[Please enjoy this lightly updated post from the WordCount archives! – Michelle]
Awhile back, friends invited me to join a Facebook challenge to list 10 books that influenced me. The trick is not to think about it too much and share the first titles that come to mind.
How’s an English major, freelance writer, and life-long reader supposed to narrow a list of cherished books down to 10?
Here’s what I came up with, along with why I picked what I did. Many of these titles evoke a specific memory or moment in my life. When I could find them, I included an image of the book jacket of the edition that I read:
The Once and Future King
I read this for a high school junior year literature class with an awesome teacher who taught me how to write a term paper.
The Great Gatsby
For the last paragraph alone.
Paradise Lost
This makes the list because my college professor Dr. Sawaya was hot, and not just because he was so damn smart. It was one of my first experiences with explicating a classic text.
Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead
I consumed this in late-night reading jags in my dingy grad school apartment in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when I should have been working on my master’s thesis. Everybody has an Ayn Rand phase, don’t they?
A Tale of Two Cities
My first time backpacking through Europe, this book was my companion for a few rainy days in Austria, and the start of my love for a certain Mr. Dickens.
Possession
A.S. Byatt’s romantic novel is a masterpiece. It was also the impetus for the start of a book club I joined in 1994, left when I moved to Oregon, and rejoined for a time during Covid. I read the end sitting in my car in the Orange County Register parking structure before work one day bawling my eyes out.
I’ve Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots
If you don’t know southern California novelist Susan Straight, you need to read this. And Highwire Moon.
Cold Mountain
One of those books that you have to force yourself through the first 50 or 60 pages and then…..wow. The Odyssey retold in the hills of North Carolina. And so much better than the movie.
Atonement
I hadn’t reached the ending by our book club met to talk about it — and we never avoided talking about endings because someone hadn’t finished. The ending still blew me away. So many good books start well but end poorly. This one doesn’t disappoint.
Stones for Ibarra
Heartbreakingly beautiful short stories set in Mexico that Harriett Doerr published as a first-time novelist when she was 74. There’s hope for me yet.
The Power Broker
Robert Caro’s groundbreaking portrait of New York public works powerhouse Robert Moses; a study in in-depth journalism that makes a difference.
The Barbarians at the Gate
This book made me want to be a newspaper business reporter. This real-life Wall Street mergers and acquisitions thriller that came out in 1989, around the same time as two fictional takes on the same subject, Tom Wolfe’s novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, and the movie, “Wall Street.”
On Writing Well
I’ve blogged about this one, by William Zinsser. It’s one of my top picks for books on the art and craft of writing, along with one-time WSJ writing coach William Blundell’s now out-of-print classic The Art and Craft of Feature Writing, and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.
And if I could add to the list: Pride and Prejudice, The Education of Henry Adams, The Scarlett Letter, Ethan Frome, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Sophie’s Choice, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, The Signature of All Things, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Katherine Graham, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, The White Album, East of Eden, The Sun Also Rises……