Zen & The Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig - the first time I read it, it opened my fact-accumulating mind to how much I didn't understand anything of reality or philosophy. The second two times it just reminded me more forcefully. Ironically, I have never fully understood the book, though I had at the last determined that I had achieved all that I could understand from it.
It's given me a much deeper level of ignorance then I'd had before.
Bliss, by Peter Carey - its beauty and hellishness and humour gave me the metaphor of absurd but necessary sacrosanctity of the human and inhuman suburban and beyond. It evolved my moribund belief system into an ever-expending and elaborated and filigreed atheistic metaphor that occasionally-and-briefly granted self-conscious spirituality to an unbeliever willing to let part of his mind be soothed by illogical, irrational non-sense. That is, it let me imbue the inanimate and animate with animism; the momentary with hallowed momentousness, and the momentous with an inviolable and inescapable gravity, all accompanied by presence and certainty of my wry and disbelieving, godless grin and barely-muffled, inappropriate laughter.
The Elegant Universe, by Brian Greene - the universe is really, really, really BIG! We don't know how it works...like
really don't know. We're learning though...slowly. It's kinda complicated.
An Imaginary Life, by David Malouf - every single event in your life - every curse, every challenge to yourself, every achievement no matter how minor, every failure, every emasculation, every love, every denial of that love, every death, every innumerable uncontrolled thing that sits on the timeline ahead of you and diverts you from expectations...they make you change, grow...metamorphose. Death is the final metamorphosis, that changes you into something else that is irrelevant to you, and you irrelevant to it. "Dust to dust".
If This Is A Man/The Truce, by Primo Levi - it showed me what it is to be human, and what can be done to you to take away your humanity from even your own concept of yourself, and the long journey through absurdity and irrelevance it can take to find your own humanity again (with the unwritten, despairing postscript, considering the ends of the author, that you might never be granted peace from that search). It tells you the worst that humans are capable of, what endurance means, and it
warns just how easy it is for us to become part of either end of that spectrum of oppression-to-oppressed, humanity-to-inhumanity, and how close we always are to it. It terrifies and depresses me more than any other book I've read. It is reluctant genius.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, by Douglas Adams - it's all funny though...life, the universe, everything. It's just that sometimes the entirely unexpected gratuitousness and brilliance of the universe's humour doesn't make you at all feel like laughing.
Cheers,
Marc