I'd list the following two:
(i) The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker
(ii) Life Is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera
Incidentally, both happen to be about poetry and what it means to be a poet.
I'd list the following two:
(i) The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker
(ii) Life Is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera
Incidentally, both happen to be about poetry and what it means to be a poet.
As a teenager I was greatly affected by Great Expectations, A Prayer for Owen Meanie, and The Left Hand of Darkness. I read most of Dostoevsky's major novels when I was 14 after picking up The Idiot in the school library. I found Anna Karenina quite moving at 16. My parents did not allow me access to internet during high school so I used to read a novel every 2-3 days. I have a collection that claims to be the most anthologized poems of the 20th century that I got at a second hand shop, I used to read that one quite regularly.
When I got older I think Achebe's Things Fall Apart really excited me when I first read it. I'm teaching it in summer school this year and hope it goes well (I dumped Catcher in the Rye in favor of it, though I think Catcher is a fine book).
I wrote my MA thesis on Eliza Haywood's Fantomina and Defoe's Roxana. I'm completing my dissertation on female narrators in early prose, which means I read a lot of Haywood, Defoe and Richardson.
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood