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