Books I've actually finished lately: 83

Facebooks - I

So, this thing is going round that you name ten books that had a major impact on you.

Ten books is not enough.

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The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Disgrace - JM Coetzee
Oscar Wilde - Richard Ellmann
One of the many biographies of The Doors [I will endeavour to recall         the particular volume]
The New English Hymnal - various
Tintin [all of] - Hergé
Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis - Wendy Cope
The Last Samurai - Helen DeWitt
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto - David Shields
The Collected Stories of... - Lydia Davis

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Notes / Self-imposed Rules:

1) No particular order of importance.
2) Links are to editions read, where possible.
3) One book per author.
4) -ish. Book stipulated is either first read or first enjoyed.

St James'ses

James Wood's use of the possessive in 'David Shields's recent manifesto "Reality Hunger"' (here, final para) is just plain ugly. But 'Roland Barthes's prosecutorial ruthlessness' (three lines later) is a real mind-warper.

Either it counts as doubly hideous - implying, as it may, that we think 'Barthes' is actually pronounced 'Barths' or 'Bart(h)ez' - and/or a mutant result of obsessive adherence to 'house style'; or it demonstrates an assumption that every New Yorker-reader knows full well that you don't pronounce the 'es' on the end of 'Barthes'.

Anyone fancy odds?*

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*French-speakers do not apply.