The Most Influential Books I’ve Read So Far in My Life
A few months back upon the death of Philip Roth, Open Culture published a list of books that he said had influenced him the most and when he first read them, and I’ve decided to do the same. His list is fifteen books long, but I’ve never been one to shy away from less when more feels right, so I’ve listed twenty-five.
My standards for what I consider to be “influential” is anything that:
a) Works I continue to think about in daily life years after reading them.
b) Works that I feel inspired me to be a a writer and to keep on writing.
c) Works that I desire to hold my own work up to, even if in practice I fall well short of them.
I was originally going to add a comment for each work, but I know that such a thing would quickly spiral out of control, so I’ve just made a straight list. (Feel free however if you wish to ask a question about any of them.)
Ranked by age of reading them, there are:
The Mennyms by Sylvia Waugh, age ten
Nineteen-Eighty Four by George Orwell, age eleven
The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, age twelve
Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick, age thirteen
Mort by Terry Pratchett, age thirteen
Animal Farm by George Orwell, age fourteen
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, age fourteen
Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick, age fifteen
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett, age fifteen
Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut age fifteen
Memoirs Found in a Bathtub by Stanislaw Lem, age sixteen
The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker, age seventeen
The Poor Bastard (graphic novel) by Joe Matt, age seventeen
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Zizek, age nineteen
[The aforementioned “Dark Ages” period.]
Utopia by Thomas More, age twenty-three
“Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Jorge Luis Borges, age twenty-three
The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton, age twenty-three
The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot, age twenty-three
Forty Stories by Anton Chekov, age twenty-four
Dubliners by James Joyce, age twenty-four
Post Office by Charles Bukowski, age twenty-four
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, age twenty-four
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut, age twenty-five
Ask the Dust by John Fante, age twenty-five
Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison, age twenty-five