Over on That Other Social Network (at http://goo.gl/ZLnEKC), +DeAnna Knippling tagged me for a meme to list "10 books that have stayed with me, changed my life, or were for other reasons memorable."
In no particular order …
1. The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) – For a book that took me three years of reading the first hundred pages before finally breaking out of the Shire and into the good stuff, I eventually dove in and didn't come up for air for another decade or more. I did maps. I did calendars. I did Quenya and Sindarin vocabulary lists. I stole shamelessly for my D&D campaigns. And to this day, all the flaws in Peter Jackson's epic action adaptations still melt before the sheer giddiness of seeing something that approximates Prof. Tolkien's fantastic world.
2. The Zero Stone (Norton) – Norton's "juveniles" were not only deeply human (so to speak), but also taught me a lot about slowly building a shared world just through terminology and props.
3. The Bible (Anthology) – I'm not noting it here because it saved my soul or something, but because it informed me about my faith, its roots and conflicts and inconsistencies and its content. The Bible is also a cultural touchstone — while you can't casually mention Balaam's Ass any more and have people know what you're talking about, a lot of our metaphors and references and literary imagery — as well as societal norms — derive from the Bible and its various translations. It should be required reading for everyone, not for its religious content but because of its effect on culture, history, and literature.
4. Mere Christianity (Lewis) – While I've fallen out of love with Lewis since discovering his apologetics once upon a time, there's still a lot worthwhile for Christians in his writings, including the idea that you can actually think about your faith, not just passively accept the stories.
5. 1984 (Orwell) – Made me very aware of totalitarianism and the importance of information, language, and thought control. That different aspects of it keep rising to the surface of the news, 65 years later, speaks to its strengths.
6. Operation: Chaos (Anderson) – My introduction to "urban fantasy" decades before anyone actually coined the phrase, as well as featuring a great husband and wife pair of protagonists. I still pull this out and read it every several years.
7. Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) – My intro to Shakespeare, wherein I learned to love what he did with the language, and with history, and I also learned the importance of a good sales pitch.
8. The Stainless Steel Rat (Harrison) – Capers! Scams! Yeah, I'd grown up watching old "Mission: Impossible" reruns, but I had no idea that you could do that sort of thing in a science fiction novel, let alone with such a charming anti-hero as "Slipper Jim" DiGriz. Harrison sort of ran the franchise into the ground, but there was a joie de vivre in the protag here that I never forgot.
9. Searching for Rachel Wallace (Parker) – Wait, I could enjoy a genre besides SF and Fantasy? Inconceivable! Parker's Spenser was my entre into hard-bitten detective tales, the "tarnished white knight," bruiser and intellectual, who saves the innocent (or damn well tries), gets beat up a lot, and bears guilt for his perceived failings.
10. A Wrinkle in Time (L'Engle) – This story is more "magical" than would normally be to my taste, but both the scenes on Earth and (even more) the scenes on Camazotz resonated with me when I first read it, and still do today.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
11. The Puppet Masters (Heinlein) – This, along with Methuselah's Children, came at a time when Heinlein was writing ripping and thought-provoking SF with just enough polemic to be interesting. That polemic, which tends to choke his later novels (as vastly entertaining as they are) taught me both some interesting social and political ideas, as well as some cautionary notes in my own writing.
12. The Caves of Steel (Asimov) – A mediocre mystery, a good "buddy flick" cop partners tale, but a fantastic and memorable setting in the domed City of New York.
13. Children of the Night (Lackey) – My intro to paranormal romance (though it wasn't called that then) as well as modern urban fantasy vampires and witches. My favorite of the three Diana Tregarde tales. They haven't aged well, but the influenced a lot of my reading (and some of my writing) thereafter.
I'm not going to specifically tag anyone for this, because I'm not that kind of guy. But I will say there are a number of my regular correspondents I'd be interested in hearing from.
I'll have to check out Operation: Chaos. Somehow I missed that.
+Kee Hinckley Lots of fun, a high-magic alternative Earth that works a lot like ours … only families buy big magic carpets instead of station wagons (think "Flintstones" with Sorcery instead of Stone Age). She's a professional witch, he's a werewolf who works at an engineering firm, together they fight (supernatural) crime!
The first three stories are short stories Poul Anderson did in 50s-60s; the concluding novella was, I believe, custom written for the book.
He wrote a follow-up novel, Operation: Luna. in the 90s-00s. I never cared for it as much.
There is a lot to admire in Lewis, despite his antiquated views. I particularly like The Great Divorce, A Preface To Paradise Lost, and The Discarded Image.
@David – Agreed. Actually, I love The Great Divorce probably the best of all his works; possibly I should have listed that instead.
Don’t forget Magic, Inc. by Heinlein — although the heavy dose of 1930’s-style business and politics may seem as fantastic as the magic usage to younger readers.
I’d forgotten about “Magic, Inc.” — I actually came across that story fairly late in the game.