For me,
Stephen Donaldson - Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, both sets. I love the flawed and scared hero, just hits with me.
LoTR - Not the Hobbit tho, never liked that book
War of the Twins - Weis and Hickman. I read these in my teen years, and they have just stuck with me.
The Belgariad - Not well written I will grant you, but I was 11 when I read the first book, and it was wonderful. I think when I read them I remember more about my own youth and innocence then anything else.
