Gareth Stack's "Books That Have Influenced Me"

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They’re not my favorite books, though many would make that list too. Nor are they representative of what I’ve read – I spent most of my childhood immersed in science fiction; and most of what I read these days is digital; much too, of the writing I consider influential, is in the form of song lyrics. But each book changed how I saw the world.

It’s a list as significant for what it leaves out as for what it includes; there’s no Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, no Salinger or Mailer, no D.H Lawrence or Virginia Wolfe, and there’s (god forbid) no Ernest bleedin’ Hemmingway. It’s an embarrassingly clichéd list, and incomplete, both due to faulty memory and the huge degree of ephemeral journal articles, reports, blog posts and news print excluded by definition.

  1. 1.
    On the Road (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)
    by Jack Kerouac

    Drag me to re-order


  2. 2.
    The Social Contract (Penguin Great Ideas)
    by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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  3. 3.
    The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
    by Steven Pinker

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  4. 4.
    Nineteen Eighty-four
    by George Orwell

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  5. 5.
    Hothouse
    by Brian W. Aldiss

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  6. 6.
    Dracula Unbound
    by Brian Wilson Aldiss

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  7. 7.
    Farenheit 451
    by Ray Bradbury

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  8. 8.
    Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Canongate Classics)
    by Alasdair Gray

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  9. 10.
    No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs
    by Naomi Klein

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  10. 12.
    Time's Fool: A Tale in Verse
    by Glyn Maxwell

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  11. 13.
    The Canterbury Tales (Penguin Classics)
    by Geoffrey Chaucer

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  12. 14.
    The World According to Garp (Modern Library)
    by John Irving

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  13. 15.
    A Scanner Darkly
    by Philip K. Dick

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  14. 16.
    Catch-22
    by Joseph Heller

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  15. 17.
    American Psycho
    by Bret Easton Ellis

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  16. 18.
    The Rules of Attraction
    by Bret Easton Ellis

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  17. 19.
    Money
    by Martin Amis

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  18. 20.
    Bright Lights, Big City
    by Jay Mcinerney

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  19. 21.
    Dune, 40th Anniversary Edition (Dune Chronicles, Book 1)
    by Frank Herbert

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  20. 22.
    Sociology
    by Anthony Giddens

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  21. 23.
    Ring
    by Stephen Baxter

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  22. 24.
    Lolita (Everyman's Library Classics)
    by Vladimir Nabokov

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  23. 25.
    Dangerous Visions

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  24. 26.
    Transmetropolitan Vol. 1: Back on the Street
    by Warren Ellis

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  25. 27.
    The Liar
    by Stephen Fry

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  26. 28.
    The Picture of Dorian Grey
    by Oscar Wilde

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  27. 29.
    The Star Rover
    by Jack London

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  28. 30.
    Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
    by Richard Bach

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  29. 31.
    Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (New Directions Book)
    by Wilfred Owen

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  30. 32.
    Anton Chekov's Short Stories (Norton Critical Edition)
    by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

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  31. 33.
    A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems (New Directions Paperback No. 74)
    by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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  32. 34.

  33. 35.
    ?
    Forty Thousand in Gehenna
    by C. J. Cherryh

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  34. 36.
    ?
    The Earth Book of Stormgate
    by Poul Anderson

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  35. 37.
    Rendezvous with Rama
    by Arthur C. Clarke

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  36. 38.
    Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
    by Sigmund Freud

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  37. 39.
    The Magician's Nephew Color Gift Edition (Narnia)
    by C. S. Lewis

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  38. 40.
    The Last Battle (paper-over-board) (Narnia)
    by C. S. Lewis

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Created by Gareth Stack on Nov 12, 2006.
 

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