Books I think about regularly and why:
Best Bookclub Books - City of Thieves by David Benioff, - A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
Impacted Me in Highschool/College - A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr., - Walden Two by Skinner, B. F.
Books That Made me Laugh Out Loud - The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float by Farley Mowat, - My Old Man and The Sea by David Hays
And now I will likely spend all day thinking about all the other books I have ever read and wonder why I don’t think about them.
I really like this book.
I felt this way about The Catcher in the Rye. I know it’s a controversial book, but I first read it when I was thirteen and it influenced me tremendously as a writer. I mean, Holden is a fucking wreck! I didn’t know protagonists were allowed to be that messy. That was the moment I stopped reproducing every refined voice of classical literature I’d read and starting finding my own voice. And I started writing about people living on the margins who would maybe not be so acceptable in polite society. I don’t know if I would call it the greatest story I’ve ever read. I can think of objectively better stories, but it was certainly one of the most personally influential books I’ve ever read.
Boy, lots of possibilities here.
I, too, found The Lord of the Rings memorable and compelling. I long ago lost track of the number of times I’ve read it through. I used to read it about once a year.
I was blown away by The Odyssey when it was assigned reading in junior high. We got the full Robert Fitzgerald translation, which I devoured. I was also assigned it for a freshman humanities class, and have re-read it multiple times since, to the point that my paperback copy is falling apart. I have a copy of the Robert Fagles translation on both cassette and CD (for some reason, I never found an audiobook edition of the Fitzgerald translation), and I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve listened to it all the way through. I feel similarly about The Iliad (for the same two translators), and have re-read it multiple times. For some reason, the audiobook of Fagles’ translation is grotesquely abridged, which is too bad. But I prefer the Odyssey to the Iliad.
I find I can easily get hooked and re-read Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Day of the Jackal. I like Forsyth’s other books, as well, but none as much ass this one. Again, I’ve lost track of re-readings. Wonderfully told and detailed.
Similarly, I have constantly re-read C.S. Forester’s “Hornblower” series. No other set of sea stories affects me that way – nor O’Brian or Alexander Kent. I like Forester’s other works, too, but the Hornblower books, possibly because he let Hornblower always succeed , or at least come out well, rather than the way many of his other books have pessimistic (if realistic) outcomes. Many of Heinlein’s books have the same effect, including the above-mentioned Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I have three Heinlein books on audiodisc, and re-listen to them frequently.
Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Life on the Mississippi. You can keep your Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn – this is the real Twain.
I asked for and received a copy of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels when I was still in grammar school, and it’s another book I have frequently re-read. I’ve got an Annotated edition, with annotations by Isaac Asimov, which was a great help in understanding several of Swift’s references.
I really enjoyed that, thanks. I don’t recall having read Anderson previously, I’ll have to explore his works. Like a mixture of Twain and Thurber.
Gaiman has written at least one short story and a novella about Shadow Moon, so you can continue a bit more. I am also a big fan of American Gods, my first exposure to Gaiman, and now I’ve read most of his works. I re-read ‘The Ocean at the End of the Lane’ every year.
Bigfoot Wallace is an incredible character, a real-life Texas Ranger whose many adventures have built a huge mythology around him. J. Frank Dobie wrote lots of short stories about that period of Texas history, quite a few about Bigfoot Wallace. Worth checking out.
Hyperion by Dan Simmons (1989, Hugo Award winner).
I’ve read many books but that one really stuck with me.
I’m not sure if this is the answer the OP is looking for, but the two books I have re-read the most over the last 20 years are Confederates In The Attic by Tony Horwitz and Cross Country by Robert Sullivan. Both take me out on the road to meet interesting people and muse about the history and current state of the places they visit.
In the short-story/essay category, and along the same lines are David Foster Wallace’s articles for Harper’s, Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.
This is a difficult thread to answer. I have seen so many books mentioned that I’ve read and love.
But okay, if I have to pick just ONE, it’s going to be To Kill a Mockingbird.
But a novel is so different from a short story. There I have two I can’t decide between. The first is The Man Who Traveled in Elephants, by Heinlein. And the other is True Minds, by Spider Robinson.
And of course non fiction is yet another beast. I have to go with Will and Ariel Durants’ Western Civilization series. Incredibly detailed.
“The Flounder”, by Gunter Grass
This was utterly spellbinding reading.
The Use of Force by William Carlos Williams. It’s a doctor describing a little girl who wouldn’t submit to a tongue depressor. I first read it over 50 years ago but it’s still stuck with me.
Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, an accounting of Shackleton’s failed trans-Antarctic expedition in the early 1900s. After their ship was trapped in pack ice and slowly crushed over a period of months, the crew of 28 men then spent a year surviving in unimaginably harsh conditions and were only able to return to civilization due to an incredible feat of maritime navigation by six men in a highly modified lifeboat, across 800 miles of open ocean in high waves/winds, with icing conditions, to reach South Georgia Island - followed by three of those men engaging in a 26-mile trek across uncharted mountain wilderness to reach a whaling station, from which they were able to mount a rescue mission to collect the rest of their crew, with said rescue mission requiring months to succeed.
And nobody died during the entire voyage.
As this was a formal/planned expedition, they were fastidious about recording daily events in diaries and photographs, resulting a very detailed historical record of all that transpired.
I’ll add a special clarification to the many Lord of the Rings entries, which would be one of mine as well.
Phil Dragash made an unauthorized audiobook of Lord of the Rings where he does all the voices and mixed in Howard Shore’s musical score. It’s the greatest audiobook I’ve ever listened to.
He gave it away free because he did it without rights, but I believe it was pulled down from his site.
I have listened to it twice and have more than once said, “This is the absolute best way to experience Lord of the Rings.”
It is unabridged.
Here it is on the Internet Archive, which apparently is still allowed to have it.