From Twitter 02-19-2010

• 00:17:44: @RedneckGaijin Oh, I dunno. I checked two different machines; both my home machines, yes. But your trick also worked for me.
  
• 17:13:58: "At the moment I am terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought." #ghostbustersfriday
  
• 18:41:27: Watching BVS 3.promnight
  
• 18:49:17: There's just something in my eye.
  
• 23:29:29: Catching up on the DVR. Tonight: stuff from the week of January 25.
  

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from bodybag_pilgrim (quoting <user site="livejournal.com" user

If you tend toward books (and if you don't at least somewhat, the odds of you being an LJ devotee to whatever degree are pretty slim), then it's a good bet that you've got a number of books that really resonated with you, often to the extent of informing your development as a person and your view of the world. These are not always classics of literature. Often they are, viewed objectively, really deeply awful books. That's not the point. The point is that they were the right (or wrong, nothing says they had to have a positive influence) thing for you to read at the right time, and they stayed with you in a meaningful way.

The number of these varies, but most people if queried can come up with three of them. One or more of them were likely encountered between the ages of 11 and 13, and may have been the first "grown up" book you read. Beyond that, I can't think of any set pattern, and even those may just be a coincidental cluster of data points. Nonetheless, I'm newly fascinated by this question and I wish to ask it here.

Help me out then, my friends. Name your top three core texts. If you wish to include age when encountered, positive or negative influence, general summary of the text, or type of influence it exerted on you, that would be likewise awesome.

1. A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. My first exposure was so far back that my earliest recollection of it/them is bringing Winnie-the-Pooh home from the the day the first grade was taught how libraries work, and my mother saying, "But we have that." I was not yet articulate enough to say that (or had not yet articulated that) I just wanted the first book I took from a library to be Winnie-the-Pooh. Years later when I read Hoff's The Tao of Pooh it not only made me realize that my values and worldview come largely from this Bear and his, but validated those values and worldview with a major world religion/philosophy. And if you don't believe that, notice that the hero of my webcomic, his familiar name and supporting cast notwithstanding, is Pooh made human (and tall and thin).
2. T.H. White, The Once and Future King. When we were reading Tennyson in tenth grade my mother mentioned that there's a novel out there that Camelot was based on. I read the tetralogy annually throughout high school. Between Pooh, Charlie Brown and Henry Blake my heroes had always been nice guys who never really knew what was going on, and here in contrast to Henry Blake was one who became a famous leader, the most famous king of Britain ever. This story tells us that kingdoms are brought down not by those who love but by those who hate. If you want spoilers for the fairy tale time zone of my webcomic, you may as well read this.
3. Hm, one slot left and no science fiction yet. Well then, there's the other book I read annually in high school, Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye. Continuing the thread of influence, this must have been off my mother's shelf, and when it was just about new. Additional to its appeal was that it was a starship story like Star Trek, but also it's a good story with characters I could visualize and was interested in playing onscreen (back when I aspired to a screen acting career). To this day, when I work somewhere I have a desk, I keep this book and its sequel The Gripping Hand on my desk so I'll never be without something good to read.