Driving home from our last road trip of the season (an awesome weekend in Ottawa) wmy wife and I read numerous lists to pass the time. It is sad how much time I can spend looking at assorted lists of the best movies ever made, getting angry at silliness of many of the choices.
As an aside my kids and I are watching the Dark Knight Trilogy by Christopher Nolan. The second of the three movies is on most best movie lists and I have to say that I am simply appalled by that.
I will be sitting through The Dark Knight Rises tonight and if the first two are any indication, I will be napping throughout. I find them to be interminably boring with no sense of pace and fairly awful action scenes.
Heath Ledger does good work in the second movie but it is too long by half, and really doesn’t need the Two-Face story line that makes it two movies in a way, both of which blow from my perspective. But what do I know?
Another group of lists was of influential books that people are putting up on Facebook. Some lists were obscure and others revealed people I would probably like to hang out with.
So here is a list of ten books that influenced my life. I thought there would be more novels, and in the end I had to leave off a couple of body books that I truly love but here you go:
Also, I just love the fact that I can find images of the original paperback covers that I read.
  
  
Ten Books That Influenced My Life
- The World According To Garp- John Irving
- The Stand- Stephen King
- Letters To A Young Poet- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Drama Of The Gifted Child- Alice Miller
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas- Hunter Thompson
- Junky-William Burroughs
- The Crack In The Cosmic Egg- Joseph Chilton Pearce
- Lonesome Dove- Larry McMurtry
- Tao Te Ching- Lao Tzu
- The Body Has It’s Reasons- Therese Bertherat