New meme. Bold the titles. You know the drill. (via this guy)

Here goes:

1. The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell
.3. Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip Dick
5. Neuromancer — William Gibson
6. Dune — Frank Herbert
7. I, Robot — Isaac Asimov
8. Foundation — Isaac Asimov
9. The Colour of Magic — Terry Pratchett
10. Microserfs — Douglas Coupland
11. Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson
12. Watchmen — Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
13. Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson
14. Consider Phlebas — Iain M Banks
15. Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert Heinlein
16. The Man in the High Castle — Philip K Dick
17. American Gods — Neil Gaiman
18. The Diamond Age — Neal Stephenson
19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy — Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
20. Trouble with Lichen – John Wyndham

David Hudson passes along this list of books that notables fell in love with in college. While Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban’s plaudits for Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead are preposterously predictable (“I don’t know how many times I have read it, but it got to the point where I had to stop because I would get too fired up”), but it’s interesting that George Saunders was such a big Thomas Wolfe fan.

Surpisingly, however, there’s no Orwell for Hitch.

As for me, the writers that blew me away when I was a lad of twenty-one (and that I discovered in the library almost entirely by accident) were John Cheever (which I liked for his attention to manners), Erskine Caldwell (which I liked for the sex), Guy de Maupassant (which I liked for the sex and the twist endings), the stories of Somerset Maugham (who led me to de Maupassant) and Thomas Wolfe (which, like Saunders, I enjoyed for his heartiness).

What authors did you discover or read in your undergraduate days?

[UPDATE: Jenny D lists her choices, a far more impressive selection than mine.]

Worthy of the 400 Windmills? Who can say? But Isabella’s thoughts on reading Don Quixote for the first time certainly recall mine. If you have somehow managed to go through life this long without reading Cervantes’ great novel, then perhaps the passion presented here might encourage you to do so.