Book bucket challenge (a double barrel)

I just heard about this through a Toronto Star piece (sorry if it is behind a paywall).

The basic idea is to list 10 books that deeply influenced you and that you would recommend to others.  As far as I can tell, there are no specific age limits, and while it is true many of our most influential books are ones we read as children, that doesn't have to be the case.  I also don't want to tie it too strongly to books that "changed my life," as that may mean sticking to books that are too overtly philosophical.  This may be something I return to from time to time, and indeed, perhaps I should add a date anytime I update the list (rather than editing it silently).

On a somewhat related topic, someone mentioned that many of the critical darlings of today (particularly of the New Yorker set) will have fallen from fashion at the end of the century, which got me to thinking about literary canons and the fact that today's literary landscape seems particularly fragmented.  I do think a fair number of the 20th Century foreign authors I read have made it into translation and will probably still be remembered (particularly if they were republished by NYRB Press). So that would certainly include von Rezzori, Bulgakov, Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, Mahfouz, I.B. Singer, Narayan, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie (ok, so the last three aren't really being translated into English but they do write primarily about non-Western cultures).  I am not entirely sure about Irène Némirovsky; she's got a compelling and tragic back-story, but will it resonate in another 85 years?

It's so hard to predict if times will be so terrible that escapist fiction is the order of the day, or if those future readers obsessively peruse our dystopian books and books about ecological disasters and wonder why we mostly sat around on our asses and let the world burn up.

Anyway, after I gave it some thought, I decided that of the US or British (or Canadian) authors from the second half of 20th Century or early 21st Century, the ones that would still be discussed at century's end were probably Don DeLillo (esp. White Noise), Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, probably Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro (but only in the context of a few stories that get anthologized), maybe Muriel Spark, possibly Doris Lessing (though her best work is over 50 years old already).  It's possible that Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible will resonate more strongly through the years as conflicts between the developing world and Western nations increase (most likely anyway). I suspect there are some who are still in circulation that maybe shouldn't be (looking at you, Jonathan Franzen). David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Lethem might have some readers but probably not a very significant following compared to today.  It's so tough, because most of the writers before then that I read already rose to the top as it were, so it is extremely likely that Fitzgerald and Faulkner and Willa Cather will still be read (even outside of university courses) whereas much of what I read now hasn't passed any kind of longevity test.  What I do tend to think is that the urban writers will speak more to future readers and that these future readers will generally be fairly alienated from rural life.  On the other hand, some people will read the "country" writers just for a window into that world, but that may be a minority position.  Very hard to say.

I think I have come up with my list of 10 books that I found powerful and influenced my thinking in one way or another.  I believe I would still recommend all 10 (I hope I have it narrowed down to 10 -- let's see).  I'll list them in roughly the order I came across them.

Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Edwin Abbott - Flatland
Isaac Asimov - I, Robot (I read a lot of science fiction as a teenager)
Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis and Other Stories
Ivan Turgenev - Fathers and Sons
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths (also A Personal Anthology -- or cut to the chase and get Collected Fictions)
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities 
Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot

That's already 10!

I need at least 10 more:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon
Adrienne Rich - The Fact of a Doorframe
Anne Sexton - Complete Poems
Donald Barthelme - City Life (or The Dead Father but really just go get Sixty Stories) 
Raymond Carver - Cathedral (or the Collected Stories from Library of America)
Don DeLillo - White Noise
Timothy Findley - Not Wanted on the Voyage (need at least some CanCon on the list!)
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide (this is the most recent addition to the list, while not as overtly philosophical as Life of Pi, I think it is some ways more meaningful)

I'm sure this will change, and I almost left an empty spot, just to signify the impossibility of the task.  (Just like some rune sets come with a blank rune.)  But they are a pretty solid 20 to start with.  Feel free to add your nominations in the comments.

And a few of these are particularly dear to my heart.  I've actually given away Invisible Cities and The Master and Margarita to some of the junior modellers I've worked with over the years (having picked up a bunch of remaindered copies one year -- I think I am down to one left).  I even ordered a few copies of Borges' Collected Fictions to give away when I left RAND, but that was a special case.

In some cases, I would recommend the more complete version, particularly for short stories or even poetry, but this isn't how I first was introduced to these authors.  It is also the case that something more compact may have more impact, particularly on somebody just starting out on a (life)long journey of appreciating books.  I only put one play on the list, as I generally do think they need to be seen to be fully appreciated, but Waiting for Godot was so radical and it did influence me in several ways (I already told the story of how my Senior Honors English teacher had us do a live reading of this in place of our final exam).  I think in a week or two, I will put together a list of the best plays -- perhaps 10 of the ones I consider the most intelligently constructed on the page and 10 productions that have stayed with me all through the years (some might be quite surprising!).

I am tempted to include at least one non-fiction book on the list, but most are a bit too specialized.  I also was tempted to include Thoreau's Walden, but the truth is, while I find much that is admirable about it, it never influenced me that much.  I certainly never wanted to stop being a city boy -- or to slow down.

Now there are a few books that are tempting to throw on the list that skew more towards children, such as The Little Prince or The Phantom Tollbooth, but the truth is that I came to both of those pretty late, and I wouldn't say I was that influenced by them.  Still, both are great books.  Now Charlotte's Web is a more serious contender, and perhaps that will sneak into the first list, particularly if I decide that my knowledge of the Three Laws of Robotics never really came in handy.  But by the same token, I never needed to know how to deal with farm animals!  I probably will have to work Orwell's 1984 onto the list, as that has remains a powerful and depressing vision of the society we are creeping towards and have essentially become.

But rather than making any changes, I'd rather take a week and let some of those omitted books start creeping their way back into my consciousness, asking for a place somewhere on the list.  (I suspect in the end I will cheat and I'll pull the poetry off into its own special list and free up a couple of spaces at least.)