Wild Monkeys!

Was anyone else influenced as a child by Stanley Kiesel's The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids? For some reason it came back to me today. I commend it to your attention.

OK, here's a new book meme by me. List the 20-odd books you have personally read that have been most influential in your life. By personally read, I mean that we aren't talking about indirect effects of famous books you haven't read. By influential, I mean intellectually, spiritually, politically, aesthetically, or any other way you might be influenced (e.g., books that have shaped habits or hobbies of yours). I'm not referring to your favorite stories qua stories -- plenty of mine are omitted from the list below. The question here is lasting effect.

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bonobo23's most influential books (alphabetically by author's name)

David Arora, Mushrooms Demystified
T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain
Susie Bright, Susie Bright's Sexual Reality, SexWise, and The Sexual State of the Union
Edward Espe Brown, The Tassajara Cookbook
Pat Califia, Public Sex
Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging
Edward De Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere
Nancy Friday, My Secret Garden, Forbidden Flowers, Men in Love, and Women on Top
Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America
Stephen Gaskin, Amazing Dope Tales
Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
Robert Heinlein, Friday
Ursula LeGuin, Always Coming Home (probably my favorite single book)
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and Jerome Armstrong, Crashing the Gates
George Orwell, 1984
Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma
Ram Dass, Be Here Now
Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars, Blue Mars, and Green Mars (definitely my favorite series)
Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below Zero, and Sixty Days and Counting
Spider Robinson, Mindkiller and Time Pressure
Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Romauer Becker, and Ethan Becker, et al., The Joy of Cooking
Sasha Shulgin and Ann Shulgin, PIHKAL and TIHKAL
Gary Snyder, No Nature
Starhawk, The Spiral Dance
Marco Vassi, The Stoned Apocalypse
Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger
Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, Illuminatus!
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow.

From alese:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded.

Bold the ones you've read; underline the ones you read for school; italicize the ones you started but didn't finish; and place an asterisk beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend, even if you read them for school in the first place.

( Read more... )

From mustela:

Fifty classic SF/fantasy books. The ones I've read are bolded.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov (well, part of it)
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer