Books that made an impression on me in some way or another, listed according to the age at which I read them. I could tell you what edition I read (or possessed), who recommended them (or where I found them), where I read them, what the weather was like, how and what they changed for me, and perhaps later I will do any or all of these things. For now, though, here is the list:
- Age 9 — Grimm’s Fairy Tales, unexpurgated
- Age 11 — John Steinbeck, East of Eden
- Age 12 — Homer, Odyssey and Iliad
- Age 13 — Voltaire, Candide
- Age 14 — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
- Age 15 — W.W. Horn, The Plan of St. Gall
- Age 16 — Georges Perec, A Void*; Emerson’s Essays; Byron’s Hours of Idleness
- Age 17 — Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
- Age 18 — Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents; Thomas Mann, Dr Faustus; Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West*; Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
- Age 19 — Dickens, Bleak House; Turgenev, The Diary of a Superfluous Man
- Age 20 — Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain; Herodotus, Histories; Virginia Woolf, The Waves; Henry James, Roderick Hudson; E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey
- Age 21 — Henry James, The Ambassadors; Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey
- Age 22 — Don DeLillo, Underworld
* Not read at the time, but they altered my understanding of their respective genres.