That book meme

jemck posted her own belated list of books that have stuck with her, which was a Facebook meme last month. The rules were that you had to write down ten books that had stuck with you over the years, without thinking too hard or trying to over-analyze. (I might be paraphrasing at this point.) Her list inspired me to (finally) come up with my own list, so here it is:

1. "Oliver Twist" by Charles Dickens. This was my favorite book when I was in the third and fourth grade (nine and ten years old). I was a depressed and angry child, though I didn't realize that was an odd thing to be, and Oliver Twist's sad life appealed to me tremendously.
2. "The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood" by Howard Pyle. Because Robin Hood. One of my early crushes that has stayed with me forever. I'm trying to write my own version of the tale right now. I read this book when I was ten (those two years were a magical time for me), and stayed up very late to finish it. I went upstairs once I was done, tears steaming down my face at the romanticism and sorrow at his death, to surprise my poor mother who was herself up late reading (for work, though).
3. "Dawn Wind" by Rosemary Sutcliffe. I love love love Rosemary Sutcliffe's Roman Britain novels, but I haven't read one that I haven't liked no matter what the period. Her Roman Britain novels give me that same shiver of excitement down my spine that very good fantasy and science fiction bring. I was tickled one time when I was in college to find that, a couple of days after reading a few paragraphs in my Latin sight-reading class, she had used those same paragraphs as a jumping-off point for one of her Roman historical novels. She's wonderful.
4. "The Final Reflection" by John M. Ford. I loved the early "Star Trek" novels. They read more like fan fiction than anything else. John M. Ford is a fabulous writer, and my favorite "Star Trek" novels were by fabulous writers who had written much more than "Star Trek": Barbara Hambly wrote a "Here Comes the Brides"-meets-"Star Trek" novel that I adore. But John M. Ford...he managed to do so much better than everyone else at so much of everything else that of course he had to write a "Star Trek" novel that not only was a fine novel, it transformed Klingons into a real culture of believable people. Plus it used physics as if it was actually physics.
5. "Alone Against Tomorrow" by Harlan Ellison. Harlan was my favorite writer for many, many years, and was my savior during my teens. This volume contains "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" and "'Repent, Harlequin!' said the Ticktockman", but also others not as famous. One of my mother's colleagues at ISU (Dr. Brian Attebury) told me once that Harlan was -- and I'm paraphrasing after many years so I'm getting this wrong -- an adolescent writer, or a writer for adolescents, but his intent was to disparage Harlan's lasting effect as a great writer. I didn't care. I think Harlan speaks beautifully to adolescents, and he certainly made those ugly years of constant uncertainty more livable for me.
6. "Watchmen" by Allan Moore and Dave Gibbons. One of the most beautifully crafted graphic novels, with art and story tightly coupled. I waited all year for each issue to come out, and the shock and delight with each new revelation thrilled me. Re-reading the first issue after reading the last -- oh, yes.
7. "Houston, Can You Read", collected in "Saul's Death and Other Peoms", by Joe Haldeman. Joe is an excellent poet, writing both free verse and structured poems with equal ease, and has studied poetry in a workshop at M.I.T. that he's written about quite a bit. This particular poem has stuck with me since I first read it. It's one of the very few villanelles I've read -- possibly one of the very few ever, given how annoying the form is -- that really works. As you know, Bob, a villanelle is written for someone who has died, or is about to. This was written for the space program.
8. "Impossible Things" by Connie Willis. This is a short story collection, by one of the best science fiction writers ever. Her stories are funny, romantic, poignant, clever, and will punch you in the gut in the last paragraph. This collection contains many of her award winners, though not "A Letter From the Clearys", which is one of my favorites. The ones included, though, have stuck with me since I read them.
9. "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. I worked on WorldsAway in the early nineties, one of the first virtual worlds. Looking at it now, especially after a session playing World of Warcraft, the world seems depthless, flat. Still, for the time it was incredibly cool, and we thought we were creating the world that Neal Stephenson was describing. We weren't, but maybe someday someone will.
10. "Mother of Storms" by John Barnes. John Barnes' stories stick with me, but this one glued itself on. This is a novel of what happens when more energy is added to the Earth's weather system. You know, like if climate change was causing larger and more frequent hurricanes. Yeah. The John Barnes version, which was the scariest thing I'd read in this genre until I started seeing it on the news.