It’s
easier than the Ice Bucket Challenge, that’s for sure. Less wet, anyway. And
less cold.
Sandra Heska King tagged me on Facebook.
And it’s clearly one of those Facebook things. The question: What 10 books have most influenced you?
The
easy answer (and the most Christian-ly correct one) would be to start the list
with the Bible. And in my case, I would say that’s true.
After
the Bible, one book immediately – and I mean immediately – came to mind.
Although
I think it would be more correct for me to list the authors who influenced rather
than individual books (ask my wife; I tend to read clusters of books by authors
I like).
Here’s
my list, in no particular order. And I’ll stick to books. I’ll note at the end
which one of them first popped into my head. (And the number of the books in the list are actually slightly more than 10.)
The
Hobbit
/ The
Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.
October
Light
by John Gardner.
The
Source
by James Michener.
David
Copperfield
/ Great
Expectations by Charles Dickens.
The
Screwtape Letters
by C.S. Lewis.
The
Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes.
Augustine
of Hippo
by Peter Brown.
Don
Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes.
The
Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Conner, edited by
Sally Fitzgerald.
The
Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner.
The
Gulag Archipelago
and The
First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Conversation
in the Cathedral
/ The
War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa.
And
the one that immediately popped into my head when I read Sandra’s Facebook
post?
Don Quixote.
What
about you? What 10 books would you say have most influenced you?
Top photograph by George Hodan via Public
Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
