ANOTHER LIST!

It might be boring to others, but having been a compulsive list-maker all my life and then, in an instant, waking up after my brain operation with the compulsion totally gone, unable to put more than two things together for any kind of list, without help from Google and much determination and much prodding of myself to do it, the other night while falling asleep I actually started making a list of books that had impacted (and in some instances influenced) me (sometimes changing my life) when I was coming up, in my teens and early twenties, so here it is:

Saint Augustine's CONFESSIONS
Lady Murasaki's TALE OF GENJI
Saint John of the Cross's DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
Walt Whitman's LEAVES OF GRASS and SPECIMEN DAYS
Sherwood Anderson's WINESBURG, OHIO
Rainer Maria Rilke's THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGS
James Joyce's PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
Vladimir Mayakovsky's THE BEDBUG AND SELECTED POETRY
T. S. Elliot's THE WASTELAND AND OTHER POEMS
Ezra Pound's CANTOS
William Carlos Williams SELECTED POEMS and PATERSON
e. e. cummings's six non-lectures
Blaise Cendrars SELECTED WRITINGS
Jean Rhys AFTER LEAVING MR. MACKENZIE
Jean Toomer's CANE
Ernest Hemingway's IN OUR TIME
F. Scott Fitzgerald's TENDER IS THE NIGHT
William Saroyan's THE DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE, TRACY'S TIGER and THERE GOES, HERE COMES, YOU KNOW WHO
Muriel Rukeyser's SELECTED POEMS (the first New Directions one)
Jack Kerouac's ON THE ROAD, DESOLATION ANGELS and THE SCRIPTURE OF THE GOLDEN ETERNITY
Gary Snyder's RIP RAP
Frank O'Hara's LUNCH POEMS
LeRoi Jones's TALES (later reissued under his new name, Amiri Baraka)
Diane diPrima's DINNERS & NIGHTMARES
Bob Kaufman's GOLDEN SARDINES
Brendan Behan's BORSTAL BOY
Samuel Beckett's WAITING FOR GODOT (didn't see it performed, just read it) and HOW IT IS
d. a. levy's NORTH AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD PART 1 & 2