I will, finally, respond to this. . .

but not, my friends, where anyone who asked me will read it.

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.

In no particular order:

1. The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
3. My World and Welcome to It by James Thurber
4. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
5. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
6. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
8. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
9. How It Is by Samuel Beckett
10. Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman
11. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
12. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
13. The Castle by Franz Kafka
14. Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl
15. The Portable Dorothy Parker

Note: I will not pretend for one second that I enjoy Pale Fire. Instead, that book taught me that there is a limit to my enjoyment of books and of their appeal to me. A depressing day that was immediately brightened by the realization that Samuel Beckett was there for people like me and that the world was full of less opaque and convoluted perverts than Nabokov for me to latch onto. Jakov Lind, for one, a man who would make number sixteen on this list with ease.