Nick writes:
My question -- What are your 25 favorite/most influential books? The answers were intriguing, revealing, inspiring, enjoyable. Here, as suggested by Peter Porco, are all lists compiled -- print it out and bring it with you to the book store/library.

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Contributors:

Nicholas DiGiovanni (America's greatest unpublished novelist, or so he says)

Laurie Granieri (The Belle of Blogdom, who gave Bob Dylan the line "In Jersey everything's legal/As long as you don't get caught"),

Peter Porco (Arctic adventurer and former lead guitarist in a band called the Pelham Bay Ponderers)

Phil Gnatowski (unofficial president of the New England chapter of the Mickey Mantle Fan Club and Our Man at Brandeis)

Laura Gutmann (who, by her father's unofficial count, read the Little House on the Prairie books 32 times)

Jake Stuiver (who came home one winter night and watched as his door knocker was trasnformed into a ghostly image of Bob Marley)

Mike Fiore (the man who actually met Samuel R. Delany)

Tammy Paolino (poet, columnist, Tino Martinez fan, Winnie-the-Pooh fan, Walt Whitman fan, not necessarily in that order)

Steve Hart (when his book about Boss Hague is published soon, you'll think of Steve every time you drive over the Pulaski Skyway)

Bathsheba Monk (translator of Rust Belt runes),

Christian Bauman (his third novel will make your want to become a scruffy but soulful folksinger and move to Hoboken);

Christopher Armitage (who will tell you, accurately, that Dandelion Wine is actually about a boyhood summer in North Andover, Mass.)

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My choices for each contributor's most interesting choice:

Granieri -- "Travels with Charley."
Gnatowski -- "A Christmas Carol."
Fiore -- "The Picture of Dorian Gray."
Porco -- "Hair" (the musical).
DiGiovanni -- The Bible (King James version).
Bauman: "City of Joy."
Hart: History of My Life" by Casanova.
Armitage: "Abraham Lincoln" by Sandburg.
Stuiver: "Common Sense."
Monk -- "The Sea Wolf."
Paolino -- "Manifest Your Destiny."
Gutmann -- "The Wonderful O."

And now...a drum roll...trumpets...crashing cymbals...the crowd roars...BOOM! The Human Cannonball whizzes through the air! Ladies and Gentleman....The List!

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LAURIE GRANIERI:

1) Paula," Isabel Allende
2.) "The House on Mango Street," Sandra Cisneros
3.) "Something to Declare," Julia Alvarez
4.) "Interpreter of Maladies," Jhumpa Lahir
5.) "There Are Jews In My House," Lara Vapnyar
6.) "Bastard Out of Carolina," Dorothy Allison
7.) "Pulp" Charles Bukowski
8.) "Look Through My Window," Jean Harris. (Out of print, great kids' book
for readers, nice drawings.
9.) "The Partly Cloudy Patriot," Sarah Vowell
10.) "Travels with Charley," John Steinbeck.
* Laurie also mentions Turgenev's "Spring Torrents," Wharton's "Old New York," Salinger's "Franny and Zooey," Steinbeck's "The Long Valley" and "East of Eden,"Woolf's "The Voyage Out,""Anne of Green Gables,""Pride & Prejudice,"E.B. White, especially "Here is New York," and Didion's recent book on grief.


PHIL GNATOWSKI

Dickens: Christmas Carol
Vidal: Julian
Salinger: Catcher in the Rye
Matusow: The Unravelling of America
Twain: Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Seldes: Even the Gods Can't Change History
Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism
Melville: Moby Dick
Merton: Raids on the Unspeakable
Hawthorne: Blithedale Romance
Chesterton: Father Brown Stories
Breslin: The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight
Mailer: Naked and the Dead
Auchincloss: The Indifferent Children
Kerouac: The Town and the City
Roth: The Great American Novel
Steinbeck: Grapes of Wrath
Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
Singer: The Manor
Henry Miller: The Air Conditioned Nightmare
Malamud: The Natural
Mantle: The Education of a Baseball Player
Graves: The Greek Myths
Lax: Circus of the Sun
DiGiovanni: Rip



MIKE FIORE:

On the Road (Kerouac) - yeah, yeah, cliche, but I was 15 and the notion of
smoking joints and drinking wine with a bunch of bohemians was quite appealing. still is.
Charles and Ray Eames (Pat Kirkham)
Dune (Frank Herbert)
Culture of Make Believe (Derrick Jensen)
The Castle (Franz Kafka)
Trainspotting (Irvine Welsh)
Breakfast at Tiffany's (Truman Capote) - reason being I have 4 copies of it on our bookshelves. must mean i liked it.
Dhalgren (Samuel R. Delany)
Howl (Allen Ginsberg)
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (Lester Bangs - edited by Greil Marcus)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
Stokes Field Guides to Birds, Mammals and Plants
Art to Choke Hearts (Henry Rollins)
Rough Guide to Reggae (Steve Barrow, Peter Dalton

Still Life with Woodpecker (Tom Robbins)

Grateful Dead (Paul Grushkin, Cynthia Bassett, Jonas Grushkin)



PETER PORCO:

The Cheaters ("dime-store fiction")

The roadster novels of henry gregor felsen

Oriana Fallacci's interview of Mary Hemingway

A Moveable Feast (Hemingway)

The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway)

Malcolm Cowley's intro essay to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

Melville's letters to Hawthorne

No, in Thunder" (essay by Leslie Fiedler)

The Scarlet Letter (Norton Critical edition)

Tropic of Cancer (Miller)

Karl Shapiro's intro essay to Tropic of Cancer

The Adventures of Pancho of Peru

Advertisements for Myself (Norman Mailer)

The Psychoanalyst and the Artist (Dan Schneider)

The Creative Process (Brewster Ghiselin)

The Portable Nietzsche

The Portable James Joyce

Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre (ed. Walter Kaufman)

Lord of the Flies

Exile's Return (Malcolm Cowley)

Rainer Maria Rilke's poems

Hair" (the Musical)

Abbey Road (Beatles)

Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (Freud)

Christ Stopped at Eboli (Carlo Levi)

Huckleberry Finn

King Lear and Shakespeare's other great tragedies

12th Night

Death of a Salesman

"Barn Burning" and "A Rose for Emily" (Faulkner)

Good Country People" (O'Connor)



NICHOLAS DiGIOVANNI

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Bradbury)

Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut)

Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut)

Huckleberry Finn

Ragtime (Doctorow)

On The Road (Kerouac)

One Hundred Years of Solitude

The Trial (Kafka)

USA (Dos Passos)

Paterson (W.C. Williams)

Kaddish (Allen Ginsberg)

Leaves of Grass

Three Men In a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome)

North of Boston (Robert Frost)

Circus of the Sun (Robert Lax)

Ragtime (Doctorow)

Up in the Old Hotel (Joseph Mitchell)

Walden

Collected Poems (Emily Dickinson)

My Life and Hard Times (Thurber)

The King James Bible

A Human Comedy (Saroyan)

Tortilla Flat/Cannery Row (Steinbeck)

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

A Christmas Carol

History of Yonkers (Rev. Allison)

The Sketch Book, Washington Irving

Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres

Rabbit, Run by John Updike



CHRISTIAN BAUMAN:

In Patagonia and What Am I Doing Here? by Bruce Chatwin
My Own Country and The Tennis Partner by Abraham Verghese
The English Patient and Anil?s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
Lying Awake by Mark Salzman
Close Range and Heart Songs (an unfortunate title for a great book) by Annie Proulx
Frederick by Leo Leoni
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Unstrung Harp by Edward Gorey
Gorky Park and Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith
The Chosen by Chaim Potok
A Farewell to Arms and Collected Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway
Ghost Road by Pat Barker
Salem's Lot and Different Seasons by Stephen King
About Face by David Hackworth
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkein
Koko and Shadowland by Peter Straub
The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama (he's a very funny guy, the Dalai)
The Matarese Circle by Robert Ludlum
Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin
Woody Guthrie: A Life by Joe Klein
The Cider House Rules by John Irving
Monkfish Moon by Romesh Gunesekera
Meditations From a Movable Chair and Selected Stories by Andre Dubus
Dune by Frank Herbert
One Was Johnny by Maurice Sendak
Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice
The Things They Carried by Tim O?Brien
Arkansas and Martin Bauman by David Leavitt
Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver
Wonderboys by Michael Chabon
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
Soul of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman
City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre
Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre
At Freddie's and Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

STEVE HART:

Julian by Gore Vidal,

The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski

The Consolation of Philosophy -- Boethius

The Pastures of Heaven, John Steinbeck

Cannery Row, John Steinbeck

For the Union Dead, Robert Lowell

The October Country, Ray Bradbury

U.S.A., John Dos Passos

Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, Ambrose Bierce

Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion

The Dying Earth, Jack Vance

The Eyes of the Overworld, Jack Vance

History of My Life, Giacomo Casanova

Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller Jr.

The Hawk in the Rain, Ted Hughes

Xiccarph, Clark Ashton Smith

The Nehwon Books, Fritz Leiber

Life of Johnson, James Boswell

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

A Heart at Fire's Center, Steven C. Smith

Behind the Shades Revisited, Clinton Heylin

The Power Broker, Robert Caro

Up In the Old Hotel, Joseph Mitchell

The Titus Novels, Mervyn Peake

Flash for Freedom!, George Macdonald Fraser

Flashman and the Redskins, George Macdonald Fraser

A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul

Laxdaela Saga, Unknown

Egil's Saga, Snorri Sturluson

This Wheel's On Fire, Levon Helm

The Children of Llyr, Evangeline Walton

In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin

Against the American Grain, Dwight Macdonald

Prejudices, H.L. Mencken



CHRIS ARMITAGE:

Beatrix Potter

Robert McCloskey

Tom Sawyer,Mark Twain

Peacock Pie, Walter De La Mare

Peter Pan

Songs/lyrics, Stephen Foster

Deerslayer, Natty Bumpo, Longstocking, James Fenimore Cooper

Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor D.

Sherlock Holmes (all the adventures of), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Conquest of Peru

Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson

The Black Arrow, RLS

The Brothers Karamasov, Fyodor D.

Sometimes A Great Notion, Ken Kesey

The Big Sky, A.B. Guthrie

Shakespeare

Conrad

T.S. Eliot

Ada, Vladimar Nabakov

Foundation Trilogy Isaac Asimov

100 Years of Solitude

(and everything and anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

Lord of the Rings

The Worm Ouroboros, E.R. Eddison

The Gormenghast Trilogy, Mervyn Peake

The Sot-Weed Factor, John Barth

Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (I can't resist stuff about Everest)

National Geographic

Abraham Lincoln, Carl Sandburg

Gettysburg Address, A. Lincoln

Civil War stuff

Favorite Title "Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

(as I recall, the book sucked)

2nd Favorite Title "Notes From The Underground"



JAKE STUIVER:

The Grapes of Wrath -- John Steinbeck

One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest -- Ken Kesey

Rules for Radicals -- Saul Alinsky

The Conscience of a Liberal -- Paul Wellstone

Our Band Could Be Your Life -- Michael Azerrad

Barbarians at the Gate -- Byran Burroughs

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test -- Tom Wolfe

Watchmen -- Alan Moore

Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth -- Chris Ware

Clyde Fans, Book 1 -- Seth

Jazz Poetry Anthology -- Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa

The Killer Inside Me -- Jim Thompson

A Hell of a Woman -- Jim Thompson

VALIS -- Philip K. Dick

Ubik -- Philip K. Dick

1984 -- George Orwell

Common Sense -- Thomas Paine

Walden -- Henry David Thoreau

Sweet Soul Music -- Peter Guralnick

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity -- Abraham Joshua Heschel

The Grasshopper and the Ant -- Harvey Kurtzman

Given Sugar, Given Salt --

Alias Omnibus -- Brian Michael Bendis

Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron -- Daniel Clowes

American Pastoral -- Philip Roth





BATHSHEBA MONK:

To Kill a Mockingbird (every tomboy is Scout, and it makes me believe the best about myself)

The Sea Wolf (makes me acknowledge the worst about myself)

Pale Fire (I didn?t know it was supposed to be funny, but I couldn?t stop laughing)

War and Peace (You can?t beat love in the time of war)

Gone with the Wind (ditto)

Breakfast of Champions (you can?t beat Vonnegut for over-the-top absurd social criticism)

Remains of the Day (the way the plot unfolds is miraculous)

Anna Karenina (I?ve read this book at five different times in my life and have five different reactions to the moral dilemmas presented)

Crime and Punishment (much more than I ever wanted to be in the head of a criminal, but there it is)

Just about any poem by Kipling

The Dubliners (this fellow can write!)

The Corrections (so can this guy)

Writing to Sell, by Scott Meredith
The Things they Carried, Tim O'Brien
And recently read,
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, by Jane Smiley
The Rain King, Saul Bellow


TAMMY PAOLINO:

1. The collected Rumi
2. Leaves of Grass - Whitman
3. Ada - Nabokov
4. Creative Visualization - Shakti Ghawan (pardon my spelling, I'm too tired
to google it)
5. On the Road - Kerouac
6. The House at Pooh Corner - AA Milne
7. The Seventh Octave - Saul Williams
8. A Handmaid's Tale - Atwood
9. Peace is Every Step - Thicht Nat Han
10. The Three Ruths - Julia Glass
11. Diary of Anais Nin
12. Letters to a Young Poet -Rilke
13. Norton's Guide to American Poetry
14. The Lorax - Dr. Seuss
15. Manifest your Destiny - Wayne Dwyer
16. All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
17. Cosmicomics - Italo Calvino
18. Talk Before Sleep - Elizabeth Berg
19. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
20. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Caroll
21. Hamlet - Shakespeare
22. Sister of My heart - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
23. The Monster at the End of This Book - Jim Henson & Co.
24. Different Hours - Stephen Dunn
25. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
AND

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins.



LAURA (DiGiovanni) GUTTMAN::

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

2. The Kiterunner by Khalded Hosseini

3. Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres

4. Rabbit, Run by John Updike

5. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

7. Le Miserables by Victor Hugo

8. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

9. Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

10. The Handmaid�s Tale by Margaret Atwood

11. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

12. The Wonderful O by James Thurber

13. The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

14. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O�Brien

15. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

16. Ragtime (and The Book of Daniel) by E.L. Doctorow

17. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

18. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

19. Nickled and Dimed by Barbara Erenreich

20. The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman

21. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

22. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

23. The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank

24. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

25. The Little House on the Prarie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder