i know where beauty lives...

Ten books that have changed my life, in order of personal impact:

1. Genesis. A value system is born. Our paradigmatic notions of good and evil are fashioned. The story of Abraham and Isaac haunts me to this day.

2. On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche. Singlehandedly turned my moral landscape upside down. Shocking, terrifying, liberating.

3. Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard. Subjectivity is discovered; objectivity is rendered utterly uninteresting.

4. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce. The modern individual is born in Stephen Dedalus--such tragedy, such emotion, such truth.

5. King Lear, Shakespeare. Tragedy reaches a cosmic level. The only appropriate reaction is silence.

6. Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky. Caustic, irrational, self-deprecating, unapproachable. Life is exposed.

7. Nausea, Sartre. The world becomes unstable, detached, contingent. Anything is possible.

8. The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner. Separation between the characters and the reader is demolished. We experience the characters.

9. The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger. A treatise on alienation and self-discovery. The adolescent is defined.

10. Waiting for Godot, Beckett. Asks the ultimate existential question: What are we waiting for? We yet await an answer.