Some books hit me where I live as a writer, some where I live as a reader, some where I live as a human. This masterpiece accomplished all three. It forced changes and realizations in how I think about word craft, how I present characters and place and the arc of a tale, and, in some ways, how I look at the people around me.

This was the first "contemporary" historical novel I read, and it showed me that history doesn't have to be dusty, but can be fresh and relevant and entertaining and heart-breaking. I took my cue from it and have been writing historical fiction ever since.

This is the travelogue that made me realize a woman could hit the open road sola and define her journey on her own terms. It inspired an entire generation of female travel writers -- myself among them.

The book showed me one can write quite seriously about the weird. It's also one of the most striking form = function works—it does to the reader what has happened to the protagonist.

Fell in love with writing, and fell in love with writing again.

No book has horrified me more, gripped me more, or fascinated me more. Gulag's three volumes swirl with millions of ghosts, and no work has better established the ultimate importance of literature.

Like a lot of stupid young men, I once hoped to write scathing commentary that would make my readers ashamed of themselves. This English family saga made me want to help readers love people who do shameful things.

Huff's charming and eye-opening classic remains as timeless as ever. It should be part of every citizen's field kit—you'll never look at a newspaper, watch a commercial, or listen to a politician in the same way again after reading this book.

Poetry can be salsa, hip hop chchifrito vernacular organic storytelling featuring homeboys like Kryptonite and Boogaloo… and still be high art.

One of the five funniest books ever written, teaching potential writers that a) cause-and-effect plots never grow tiresome as long as b) we love the characters who c) will remain lovable even if they do odious things while d) pursuing a goal we want them to achieve.

It's a book about breaking away from a stifling upbringing to become the adult you were meant to be, while falling into doomed love affairs and creating the friendships that will last a lifetime. It's also a riveting and startling piece of history—a look at how life for gay men, in the years before the Stonewall Riots, was both terribly repressed and achingly vibrant.

I read Lost Horizon when I was barely a teenager and had just made an exhilarating, terrifying, life-bending choice. The book took me like a storm: I wanted to leap into it and wrestle Conway to the ground to keep him in his place of dreams, as I was struggling to keep myself in mine. It made me braver about my own choices at a time when I needed all the courage I could find. It's a great, joyful, tragic, hopeful book.

There's a scene where Ray, the fifty-one year old multi-millionaire software genius savant, is eating dinner out of a white paper bag while standing in his kitchen. Watershed moment when I read it. I guess I instantly knew should my wildest dreams ever come true—like, say, later in life discovering I had somehow become a multi-millionaire software genius savant—I would still be eating take-out or delivery while standing at my kitchen sink.

When I was 20 I read this book and it made me burn with such fury that I shut myself in my flat and refused to leave for fear I would kill the first man I met. I was in the room for three days with no phone, no TV, and no books I hadn't already read; bored, traped, and crazy with rage, I started to write a book of my own…

Portnoy showed me, at age 15, that sex is an acceptable topic for literature, and that sex is funny. Experience has revealed aht the sex scenes are much closer to realism than I previously thought.

I didn't read for pleasure between the ages of 13-20. In college, my best friend handed me this book, asked me to read it, and wouldn't listen when I argued. I now re-read it every few years and leave a candle at the Aids Memorial in San Francisco in honor of Randy Shilts, the man I credit with reawakening my interest in reading and writing. His book brought me, through its anger, compassion and soul, into adulthood.

I'm hardly the first writer to claim existential transformation at the hands (okay, the pen, the typewriter, whatever…) of Joan Didion, but to be 22-years-old and reading sentences that go on for nearly a page and employ more commas than many writers use in entire chapters is to find oneself kneeling at a sort of literary altar. That last sentence, which is more or less a bad stylistic rip-off of Joan Didion, is a good indication of how much The White Album (and, in quick succession, all her other books) changed my life. On behalf of the thousands of young writers who steal from Didion everyday, all I can say is thanks.