I really need to read more. I read so much when I was in middle school and high school...
I would go out of my way to read (though come middle school I would weigh it with computer games from Sierra and Lucas Arts, among others) and blow off my friends to do so.
The authors and works stick out in my mind as making impressions on me at the time...
- Poe (My dad used to read him to me when I was younger... I memorized "The Raven" in second grade but my teacher wouldn't let me recite it)... "Annabel Lee" and "A Dream Within A Dream" were my two absolute favorite poems. I also remember vividly him reading "The Cask of Amontillado" to me
- Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, October Country)
- Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five, Welcome to the Monkey House)
- Anthony Burgess (Clockwork Orange)
- Art Spiegelman (Maus, Maus II)
- David Sedaris (Barrel Fever, Naked)
- Shakespeare (at the time Hamlet and Othello were personal favorites of mine)
Come college I was an English major... Discussing the works of these authors changed their meaning for me and made me respect them on a whole other level:
Poe (It was great to return to Poe in my college life and analyze the literary works that I had embraced in my childhood)
- "The Black Cat"
- "The Fall of the House of Usher"
- "The Pit and the Pendulum"
- "William Wilson"
Shakespeare
- As You Like It
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Henry IV Part I
Faulkner (his short stories were especially compelling)
- The Sounds and the Fury <-- (personal favorite of mine)
- Light in August
- "A Rose for Emily"
- "Red Leaves"
Favorite Poets
- Blake (Songs of Innocence and Experience)
- Coleridge ("Dejection: An Ode")
- Wordsworth ("Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood")
- John Keats ("Nightingale")
- Lord Byron ("When We Two Parted")
- Robert Herrick <-- A VERY cunning linguist ("Delight in Disorder," "Upon Julia's Clothes," "The Bracelet to Julia")
- T. S. Eliot ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock")
I also read a lot of Camus and Sartre.
...
Post-college I didn't read nearly enough as I had expected to. Some of the best books I've read after college (that would be after 2004) include:
- Nabokov's Lolita
- Irving's World According to Garp <-- (life-changing novel; I recommend it)
- Atwood's Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake (for scifi literary fans, I HIGHLY recommend this book)
- Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis I and Persepolis II
- Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts
- Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore
I've also gone through all of the Harry Potter books and most of The Series of Unfortunate Events books.
I'd like to say that in my adult life I devote more time to reading. Unfortunately I just don't have the attention span for it most of the time (and I'm a slow reader who takes in every individual word that it's frustrating sometimes how long it takes to finish a book). I do most of my reading now the 15 minutes before I crash at night. With the stress of work, I pretty much crash with the television when I get home... Or the damn XBox360... I SWEAR I'm losing brain cells with every passing day...