V.

I'm not sure what "fundamentally" means in this context, but these certainly made a lasting impact upon my young mind: Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter Dune by Frank Herbert Post Office by Charles Bukowski V. by Thomas Pynchon Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy Pretty much everything by JL Borges

Some authors and a rec or two for each. DFW - Infinite Jest Pynchon - Really anything, but in particular Against the Day, V, and Gravity's Rainbow. Rushdie - Shame and Satanic Verses, a lot of good other ones. Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon Gaddis - JR, hence my name. Heller - Catch-22

I got myself a Sony Reader mid-2009 and started reading about twice more than I had been before. 2009 was also the first year in which I wasn't too lazy to document which books I read (I'm really glad I wasn't). Here're some of the favourites this year: Classics: Kafka's The Process and America - both stunning novels that deserve to be read as much as his most famous, The Castle. Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - a trippy collection of tales organised in multiple nested frames. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. Still as breathtaking as I'd remembered it from the previous reading five years ago. Science Fiction: Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe, whom I hadn't read before, turns out to be in a class of his own. It's literary SF, overwhelmingly masterful and beautiful in its prose and characters, yet it could give any hardcore SF novel a run in terms of its ideas. It demands and richly rewards a close reading. I'll be reading more Wolfe in 2010.…

V. by Thomas Pynchon The Life of Pi by Yann Martel the McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (Not a book per se, but very enjoyable) Shakespeare (Everything, I'm surprised he's only been mentioned once so far) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe Shogun by James Clavell Then, of course, the regular hodgepodge of Card, Asimov, Adams, Gaiman, Pratchet, Stephenson, Feynman, and that LOTR guy, Tolkey or sommat. (In all seriousness, though, all of these authors are phenomenal, if well-known for being such)