15 Books

I've succumbed to yet another Facebook meme that has gone rabid. This one can be basically called 15 Books. You are supposed to choose 15 books that you love, or that had a major influence on your life. It was a very difficult task for me, given how much I enjoy reading, but here is the list I've come up with:

1. The Lord of the Rings | J.R.R Tolkien
2. Dune | Frank Herbert
3. The Sandman Graphic Novels | Neil Gaiman
4. The Passion | Jeanette Winterson
5. Housekeeping | Marilynne Robinson
6. Atonement | Ian McEwan
7. Disgrace | J.M Coetzee
   
8. The Remains of the Day | Kazuo Ishiguro
   
9. The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald
   
10. The Things They Carried | Tim O'Brien
11. In Cold Blood | Truman Capote
    
12. King Lear | William Shakespeare
13. Ex Libris | Anne Fadiman
    
14. A Wrinkle in Time | Madeleine L'Engle
    
15. True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle | Avi

Two books that probably influenced me greatly but which are too embarrassing to list: The Firm by John Grisham (it was the very first "adult" novel I ever read after I picked it up off my mother's shelf) and Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer (I read through the night trying to finish it, fell asleep, woke up around lunch and carried on where I had left off).

Near Misses: A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes, Practical Ethics by Peter Singer, Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George, Bartholomew and the 500 Hats by Dr Seuss, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisevitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn