It seems to me now that many of these books read in my late teens/early twenties share some strain of passionate longing or desire for getting beyond where you are and an almost willful obliviousness to that very place - which might be the essence of adolescence.

In high school a girl named Marva was passing around a battered copy of The Happy Hooker lifted from her mother's lingerie drawer.  It startled me, fresh from Catholic school and mass six days a week,  but as I've not had sex with a German Shepard nor made an economy of my carnal adventures, I can't say it influenced me to any great degree.  At the time I'd  yet to encounter my own sexuality in the flesh, so The Happy Hooker was the literary (and sexual) equivalent to wandering through an overheated wax museum.   It was no more or less real to me than fairy tales or myths: Leda and the Swan, maybe. What's-her-name, Xaviera, made an impression, but it was nothing like the imprint D.H. Lawrence  made a few years later.  

I love Lawrence in a sentimental way he would probably abhor.  I don't know why some people want me to feel embarrassed by that.  If you enjoy Whitman and Emerson, chances are you'll feel some affinity for Lawrence.  His is a transcendentalism without puritanical shadows and whispers and minus the promiscuous bravado of Whitman's muscular romanticism.  Messy, adolescent, blowsy, immoral, confused, egoistic: Lawrence lets us transcend formulas for perfecting ourselves. In this time of internet porn and sexting the language of sex in his books might seem quaint, but it hardly matters because it isn't about the sex.  It's about how his characters intimately experience their lives.

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor - Dark, sly, and hilarious.  I read O'Connor because my mother, Catholic and dying, did.  Black humor was a coin of the realm in our world: it purchased relief from the subtexts of Death and Salvation.

I read Anna Karenina when I was fourteen.  Sort of.  I was too young for it.  Also, I was more than half-way through the book and confused as hell when it finally dawned on me that the number of characters in it was about a third as many as I'd thought.  Patronyms, matronyms, and diminutives - oh, my! Oh, well - Tolstoy prepared me for my later acquaintance with Dostoevsky.  Of all his works,  Dostoevsky's The Idiot  is my favorite.  The story is funny and sad and unbearably, stupidly human.

But I'll add though that there is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you for ever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps, the most important of your ideas.

-  Prince Myshkin, The Idiot

Oh hell. Well, that's gonna be my excuse.

The Life and Times of Michael K.  by J.M. Coetzee - I was so moved by a single image in this book that I carry it around in my head to this day, a thought amulet. The image is the antithesis of Prufrock's coffee spoon deliberations.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marques -  I devoured fairy tales and myths when I was a child.  Then I gobbled whole series of mysteries.  There was always a lesson, a warning, an aphorism, the great reveal: reasons.  Magical Realism is an adult funhouse version, a weird recursion, of the fantastical tales children tell when they're still floating in a sea of alpha waves, before their imaginary friends move out of town.  Jose Arcadia Buendia seeks the philosopher's stone, but in Macondo alchemy is superfluous and any sense of control is myth.  I was twenty when I read this, upon a friend's recommendation.  It was August and easy to understand tropical torpor and the romance of ice.  Lying on my stomach on the cool floor, the buzz of summer in my ear, I read the last words of this book and so didn't want it to end,  I immediately turned it over and began reading it again.

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford begins "This is the saddest story I have ever heard" - but it's the story you aren't told, about the stories no one learns about themselves and others, that really breaks your heart.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf  -  Miraculously mundane.  So much of our experience of life happens in our heads and in the stories we tell ourselves.

The Ambassadors by Henry James - The protagonist, Strether, exhorts us to live, really live, our lives. Not a rollicking read, but amusing and philosophical.  The ending is moving, even unsettling, to the point of shifting you to another, possibly unknown, place.

The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm -  This was on a high shelf at home, an old book that belonged to my mother.  I thought it might be something like the book Mrs. J. (for whom I babysat) kept in the drawer of her nightstand.  No.  "Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love."   There's more, psychological prose and some commentary on how we commoditize love, but really, that's the gist of it.  I knew a man who said we should never say "I love you"; rather, we should ask "Do I love you?"  I think about that often.

The Red Limit: The Search for the Edge of the Universe by Timothy Ferris - I read this deep in underground tunnels, riding the subway to and from work. The book was somewhat out of date when I read it, but it was all new to me.  Ostensibly, it's a history of astrophysics; when I read it the universe of me expanded. 

And so back to Lawrence:

What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his "soul." Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.  - Apocalypse, 1930