One of those memes which has been circulating on the Web surfaced in Terry Teachout's column recently. His selection (bearing in mind his North American roots) of those titles which came to him in a quarter-of-an-hour was:
Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood
James Gould Cozzens’ Guard of Honor
Boswell’s Life of Johnson
Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now
John P. Marquand’s Point of No Return
Barbara Pym’s A Glass of Blessings
Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour (yes, it’s a trilogy, but I first read it in the one-volume omnibus version)
Dawn Powell’s The Locusts Have No King
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye
Clement Greenberg’s Collected Essays and Criticism (a four-volume set, but I think of it as a single work)
George Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (ditto)
David Cairns’ Berlioz (a two-volume biography, but I think of it as a single work)
Fairfield Porter’s Art in Its Own Terms
Edwin Denby’s Looking at the Dance
It seems to me that the lists I have seen so far are a bit too worthy. One is influenced by all sorts of literature before one is even introduced to the concept. Ones childhood reading has a greater influence that most people care to admit. Wind in the Willows and the Alice books certainly still affect me, along with Dickens, Hardy, Orwell, JP Marquand (again), Dorothy L Sayers and Nigel Balchin.
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