Book that left the biggest impression

[Tali]

What is the best book you have ever read? Or at least the one that had such strong imagery or characters that you just can't forget it?

[Jennie]

Hmmm. Alice in Wonderland was always one of my favorites growing up. The non-sensical characters and rhymes, and illogical situations that Alice would get into were always surreal, but somehow, made sense and were very real to me. To this day I still love the cracked out imagery and illusions from that book.

I also really love Enders Game.

[Jennie]

OH. And this is going waaaaaay back...and I know probably doesn't count. But, I loved The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. While there aren't many words, it's just one of those books that I never forget as an adult.

[Aaron]

Favorites from a couple of different genres:

Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
It is Stephen King's first book and it doesn't feel like anything else. At the same time, it is a simple story with few characters, but it is with passion. It is silky smooth prose with enough mystery to make you wonder, and enough detail to make you cringe.

The rest of the series is somewhat disappointing by comparison, because it feels like it fits his "mold" too closely sometimes.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
I am always trying to articulate how much this story means to me, and always falling sincerely short of the mark. The material is at once deeply serious/introspective and Bugs Bunny colorful and sarcastic. It is the book that I most often purchase for my closest friends as something I have to share.

[Timothy J.]

I've been into Crichton's stuff since I was in second grade (Jurassic Park was my second adult fiction read after Jaws), but Rising Sun was really the first book that affected me.

Being a young white kid I had no idea how business worked let alone how Japanese business culture worked. It opened my eyes quite a bit and is something I've gone back to a few times over the years I've been reading.

The first book that affected me emotionally? The Things They Carried by Tim....something Irish. We read an excerpt from it in my English 102 class and it was powerful and struck a chord with me. It was about soldiers in Vietnam and started out listing their armaments and what they had in their rucksack and how much each item weighed. As the story went on it was about the intangible baggage they held with them that had more weight than any one physical item.

That and the way the events jumped around and the kind of stream of consciousness way one of the threads was told really worked for me. I bought the book and loved it.

[Shayne Anigan]

I would have to say Native Son, the story about a black man in the 70s (I think) and the social injustice of how the color of his skin affected his environment (the plot goes he got a job as a driver for this rich white woman and she dies, the police thinks it's him, a man hunt out for him ensues and it gets sad it the end). It struck a chord with me, because I am in the field of psychology and to be able to read a book and envision how life feels through the eyes of someone else captivates me.
Another book that touched me is a book called "A child called It" by Dave Pelzer... It made me cry every night when I was reading it.

[Niko]

Totally biting Jennie's response for the same exact reason. Alice is my bible. The part of the book that changed the book from a rollicking adventure to "YO, THIS IS REAL TALK" for me was when she's traveling with the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass.

Another book is The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. All the characters in it suck. They're either immoral or weak and they made me angry as hell, but Kundera somehow made me learn to accept (some of) them and even feel sympathy. It's kind of like reading Madame Bovary, except the characters kind of redeem themselves in the end.

[Jennie]

Wonderland is real, Niko.

[Kari]

I love A Prayer for Owen Meany. John Irving has some other good ones too.

For fiction, I tend to navigate towards authors that are great storytellers (not always the best writers) like Stephen King, Michael Crichton, etc.

The Road - loved it