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I’ve been very interested to see people’s lists of 100 formative/important books recently, so I have now created my own list here.

Some comments about the list:

The ordering of the list reflects the order in which I added the books–I thought about having it alphabetize them, but eventually decided that it was interesting to preserve that order. Roughly that means the ones at the beginning were more obvious choices for me, and therefore more important, but there’s a lot of randomness in there, especially farther down the list. I kept being reminded of books by seeing lists from others, or making connections with other books I read around the same time, or just taking a break and having additional unrelated thoughts about what to add. It’s a bit weirdly embarrassing thinking of this list as a sort of map of my psyche. I’m imagining people reading it and thinking things like, “How could you possibly think of adding Book X before Book Y?” or “Did Bunnicula somehow remind you of The Sound and the Fury? What is wrong with you?” Oh, well. Have fun!

Since this is supposed to be a list of books that were “formative” for me, it’s definitely biased toward things I read early in life. In some cases, I chose them because they are also books I’ve passed on to my daughter, so I now have a new layer of memories overlaid on the originals. There are definitely recent reads on there too–I figure I’m still in the process of being formed even at this late date. The recent ones tend to be books I’ve spent significant time thinking about for whatever reason—Some Desperate Glory because I wrote about it for Yuletide, as an example. Time will tell whether I still think of those as formative books later on. As a sort of test case, I remembered that I had made a (much shorter) list of meaningful books on Facebook long ago—turns out it was 2009. When I looked it up, I found that just about everything on it still appears on my current list. In a few cases I had replaced a book with something different by the same author, and for the rest I’d at least thought about them this time around but ended up deciding against them. So, I’m not too inconsistent at least.

Probably the most obscure/idiosyncratic thing on the list is the National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Universe. It’s also one of the things that have had the most specific identifiable effect on my life, in that I’m pretty sure it was a contributing factor in putting me on the path of studying physics and astronomy. It was published in the early 80’s, and included what were at the time the most state-of-the-art photos available of Jupiter and Saturn and some of their moons, from the Voyager missions. But the section I remember most clearly is one in which they invented imaginary aliens that would be adapted to live on the other planets in the solar system, with detailed descriptions and artists’ impressions of what they would look like. For example, there were the Plutonian zistles, spiky sea-urchin-looking critters that thrive in super-cold temperatures because they run on superconductivity. When I was trying to find this book for my list, I remembered “Our Universe” from the title, but figured I’d have no luck searching for something so generic-sounding. Then I tried Googling “Plutonian zistles,” and it popped right up with correct book listings. Not only that, but when I went to add it to my 100 books list, I didn’t even have to upload it; it was already in their system. So apparently at least one other person somewhere has also added it to their list.

Omg, as of right now (as I’m writing up this post, before linking to the list from my journal), apparently 25 people have already seen it and voted on how many they’ve read? Amazing. How would they even find it? I clearly have no idea how this list site works.

Anyway, feel free to ask me about any of these in particular, or comment on which ones/how many you’ve read!