When I was in my teens and twenties, I thought of books -- both fiction and non-fiction, but probably especially fiction -- as an important way of gaining the information I would need to survive in the world, and especially to survive in the social world.
In college, and in the interim years between college and graduate school, I had a very definite list of books that I considered important. I tried to get anyone who I was friendly with to read the books on this list, both because I thought that these were the essential books that anyone would need to read in order to understand the world, and because they were the books someone would need to read in order to understand me. My ex-wife was the only one I ever managed to convince to read many of them, however. She was the only person in my life who was ever as interested in me as I was in myself.
And then, after she finally understood the person I considered myself to me, I changed. (But that's another story, and a rather sad one all around.)
These were books that had a powerful emotional resonance for me. A friend who read several of the books on my life once said to me, ``But all the books on your list are depressing.'' Well, yes. (With a few exceptions, such as Lucky Jim and perhaps J. P. Donleavy.) They were all in tune with the way I perceived the world.
I cannot reconstruct that list now. Some of them are in the list that follows: George Orwell, Huxley's Brave New World, Maughm's The Razor's Edge, George Bernard Shaw (all of his plays, really, and perhaps the prefaces to the plays even more so), Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading and The Cantos (I really should list all of his books here), David Riesmann, The Golden Bough, Thorstein Veblen, Eric Berne, Kurt Vonnegut, J.P. Donleavy, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (a short story) by Carson McCullers, ``The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'' by T.S. Eliot, The Stranger by Camus (but none of his other books), Robert Lindner's book of psychiatric case histories The Fifty-minute Hour, and Hannah Green's autobiography of a schizophrenic I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.
There was a time, later in my life, when I would have omitted certain authors from the this list because I was ashamed of ever having liked them. But they were important influences in my life, and while I may no longer agree with them (as in the case of Ayn Rand) or may now find them superficial (as in the case of George Bernard Shaw), I still think that they had important things to say to the world.
After I graduated from college, the books that were important to me (Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills) reflected my attempt to come to terms with a new harsh aspect of reality: the fact that there was apparently no place in the world for someone with my range of interests. Computers, at that time, seemed like one of the most exciting aspects of science. But I soon discovered that as a computer programmer, I had about the same relationship to science that a seamstress in New York's garment district (or, now, in Thailand) had to the world of high fashion. And I couldn't find any way of earning a living that would be at all compatible with my interests. I attempted to become a teacher in an alternative educational structure (Summerlane), only to find no students there who wanted my teaching (or any teaching at all, for that matter).
Also, as far as literature went, after I graduated from college, I was no longer able to find contemporary authors who seemed to have real significance for me. I was reading Updike, Cheever, Malamud, Norman Mailer, Ken Kesey, and Saul Bellow, and they seemed good enough in their way, but none of them seemed to matter in the way that Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Dos Passos had. Lawrence Durrell was almost my only new literary enthusiasm in the three years while I was a computer programmer. I still eagerly read every new novel by Iris Murdoch (who I had originally discovered in high school), although years later (say starting with Bruno's Dream) I would find her subsequent books unreadable. Henry Miller was inaccessible to me, since his books were at that time considered illegal pornography.
Finally, as an acceptance of my ultimate failure at becoming the person I wanted to be, I applied to graduate school, eventually becoming a mathematician and having about the same relationship to scientific progress as a programmer of clothes-designing software has to the world of high fashion. (Less, actually).
By the time I entered graduate school, the boy who in high school had been reading Kant and Schopenhauer and Sartre's novels, and all of Hemingway and all of Fitzgerald no longer existed.
When I got into graduate school, I found myself under too much stress to do any serious reading, except for mathematics. I now used reading as a drug -- a tranquillizer -- and read enormous quantities of spy novels and mysteries. Earlier in my life I had held mysteries in contempt, but once I started reading them I found that many of them were quite as well written as many mainstream novels. The fact that few of them appear on the list below is primarily due to the fact that by that time in my life, reading no longer played the important role in my life that it once had. But I have no apologies for my liking for the novels of John Le Carré, Eric Ambler, Len Deighton, Nicholas Freeling (but only his Van der Valk books), Ngaio Marsh, and many other mystery writers.
There's very little science fiction on the list that follows either. In my teens and twenties, I read a slew of it, and collectively it was undoubtedly a major influence in my life, but there are very few individual science fiction authors of that time who I can identify as having been important to me. Heinlein's Stranger in a Stranger Land was a major influence for me, as it was for almost everyone in the late Sixties, and I liked The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, but I couldn't get interested in most of Heinlein's other books. I think that for me, the sort of enthusiasm that many people had for Heinlein had already been used up much earlier, when I had been reading George Bernard Shaw and Ezra Pound's critical works.
Later on, after I finished graduate school, I became much more seriously interested in science fiction and fantasy. There are lots of authors who I certainly liked a whole lot: Roger Zelazny, Frederick Pohl, Samuel Delany (his earlier books), Joan Vinge, Patricia McKillip, John Crowley, C.J. Cherryh. Eventually I started trying to write science fiction myself, and I studied many books by these authors very thoroughly in my attempt to educate myself as a writer. But these books were not influential in my life in the same way that the other books on the list below were.