I discovered this meme on A Commonplace Blog:

Via his blogger Carrie Frye, Terry Teachout passes on this quick game. Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Slight revision proposed: instead of the future tense (books that will always stick with you), use the past perfect. Name the fifteen books that have most influenced your thinking, that you have found yourself referring to most often in reflection, speech, and writing.

So, starting at 6:30 p.m., here's my list in no more than 15 minutes (extra time needed to create links):

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
A.S. Byatt, Possession
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
Roger Zelazny, The Chronicles of Amber
Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent
Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
Harlan Ellison, The Essential Ellison: A 50 Year Retrospective
James Tiptree, Jr., Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Tanith Lee, The Flat Earth Chronicles
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

I would have added William Butler Yeats, "Lake Isle of Innisfree," but that's a poem, not a book, so it doesn't count; but I think of lines from that poem almost every day ("And I will have peace there, for peace comes dropping slow," for instance: "peace comes dropping slow" is such a lovely locution, isn't it?).

I don't expect that this is the sort of list that was expected by the author of The Commonplace Blog or Terry Teachout, given its weird combination of genre fiction and classics. But when you read everything, and always have, that's the kind of list you come up with. There's a reason I refer to this blog as eccentric and eclectic.

Anyone else want to try?