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

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

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

  4. 4.
    Nineteen Eighty-four
    by George Orwell

  5. 5.
    Hothouse
    by Brian W. Aldiss

  6. 6.
    Dracula Unbound
    by Brian W. Aldiss

  7. 7.
    Farenheit 451
    by Ray Bradbury

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

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

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

  11. 13.
    The Canterbury Tales
    by Geoffrey Chaucer

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

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

  14. 16.
    Catch-22
    by Joseph Heller

  15. 17.
    American Psycho
    by Bret Easton Ellis

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

  17. 19.
    Money
    by Martin Amis

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

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

  20. 22.
    Sociology
    by Anthony Giddens

  21. 23.
    Ring
    by Stephen Baxter

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

  23. 25.
    Dangerous Visions

  24. 26.
    Transmetropolitan Vol 01: Back on the Street
    by Warren Ellis

  25. 27.
    The Liar
    by Stephen Fry

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

  27. 29.
    The Star Rover
    by Jack London

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

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

  30. 32.
    Anton Chekhov's Short Stories (Norton Critical Editions)
    by Anton Chekhov

  31. 33.
    A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems
    by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  32. 34.

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

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

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

  36. 38.
    Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
    by Sigmund Freud

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

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

This is Gareth Stack's list. Only Gareth Stack can edit it. You can make your own version of this list.
Created by Gareth Stack on Nov 12, 2006.
 

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