Currently I’m reading several books simultaneously. One is a long novel of nearly 1,000 pages. I have heard from fellow readers that it’s one of their favorites. After sitting on one of my shelves for years, I finally decided now was the time to read it. I’m halfway through it, but it is a behemoth book. I’m a pretty fast reader but this one is taking me quite a bit of time.

But it got me to thinking. I asked myself, “If you had to pick ten books (regardless of genre) that have impacted you most profoundly, what would they be?”

Spoiler Alert: I could not limit it to ten, so . . .

Here’s what I came up with (not necessarily in order of importance):

• Hamlet (Shakespeare)
• Julius Caesar (Shakespeare)
• Macbeth (Shakespeare)
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce)
• Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner)
• The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky)
• The Complete Short Stories (O’Connor)
• All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy)
• The Road (McCarthy)
• Suttree (McCarthy)
• The Crossing (McCarthy)
• David Copperfield (Dickens)
• Great Expectations (Dickens)
• Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky)
• Stoner (Williams)
• The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
• Madame Bovary (Flaubert)

Your thoughts? Do you have books that you really have never been able to shake, books that you can’t now imagine not being part of you?