The Little Prince
A Wrinkle in Time
Welcome to the Monkey House
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
The Giving Tree (still hate that guy)

I tried not to think about it too much but number five was Wittgenstein, then I thought Broom of the System, then it was Emmett Otter's Jug Band Christmas, then I just had to shut it down. Ask me in 20 minutes and i'd spit out five totally different books. If it was stories, it may be more specific.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner
The Crying of Lot 49
The Great Gatsby
Dancing Girls

The Beautiful and Damned, by Fitzgerald
The Witches of Eastwick, by Updike
The Robber Bride, by Atwood
The Swimming Pool Library, by Hollinghurst
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Carroll

Musashi by Yoshikawa Eiji
Clear and Simple as the Truth by Francis-Noël Thomas & Mark Turner
The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh
J R by William Gaddis
A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Scent of Magic by A. Norton
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by D. Adams
Black Jewels series by A. Bishop
The Raven Ring by P. Wrede
Fool's Run by P. McKillip

Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson (recently ruined by television)
A London Family by Molly Hughes
The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope (actually you could fit a lot of other Trollope novels in that slot)
All Jane Austens
We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich

It's not so much that these books have stayed with me as that I keep rereading them. I've read all of them at least 15 times.

Never Let Me Go--Kazuo Ishiguro
Unformulated Experience--Donnel Stern
Be Here Now--Baba Ram Das
The Line of Beauty--Alan Hollinghurst
Special Topics in Calamity Physics--Marisha Pessl

Goudsblom - Nihilisme en cultuur - meant a lot to me at some point in my life
Mulisch - De ontdekking van de hemel - the architectural dreams and the exuberance of intellectual adolescent friendship
W F Hermans - Essays - as an adolescent I enjoyed his acerbic writing. later not so much
Kraft-Ebing - Psychopathia Sexualis - read this in highschool. strange...
Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano - somehow this novel intrigues me. The movie isn't bad either.
Gerard Reve - De Avonden, Werther Nieland - wonderful use of language
Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
Joris-Karl Huysmans - Là-bas - turns out that fin-de-siècle had a lot in common with heavy metal
Edgar Allan Poe - Stories
Anthony Burgess - Earthly Powers
Maria Dermoût - De tienduizend dingen - strange elegiac language
Marguerite Yourcenar - Mémoires d'Hadrien

First five I've thought of (which of course could change at any given moment):

Love in the Time of Cholera by Marquez
Notes From the Underground by Dostoyevsky
Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver
13 Stories by Eudora Welty
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass

Notes From the Underground by Dostoyevsky

Ha! "I am a sick man. I am an angry man. I am unattractive. I think there is something wrong with my liver." Such a perfect opening.

Hugh, if I ever make it up to NYC (and I will eventually, hopefully sooner than later) I'm gonna demand that we hang out. I think we'd get along very, very well.

I agree, we certainly would. Only, it would have to be within the next month or so. After that, we would have to meet in Japan, which would also be awesome.

Nice, Hugh! I hope that's a very happy return for you.

Also, I've bookmarked The Miracle of Mindfulness for reading soon. I think it might could be *very* beneficial.

Thanks, ufez!

It's no exaggeration to say that reading the first few chapters -- over and over again until I learned to breathe -- changed my life.

As a matter of fact, it took me about three years to read any further. It seemed worth it to master the basics before going on.

Thich Nhat Hanh is a human treasure.

The Dubliners--Joyce
Ulysses--Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man--Joyce
The Stranger--Camus
The Plague--Camus

To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
The Dark is Rising Series - Susan Cooper (my introduction to fantasy as a ?9 year old. An excellent one.)
A Soldier of the Great War - Mark Helprin
Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf (what? she's my favorite author!)
The Outsiders - SE Hinton (I read that shit ragged when I was a kid)

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce
The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner
The Dead Father - Barthelme (sp?)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Kundera
Drinking - A Love Story - Knapp

A Wizard of Earthsea
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
David Copperfield
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

On another day, A Wizard of Earthsea would have made it on my list as well, bearwife. Wonderful stuff.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer