Fifteen Books

I've seen this meme in the blogging world and on Facebook, and I've now been tagged in both media, so what the heck. I've seen it introduced in two ways:

The thematic content is fifteen books of great importance - recited without looking them up. Material that sticks, like, forever. Now, tag fifteen friends

or

I'd like to introduce you to some of my friends. The following books (or in some cases, series) have played influential roles in my life. Overall, these are a few of the literary touchstones in my life. Pick one up and enjoy!

In no particular order:

• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Prince of Nothing series by R. Scott Bakker
• The Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
• Walden by Henry Thoreau
• Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn (it probably would have been his Ishmael if I'd read it first, but I didn't)
• Some combination of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil and excerpts from other works by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kauffman
• Any good collection of the poetry of John Keats
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
• Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
• The Chronicles of Amber series by Roger Zelazny
• Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

Ultimately, this is probably a pretty transitory list. This was off the top of my head, but already I'm asking myself, how could I not include

• The Vlad Taltos series by Steven Brust (or his To Reign in Hell or Agyar)
•  John Gardener's Grendel
• The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons
• American Gods by Neil Gaiman
• A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
• Better Off by Eric Brende

And I could go on... I've read over 400 books since I graduated from college 10 years ago, and I don't know how many before that. It sometimes feels like a life lived through books. I can't pick fifteen (and don't even ask me to pick a "favorite" book--I wouldn't know where to begin! Looking over the list, it's a lot of fantasy, a lot of non-fiction, and liberal sprinkling of "literature," which seems intuitively right, all things considered. I could probably come closer on this assignment if I made two lists of 15, fiction and non-fiction, but I've already invested this much time and there's beach living to get to, so I'll leave it at this for now.

I would encourage any and all of my readers to post such a list, even if it's as flawed in the execution as mine! Post it in the comments or link to your own blog there.

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