Literary wanderings

So I've wandered off the UW literary reservation (with all the reading I need to be doing for that, you can ask yourself why I would do this -- lord knows I have) and been reading some things I've just flatly been enjoying.

The first is the Odyssey. Yes, it is for class. Yes, I've read it before. That's okay. I'd forgotten just how much I enjoy it -- far more than the Iliad (and way more than Gilgamesh... not even in the ballpark). That's okay. I'm just having fun reading it, class or not. I get to do a small casual report on Book 23, in which Odysseus and Penelope are reunited. It's pretty cool. :)

The second is The Imprisoned Guest. It's about Laura Bridgman, the "original" educated American deaf-mute. As an adult, she taught finger spelling to Anne Sullivan, who went on to teach Helen Keller. In herself, she was the pupil of Samuel Howe, who was a hero of the Greek Revolution and who founded the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachutsetts (and was married to Julia Ward Howe). It's a very sort of Enlightenment tale (both in time period and philosophy) and thus far it's holding my attention pretty well.

The third is Stranger in a Strange Land. I had managed to avoid entangling myself with Heinlein as much through apathy as any set effort, but it has been shown to me of late that a number of the people I'm terribly fond of list this as one of the top three core texts that influenced their lives. With recommendations like that, how can I not read it? I'm not going to spend a lot of time discussing it here right now -- there's too much and I'm not far enough into it to really have a sense of the text as a whole. I can see it marks in those friends, though, in different ways. Very interesting. I'll say more about it later.

Core texts.

If you tend toward books (and if you don't at least somewhat, the odds of you being an LJ devotee to whatever degree are pretty slim), then it's a good bet that you've got a number of books that really resonated with you, often to the extent of informing your development as a person and your view of the world. These are not always classics of literature. Often they are, viewed objectively, really deeply awful books. That's not the point. The point is that they were the right (or wrong, nothing says they had to have a positive influence) thing for you to read at the right time, and they stayed with you in a meaningful way.

The number of these varies, but most people if queried can come up with three of them. One or more of them were likely encountered between the ages of 11 and 13, and may have been the first "grown up" book you read. Beyond that, I can't think of any set pattern, and even those may just be a coincidental cluster of data points. Nonetheless, I'm newly fascinated by this question and I wish to ask it here.

Help me out then, my friends. Name your top three core texts. If you wish to include age when encountered, positive or negative influence, general summary of the text, or type of influence it exerted on you, that would be likewise awesome. I wanna know about YOU! And books! Humor me. :)