Folks on the internet are making lists of the ten books that influenced them most. They're interpreting what that means differently, but many are posting lists of books they read at a formative age, and that shaped them in ways that remain today, even as they have themselves changed and grown and progressed and regressed and evolved and devolved and all those things we do over the years.

I love making lists. I think it's one reason why I used to love writing syllabi so much -- they were the ultimate empathetic wish-lists, crafted sequences of works that individually and in the aggregate contained ideas, styles, arguments, and information that the teacher finds moving and important, and passionately wants to share with whoever chooses to enroll in the course. These lists of favorites resemble syllabi in interesting ways; they also resemble Rorschach tests.

I'm still drinking my coffee and haven't thought too carefully about this. But here's a stab at the things I remember reading--and being blown away by--as a teenager and a young twenty-something.

--Great Expectations: Assigned by an intrepid ninth-grade teacher. I loved everything about it, and kept a list of wonderful character names (Pumblechook, Jaggers, Wemmick, Pocket) in the back. That was my introduction to Dickens. I have never stopped loving Dickens, and for me he's one of the few writers you can go back and read over and over again. Many people don't feel that way; they find him cloying, obvious, heavy-handed, and messy. He's all these things at times--but he's also not, if that makes sense. I love his imagination, and his energy, his sense of character, and think he was a lot, lot smarter than many critics have given him credit for.

--Emma and Pride and Prejudice. I stumbled on Jane Austen when I was sixteen and bored, looking at the shelves for something to read. I was stopped dead by the controlled, perfect rhythms of the prose. She was funny, and sarcastic, and her sentences seemed to be like little dances done in words. Studying for an anthro final in college, I bribed myself with Pride and Prejudice: an hour of studying, a chapter of Austen; an hour of studying, a chapter of Austen. And so on.

--Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Also something I stumbled on in high school. I wasn't, for the most part, getting assigned exciting stuff in school--but I had a list of books you were supposed to read to prepare for the AP exam, and while I never thought too much about studying for the AP, the list served me well for years as a guide to books I would never otherwise have found.

--Middlemarch. A college assignment. I've written before about Eliot, and about this book. Amazing--not just as fiction, but as a meditation on goodness, on choice, on sacrifice, on love, on what it means to be alive.

--D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police. This was one of the first works of literary criticism I ever read, and it taught me that criticism can also be a form of creative writing. I read it and read it and read it again for a number of years, and my own prose was heavily indebted to (imitative of) Miller at the end of college and beginning of grad school.

--Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor. One of the earliest examples of investigative journalism, and a prototype of modern sociology. Mayhew set out to catalogue all the kinds of work, and all the types of workers, in a London where poverty was endemic, where the working class population was exploding, and where the lives of the London poor were almost entirely mysterious. He was a huge influence on Dickens, and was also part of a broader zeitgeist that included Engels' Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and, of course, Marx's work. I read so much of this stuff in grad school; I was even reading Parliamentary blue books on poverty and urban disease. It's an incredible literature, part otherworldly narrative (even though it's not fiction, the writers routinely fall back on literary techniques to describe what they see, smell, and hear when they enter the slums), part factual inventory of an emerging aspect of a rapidly changing, frighteningly in-flux English culture.

--Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde. This one I discovered in my early thirties. Ellmann raised biography to the level of art. He was simply unbelievable, and made me start thinking about biography as a genre in its own right.

--Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate's The Shadow University. I was almost entirely innocent of the nastier side of academic life until my early thirties. Then I met it the hard way--and had to scramble to understand what was happening. This astonishing book put my experience into context, and also changed how I think. It led me to meet Kors, which led me to volunteer for FIRE, which he and Silverglate founded along with Thor Halvorssen. It led to the launching of this blog, to a rethinking of what academia is and what I was doing in it, and, eventually to a career change. Good book.

--Hayek's Road to Serfdom, also discovered during my early thirties. Short, sweet, and so smart on the dangers of big government. In four years of college, five of grad school, and seven at Penn, I had read endless amounts of Marx-inflected criticism, and was also steeped in a side of Victorian studies that concentrates very heavily on the evils of the factory system (which were very real). I had never encountered any thinker who looked at things through another lens--and had never heard of Hayek. Revelatory.

That's a quick list written off the top of my head. Curious to know what readers' lists are.