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Mental Floss list of the 25 Most Influential Books of the Past 25 Years

Appeared in the March/April 2009 issue of Mental Floss.
1.
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 And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition
by Randy Shilts
  
2. The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale
by Art Spiegelman
  
3. Listening to Prozac: The Landmark Book About Antidepressants and the Remaking of the Self, Revised Edition
by Peter D. Kramer
  
4. Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism
by Temple Grandin
  
5.
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 Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich
  
6. Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
by Jon Krakauer
  
7. The Satanic Verses: A Novel
by Salman Rushdie
  
8. Middlesex: A Novel
by Jeffrey Eugenides
  
9. The Alchemist (Plus)
by Paulo Coelho
  
10. The Easy Way to Stop Smoking: Join the Millions Who Have Become Nonsmokers Using the Easyway Method
by Allen Carr
  
11. A Perfect Spy
by John le Carre
  
12.
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 What Is the What (Vintage)
by Dave Eggers
  
13. On Writing
by Stephen King
  
14. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel
by Haruki Murakami
  
15. The Known World
by Edward P. Jones
  
16.
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 Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone
by J.K. Rowling
  
17.
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 How Proust Can Change Your Life
by Alain de Botton
  
19. The Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe
  
21. Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
  
22. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan/ Heim, Michael Henry (TRN)/ Heim, Michael Henry Kundera
  
23.
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 Beloved
by Toni Morrison
  
25. The Handmaid's Tale: A Novel
by Margaret Atwood
  
26. Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
by Steven D. Levitt
  
27.
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 Eats, Shoots & Leaves
by Lynne Truss
  
28. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
by Malcolm Gladwell
  
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Created by rstrati on Apr 14, 2009.