I was recently tagged in a challenge to list out ten books that changed me or that I carry with me or some such nonsense. I thought of the following 21 – I present them in numerical order but in reality they could be in any order as they are all books that at one time or another I’ve read more than once, they changed my life, turned me on – made me want to be a better, more well rounded round person.
1. god is not Great – Christopher Hitchens
2. Middlesex – Jeffery Eugenides
3. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Persig
4. Tao te Ching – Lao Tsu
5. Moby Dick – Melville
6. The Picture of Dorain Grey – Oscar Wilde
7. Desolation Angels – Kerouac
8. Howl – Allen Ginsberg
9. Any book by Federico Garcia Lorca
10. Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame – Bukowski
11. Malcolm X – Malcolm X
12. the Singing Mouse Stories – Emerson Hough
13. Miles – Miles Davis
14. The Complete Poems – John Berryman
15. Ariel and other poems – Sylvia Plath
16. Hell’s Angel – Sonny Barger
17. the Complete Calvin and Hobbes – Bill Waterson
18. Symposium – Plato
19. Animal Farm and 1984 – Orwell
20. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – D Adams
21. The Razors Edge – Somerset Maugham
I should also add:
22. Paradise Lost 23. Ovid’s Metamorphosis 24. the Trial 25. nearly anything by Shakespeare but specifically his sonnets I guess and the list could really go on and on and on and on.
the platitudes of willful resemblance 