In the order I read them:

1. The Little House on the Prairie Books.  This is where I feel in love with reading, and learned how to make a door without nails.  A lovely story with lots of practical advice.

2. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith.  Beautifully written tale of the pain of growing up from a sensitive young girl's perspective.  Deals with religion and poverty in a very unaffected way. 

3. The Honeymooner's by Chuck Kinder.  I read this when I first started smoking pot, and this tale of deciet and drug and alchol filled heartbreak kept me on the straight and narrow.  And it's a story of a friendship between two men that cannot be broken.

4. On the Geneology of Morals, by Nietzche.  Defies easy explanation, just pick the damn thing up.

5. The Republic.  Plato.  See above.

6. The Word, The Line, The Way.  Charles Bukowski.  This is later Bukowski, when he quit womanizing and writes layman sociology in poem form.  Lovely.

7. The Early Stories. John Updike.  A master at work.  Each of these stories is like a precious gift of syntax.

8. On Beauty. Zadie Smith.  A family story with drama and comedy in real life measures.

9.  Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.  Wittgenstein.  Ever wondered where those deconstructionists get off, and how the world appears to humans?  Dust off that symbolic logic, read this book, and be enlightened.  Of course, he recants at the end of his life, but so did Macnamara.

10. A Suitable Boy.  Vikram Seth.  The longest book ever published in English, a love song to the novella and novel form, and a great way to be exposed to foreign poetry.  Worth every one of it's 1400 pages, nothing is extraneous.

 Enjoy.