Hmmm...books that influenced me: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Starship Troopers, To Kill a Mockingbird, Animal Farm, 1984, all of the Sherlock Holmes canon, all of the Heinlein canon (Eiseley, you weren't even BORN when I read "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel"), all of Mark Twain, Geoff Chaucer's stuff*, Billy-Bob Shakespeare's stuff, The Things They Carried, stuff by people like Sophocles and Caesar and Aristophanes and Aristotle, The Defense of Poesy, Aeroapegitica (spelled wrong), Johnny Dunne's stuff, Alex Pope's verses, Jon-boy Swift's writings, Keats and Shelley and gang, Ruddy Kipling, Bill B. Yeats, Jimmy Joyce, and a whole lot more. Feel free to come browse through the couple of thousand books I have, and the couple of thousand my wife and I jointly have, and with her permission the couple of thousand she has. Oh, I didn't mention "The Gospel of the Magdalene" or the Nag Hamadi library or D&C or The Baghava Gita or the Tao Te Chin or the Old and New Testaments or the teaching of the Buddha or the Zen stuff.

That'll do for now.

*Including "A Treatise on the Astrolab."