Top eleven novels

The first chapter book I ever read was Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read it in the second grade. I fell in love with reading with that book, and I decided then and there that I wanted to write, to make people feel the way I felt with that book. I've been writing ever since. So, here's my list of 12, not 10 or 13, lol.

1. Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
2. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
4. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (one of my all time favorites)
5. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
6. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
7. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
8. Any of the Harry Potter Books
9. Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner
10. The Stand by Stephen King
11. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
12. The Betsy, Tacy and Tib books by Maud Hart Lovelace (I re-read these books every summer during elementary school after reading the first one the summer before my third grade year. I loved them, and I'm planning to buy a set for my daughter.)

All of these have taken me away from my day-to-day life, and I could read them over and over again. And, each time I finish one of them, I always wish I could write as well as the person who wrote them.

1. Catcher in the Rye - Jd Salinger
2. 1984 - George Orwell
3. Ask the Dust - John Fante
4. Martin Eden - Jack London
5. Johnny Got His Gun - Dalston Trumbo
6. Dear Mr. Henshaw - Beverly Cleary(hey I was a kid once)
7. Post Office - Charles Bukowski
8. Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
9. Journey to the End of the Night - Louis Ferdinand Celine
10. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein

Just writing the list made me recall so many great books I hadn't thought of for years. Good query.

-g

The Island Peter Benchley
Jaws " "
Black Marble Joseph Wambaugh
The Onion Field Joseph Wambaugh
Ice Rigger Alan Dean Foster
Jurassic Park Michael Crighton (sp)
Journey to the Center of the Earth Verne
The Time Machine Wells
Farenheit 451 Bradbury
The Forever War
Lucifer's Hammer
Virgin Planet Poul Anderson

Tri

Don Quixote
Les Miserables
Catcher in the Rye
Slaughterhouse Five
Great Gatsby
Wuthering Heights
Beloved
The Fountainhead
Billy Budd
Neuromancer
Clockwork Orange
Catch 22
Things Fall Apart
Heart of Darkness
East of Eden

It's more than 11 - but that's the most I can whittle the list down. My reading tastes are to say the least - eclectic.

Women, Charles Bukowski
Imajica, Clive Barker
Porno, Irvine Welsh
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
Personal Injuries, Scott Turow
A Civil Action, Jonathan Harr
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
Ask the Dust, John Fante
The Assault on Tony's, John O'Brien
The Select, F. Paul Wilson

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban, by JK Rowling
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman
The Lord of The Rings, by JRR Tolkien
The Catcher In The Rye, by JD Salinger
How Many Miles To Babylon?, by Jennifer Johnson
The Curious Incident Of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon
The Twits, by Roald Dahl
About A Boy, by Nick Hornby
The Lord Of The Flies, by William Golding

Most of my are either authors or series, rather than an individual book. Most of these are from childhood.

1. Little House series - Children's. This is the first book I remember reading. I even remember where it was in the library.
2. Nancy Drew series - Mystery. This and the next four were the closest I was to get to thriller and exciting stories with girls in them. The boy characters always got the action in the rest of the books I remember, and the girls didn't have much to do.
3. Trixie Beldon series - Mystery
4. Kim Aldrich series - Mystery
5. Phyllis A. Whitney, author - Gothic mysteries
6. Star Trek Log series - Sci-Fi/TV Tie in. He took the half hour animated series and turned them into well-written, lengthy stories, not just rehashes of the scripts.
7. Star Trek novelizations - Sci-Fi/TV Tie in. These books make the list because they were a bad influence. At a formative time in my writing development, I was reading these. It was very common to see an A story and a B story, and the B story was usually page filler. But it frustrated me as a reader having meaningless subplots that distracted me from the story, so I tried to do novels without them.
8. Kinsey Milhone series (first seven books) - Mystery (a good influence and a bad). The emergence of women character's in traditionally male books. But she also had stories with subplots that were rather meaningless, so it contributed to my subplot problems.
9. Dirk Pitt series - Thriller (a good influence and a bad influence). He was writing in my genre. But they were located in the General Fiction section of the bookstore, so I had no idea what exactly they were. Thriller was just starting as a recognized genre at this point when I was reading. One of the Pitt books also did the meaningless subplot that went on and on, which contributed to my subplot problems
10. Sword and Sorceress Anthologies - Fantasy. Women! Doing action stuff. After seeing so few books with girls/women as the main characters and my only choices being romances, this was a wonderful series of books that I eagerly hunted for.
11. Anita Blake series (first seven books) - Horror. Women! Doing action stuff and being competent throughout the story. The author was also very good at plotting, and I studied how she did it when I was trying to overcome my subplot problems. The rest of the series past seven books we won't discuss.

Interesting...you can tell a lot about people with these lists. Here's some that come to mind for me...I believe in the order I read them, too!

April Morning
To Kill a Mockingbird
Lord of the Flies
Shadowland
The Talisman
The Green Mile
The Lovely Bones
Peace Like a River
The Secret Life of Bees
Life of Pi

Mine are so predictable, they're more than predictable:

11. Sparhawk series, Terry Brooks- same deal as Iron Tower, for me. One of my early experiences with fantasy, though I don't even remember much of it, I remember it had a good sense of humor.

10. Iron Tower series, Dennis L. McKiernan- epic fantasy, perhaps not the most original thing ever but it was my introduction to grand fantasy with huge battles, armies of giants monsters etc. I still vividly remember how I first imagined the ogres and trolls, towering over the desperate human defenders of the besieged city...

9. Conan stories and Hour of the Dragon, Robert E. Howard- the original Conan by the original Conan writer. Still holds up well today- Conan is a badass matched by few, especially among the girlie men of much high fantasy.

8. Khavren series, Steven Brust- I like this better than his Vlad Taltos series, for some reason. Great sense of humor, which isn't overdone. Also, in one of the books a female guard manages to knock the hero unconscious after she's been run through...

7. Band of Four series, Ed Greenwood- great high fantasy in which the heroes fight constant threats coming from all angles and take tons of punishment. Nonstop battles and action.

6. Chicks in Chainmail series- lots of great, humorous stories about girls who can fight.

5. The Last of the Amazons, Steven Pressfield- the title says it all, and Pressfield is great at writing brutal battles. Antiope's death scene was one of the best I've ever read, and damn, Theseus is tough. He fought with a broken arm, broken foot, half his jaw sheared away, and two ruptured "groins"!!!

4. The Hero and The Crown, Robin McKinley- this one is about a princess who kills dragons. With only her horse for help, Aerin slays the last of the great wyrms, so big she has to run up his head to stab him in the eye. Note that she is burned to the point of being blackened on the face and arm, has severe lung damage (which later slows kills her until she is magically healed), and a broken ankle, while running up the dragon's head. With these injuries, she is still able to get home with only her horse. Love her.

3. Comryr series, Troy Denning- yes, it's DnD. So? Alusair, the promiscous, tough as nails princess of Comryr will always be one of my favorite female characters in any book (besides my own). Who could forget the time when, covered in wounds, she took off her armor and beat her chest during a speech to her troops to inspire them?!

2. Drenai series by David Gemmell- ah, yes. The quintessential modern "legendary warriors" series. Great plot, great characterization, great battle scenes, great everything. It was tough to choose between this and number 1, but Gemmell didn't feature female warriors all that prominently, especially in terms of front-line combat, so...

1. Paksennarion series by Elizabeth Moon- a trilogy about a farmgirl who becomes a great warrior. Paksennarion (or Paks to her friends) fights like a man and kicks serious ***. The author is a former officer in the military, and her expertise shows. What more do I need to say?

Oh, I hate questions like this. I always feel like I'll miss one really important and then someone will come take it away from me.

In no particular order, and for very different reasons:

1. The Magus, John Fowles. (Or maybe French Lieutenent's Woman).
2. The Lord of the Rings. JRR Tolkein.
3. The Aubrey-Maturin series, Patrick O'Brian (really one long book).
4. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
5. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny.
6. The Cornish Trilogy, Robertson Davies.
7. Bel Canto, Ann Patchett.
8. The Razor's Edge, W. Somerset Maugham.
9. The Way I Found Her, Rose Tremain.
10. Giles Goat-Boy, John Barth.
11. Horn of Africa, Philip Caputo.
12. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke.

So hard to limit this list!
In no particular order...

JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings
Marion Zimmer Bradley: The Mists of Avalon
Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
Bram Stoker: Dracula
George Orwell: Animal Farm
Greg Bear: Blood Music
S.M. Stirling: Island in the Sea of Time
Homer: The Odyssey
Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

1. Dark Tower Series, Particularly The Wastelands, Stephen King.
2. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
3. The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
4. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
5. Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon
6. The Girl Next Door, Jack Ketchum
7. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
8. Engines of God, Jack McDevitt
9. I, Robot, Isacc Asimov
10. King of Infinite Space, Allen Steele
11. The Gammage Cup, Carol Kendall
12. Hatchet, Gary Paulson

Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder- I knew these books so well that I could bring it into any conversation and it would make sense. I can't do that anymore. The television series makes me sick to my stomach.

Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery- She made me want to become Canadian. Canada treated fictional Anne better then we treated our real Laura.

Wolf by the Ears and other books by Ann Rinaldi- She puts so much research into all her historical fiction. I love her work. She has strong female characters that are still fit in with their time period. No women libbers here.

Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury- My first Bradbury novel. I love dystopian novels. I'd like to think I would do the same thing if I was in their place.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury- My first book about life on Mars. I especially like the story about the man who lived on Mars built the House of Usher and then invited all the censors from Earth and killed each one in the same manner as one of Poe's characters died.

Moving Mars by Greg Bear- I just love novels about Mars. This is one of the political stories I can actually read and not go to sleep.

The Giver by Lois Lowry- My first dystopian novel. This book made me want to become a writer.

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman- I never thought of it as fantasy and after finding a book about the science behind this series how can I. It's a good story and if it's still fantasy well then he was able to make me read a genre I usually avoid. Plus the main character has the same name as I do. How cool is that?

The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank- She was the same age as me when I read her diary. It got me reading all the stories out there about Jewish survival during WWII. I read a lot of good stuff but I think I got burnt out on it. They started to all sound the same. But I could never get rid of Anne.

The Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson- I first started reading it because I thought it was written by a woman. Well it's not surprise to me. It took me months to find all three books at the flea market. I had no job I couldn't afford new at the bookstore. These books made me wonder what exactly would we look for in people in order to colonize other planets. I would go to another planet in a heartbeat. I then realized I have no special skills. I'm a female of childbearing age so if we have a program to colonize another planet in the near future I'm signing up. Keep the colony going yo.

The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm by The Brothers Grimm- How can you not love the undisneyfied version of Cinderella. Not only does Cinderella get the man but her step-sisters eyes get eaten out by birds at the wedding. Plus other tales that are just as awesome.

The Otherland Series by Tad Williams- Each book is around 800 pages each but it's really one huge story not four seperate books. Makes me wish wetwire was invented already....sort of.

Novels

I couldn't begin to make such a list, but I can remember the first novel that had a huge impact on me. It was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I was in the fourth grade, reading the book during lunch hour, and there's a scene with blood on the deck, and I swear I actually smelled blood. It jerked me right out of the book for a minute.

I knew what blood smelled like, and I smelled it. It took a minute to realize it was my imagination.

In no particular order:

Watership Down, by Richard Adams

The Little House series, by Laura Ingalls Wilder

The Outsiders, by SE Hinton

Band of Brothers, by Stephen Ambrose (an amazing nonfiction book that reads like fiction, and I can't recommend it enough)

Pet Semetary, by Stephen King

Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson

The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende

Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein

The Story Girl/Golden Road, LM Montgomery

The Night World Series, by LJ Smith (published before sf/fantasy became big in the young adult world)

The Call of the Wild, by Jack London

The North and South trilogy, by John Jakes


And since I like having a baker's dozen, I will admit that an ongoing DC comic book line has also influenced me, both as a reader and a writer. Comics and graphic novels may be the black sheep of the literary world, but their influence cannot be dismissed.

Novels

Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub

The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

Contact by Carl Sagan

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Not novels, but definitely influential:

Dubliners by James Joyce

The Art of Fiction by John Gardner

I'm not sure if I can keep it down to eleven, just because I've read and enjoyed so many books. However, here are some that have had an impact on me.

1. To Kill a Mockingbird I grew up in the South, so that book really made me appreciate what the people who struggled for civil rights had to go through.

2. Little Women Made me realize it's ok to be a tomboy.

3. The Little House series. Same reason as above, and I loved learning about a girl my age who lived long ago.

4. D'aulaire's Book of Greek Myths. An illustrated YA book my grandmother gave me. I loved all the colorful stories, and in fact I still have that book.

5. Star Trek, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine Ok, they were TV shows, but I loved how the writers dealt with serious issues but still made it entertaining. That was one of the things that inspired me to become a writer.

6. Lord of the Rings

7. The Shannara series

8. Dr. Who Again, another TV series. However, the writers have done an excellent job at developing the characters. I cried at this season's finale.

9. The Scarlet Pimpernel I stayed up late at night to finish this, then turned right around and read it again. It taught me that you don't have to write "the great American novel." It's enough to write a great story and entertain people.

10. The Bible. There are some beautiful passages in there.

11. There are so many other books, I can't narrow it down to a final choice.

Not in any particular order:

1. Lord of the Rings (I re-read every year)
2. Watership Down
3. Little House on the Prairie series (I'm reading this with my daughters now and they love it as much as I did)
4. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - a Harlen Ellison collection from the 70's that turned me on to Ellison in general
5. Pride and Prejudice
6. Sherlock Holmes (all 60-something stories and 4 novellas)
7. The Foundation Trilogy - Asimov
8. The Bible
9. Anne of Avonlea series
10. Anything by Ed McBain
11. Hitchhiker's Gude to the Galaxy series

Audrey

kewl!

In no paticular order:

1) Bible
2) House of Spirits
3) Tale of Two Cities
4) Homo Zapiens
5) Hero of our Time
6) The Vampire Lestat (lol, how out of place does that look?)
7) Wrinkle in Time
8) Wuthering Heights
9) Fathers and sons
10) Scarlet Letter
11) Lolita

1. A Home At the End Of the World, Michael Cunningham. THis book made me write again.

2. Over the Edge, Suzanne Brockmann. I realized there was nothing wrong with my style.

3. Anything by Lee Child. Incredible characterization of Jack Reacher, perfect voice, great stories.

4. Anything by Andy McNabb. Again, great characterizations. Not a great writer, but his character is so involving, such a mess, that you immediately fall in love with him. A continuing series of Nick Stone novels.

5. The Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas. I recently read this book and the beginning was wrong. I could remember the beginning almost word for word and this was not it. It took me days to realize that I had never read this book in English, only in Dutch and that is why the words were wrong. I still vividly remember whole passages from this book.

6. Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maughan. After I read this book, I couldnt read for weeks, it struck me as so profound, so exactly how I felt. I tried to read it a few months ago and couldnt make it past the first chapter. Funny how things change.

7. Neuromancer, William Gibson.

8. Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies, Richard Morgan. Showed me that I do like science fiction and that good science fiction doesnt need massive amounts of information dumps. I dont care how things work, just that they do.

9. Maurice, EM Forster. Made me cry.

I could list all those "classics" I read in University, but while I really liked them, none of them made an impact on me as a writer.

Eleven novels? I can probably name 11 series, but I don't think there is any ONE novel that got me interested.

1) Conan the Adventurer, by Robert E. Howard, Edited by L. Sprague de Campe and Lin Carter

1) Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Tie because to be honest, after all these years I can't remember which I read first, but these were the first two books I read that were not The Bobsey Twins or The Hardy Boys or even children novelized versions of Jack London or what have you. These were adventures of the first order, blood and guts, death and dying, beautiful, scantily clad women and savage, primordial men, and they opened my eyes and made me shout, "THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO DO!" But seeing I can't be a sword weilding, loinclothe wearing barbarian, I decided on trying my hand at writing, instead.

3) Everything else in the Conan series by Robert E. Howard, Edited by L. Sprague de Campe and Lin Carter

4) Every other series by Edgar Rice Burroughs

5) The Shadow series of pulp adventures

6) Doc Savage series of pulp adventures

7) Elric of Melnibone series by Michael Moorcock

8) Fafrd and the Grey Mouser series by Fritz Leiber

9) Beyond the Green Star, Lemuria, and other series by Lin Carter

10) Any of the books I read by Alan Dean Foster.

11) Any of the books I read by Robert Silverberg.

Basically, these were the stories that interested me enough to emulate them and start writing my own. There are some novels I've read later in life that have had an impact upon me as a person, but they didn't have an affect upon my writing. These adventures did. These and the comic books I read formed the writer that you see here before you today.

I was (am) a voracious reader from childhood forward--reading some books aimed at adults well before adulthood. It's hard to narrow it down. Not all of my influences were novels. Easily a 1/3 were poets. With the exception of number one the list is no particular order.

1. anything by Ray Bradbury--I finished the Martian Chronicles and thought "I want to do that with words."

2. The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder

3. The Stand by Stephen King

4. Strangers to the Dust by William Faulkner

5. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

6. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (read it three times)

7. Jane Eyre

8. Watership Down by Richard Adams (Plague Dogs was pretty good too)

9. The Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London

10. In the Shadow of a Rainbow by Robert Frank Leslie

11. The Hitchhiker's Guide series

12. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene

13. Rose's Garden by Carrie Brown

14. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton