These are not recommendations nor endorsements. They're just books that made me, including recent books that crept into my heart to live and breathe with me.
Where possible, each author is represented only once; if you've read an author's other books (and definitely books in the same series), you might consider checking it off... There are a couple of cases where I made an exception and represented the same author multiple times: Ursula Le Guin, Jo Walton, Rosemary Sutcliff and Tolkien. They got a pass because they were THAT formative at different times in my life.
Where a work is in translation, the translator doesn't matter EXCEPT for Beowulf, where the Seamus Heaney translation is specifically being chosen, and for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where I am referring to the ORIGINAL in Middle English and a specific experience of reading it untranslated.
There are many books that could be here, and some books that should be here, and aren't. Arbitrary choices have been arbitrary.
