The 15 Books

The 15 Books That May or May Not Have Influenced Me – I Really Couldn’t Tell You One Way or Another I’ve been reading since the age of two, and the first things I read were the street signs off Woodward Avenue. Woodward, for those who aren’t from southeastern Michigan, is the Urroad, an old Native American trail that became Michigan’s first real road. It spans from downtown Detroit to downtown Pontiac, and is also known as MI-1. That’s probably the most important reading material that’s ever crossed my eyes, or my eyeglasses (I’ve been wearing glasses almost as long as I’ve been reading). But, since this assignment is about books that turned me on, got me to think or simply admired, I’m inclined to post the list of books that I’ve loved, and like Don Giovanni, I will certainly tempt more with my heart’s desires. In No Particular Order: 1: The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery 2: The Importance of Understanding, Lin Yutang 3: Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand 4: The Complete Poems and Plays, TS Eliot 5: Evgenii Onegin (also known as Eugene Onegin), Aleksandr Pushkin 6: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston 7: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez 8: An Incomplete Education, Judy Jones and William Wilson 9: From the Teeth of Angels, Jonathan Carroll 10: Matilda, Roald Dahl 11: Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, various writers, editors and the like 12: The Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe 13: The Classic Fairy Tales, Iona and Peter Opie 14: The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, Jim Miller (editor) 15: The Book of Tea, Okakura Tenshin I could justify my choices, and some are odd (what’s a confirmed liberal doing with a copy of Atlas Shrugged?), but I expect the comments will be plenty interesting.