Literature
I am a born-again book worm. Entering university intending to pursue a major in Economics, I hated my first econ course and cut bait. At the same time the fog was lifting from my adolescent boredom with reading and I found myself interested in books. I switched majors and have been grateful ever since for getting an education grounded in literature. I've also been pleased to find many technology colleagues with similar interests in literature, language and music.
While I'm not exclusively loyal to one genre I do like 18th and 19th century American, British and Russian fiction. I've also learned that a good author, like a good teacher, can make subjects interesting I would otherwise ignore. I tend to read several books at a time, like carrying on long-distance correspondence with a few friends simultaneously. I choose books recommended by acquaintances and book flaps, titles I find on recon trips to Barnes and Noble, and by consulting reference lists of the Western Canon. I don't have a horse in the Canon controversy race, I simply appreciate the effort others have expended in compiling lists of great Western literature, much in the way I enjoy lists of great movies or albums. It's interesting to see where I agree and where I don't.
I like books that make me think, that tell great, surprising stories, that express language richly or that stir my emotions. Once in a lucky while I connect with works that do all of that. Authors that have left an indelible mark on me include Alan Booth, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, John Bunyan, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor (the short fiction equivalent of the Coen brothers), Edgar Allen Poe, Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Washington Irving, John Donne, Alexandre Dumas, Hermann Hesse, Jack London, J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Herman Melville and the like. Among currently active writers I read a lot of books by Neal Stephenson, Bill Bryson, John Updike, Dan Brown, Elmore Leonard and John Grisham.
If I were to compile a list of works that- for varying reasons- pushed my button, a few mandatory inclusions would be Crime and Punishment, Cryptonomicon, A Tale of Two Cities, The Roads to Sata, Bartleby the Scrivener, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Snow Crash, To Build a Fire, Siddhartha, Young Goodman Brown, On the Road, Tishomingo Blues, The Da Vinci Code, Shantaram and The Pilgrim's Progress.
