Ulysses. Surprised I haven't seen it mentioned yet, as it normally is in book threads on HN. The reason that it had, and still has, such a positive influence on my life is the plethora of literary tools which it possesses. It allows for infinite play and imagination, while still being the apparent product of extreme dedication and earned mastery. In fact, I prefer Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man as a novel, and I'm sure that the Wake is a perfect encyclopedia of language, cryptography, history, et al. But Ulysses takes it as an (humerous, profound, tricky, psychoanalytic, poetic, radical) example of the process of artistic experiment, the practically infinite range of the possible, and the unforgiving merit of deep study and eclectic knowledge. I go back every so often to bounce my own ideas and troubling sentences off of it, more often than not just to get a little bit of validation.…
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