Has inspired this beginning of a list:
1. At 9, not the first adult novel I had read, but the first from the adult section in the public library, for which I was reprimanded when I was hungry and clueless enough to ask the librarian where I would find more books by Margaret Mitchell.
2. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
At 18, opened up the world in a way that travel up, until this point, had only imagined. I have read all of Hesse since then and yet they all remain part and parcel of that one thin paperback novel.
3. At 13 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte indirectly addressed the idea that one's passion may not be one's destiny. Choice comes into play even when every hormone in the body screams otherwise. Letting the tall, dark and handsome, broody one get away is often the only way to keep what's you for yourself. Controlled passion became a theme throughout my teen years to which I adhered somewhat successfully to greater and lesser degrees, and now largely defines my sexuality.
4. Virginia Woolf's ORLANDO redefined social expectations in my 20's when I realized that the hardcore feminists, who had insisted I must be a lesbian to be a feminist, were self-serving in their proclamation. Loving the male and female parts of myself equally, for different reasons, was part of loving myself, regardless of the social pressures from either side of the divide to affix a label.
5. In my 30's it was Joseph Gold's READ FOR YOUR LIFE that gave my reading purpose. I learned with great disappointment that Reader Response Theory had gone out of fashion by the time I was studying literature at university, but without calling it that, Gold's book was a master's class in the process of reading as a form of self-analysis to which I continue to adhere.
6. Though introduced to scifi in my 30's by DUNE and Delaney, it wasn't until my 40's that I really acknowledged genre fiction as literary. ISLAND by Huxley was the clincher and so many others many others now besides. Margaret Atwood's SURFACING had made an earlier impression but HANDMAID'S TALE was next level.
5. By my 50's, I was a librarian and THE DIAMOND AGE by Neal Stephenson gave me glimpse into a new world of information rich living. Suzette Hagen Elgin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Tongue_(Elgin_novel)
6. My 60's turned the tables and writing became part of my reading experience to a much greater degree. Journals and memoirs became sources of information pointing me back to my 20's when I first encountered Doris Lessing and Ana's Nin, my 30's with Marge Piercy. Re-Discovering Octavia E. Butler, having read her vampire series earlier but re-visiting her Cassandra-like vision of 2024 in the Parable series.
