Impact: Showing me that “grown up books” don’t always leave childhood themes behind

Our high school basketball team was traveling to a state tournament, and I couldn’t sleep. It’s not that I was nervous about tomorrow’s game—I was a bench-warmer at best—but that I had started reading Watership Down and was hooked. While The Shining was probably the first adult, unputdownable book I ever read, Watership Down was the first book that successfully drew me into a fantasy world. I’d still judge it as a book for adults, yet it was fully accessible to me then. Although animal-themed, it’s much darker than Redwall, containing similar cultures and legends but lacking the miniature-world elements of Brian Jacques’ books, the swords and clothes and all. I’ve since read Richard Adams’ Plague Dogs and have Shardik perpetually on my must-read list. Watership Down taught me that growing up didn’t mean leaving my imagination behind.

Impact: Instilling in me (at the right time) a longing to travel and see the world

Before reading Peter Jenkins’ Across China (1986)—a book that was instrumental in taking me to Asia following graduation—I first read Jenkins’ two books about walking across America: from New York to Louisianna in A Walk Across America and from Louisianna to the Pacific coast in The Walk West (1981). You could call these books “gateway-drugs for the Wanderlust borne in every Twenty-something.” They’re emotional, personal, and adventurous travelogues, and in this one especially, Jenkins adds a strong spiritual element that was perfect for me at age 20 or 21. I’m not much of a walker, hiker, or jogger, but in my 40s I’m still a traveler. The wanderlust remains strong…I just wish I took more cultural notes about the places I visit than the “work notes” I’m determined to take. Maybe I need to read this one again for inspiration.

Impact: Introducing me to a the wonderful world of graphic memoirs and travelogues

This is one of those books that landed in my lap randomly—if I recall, I picked up at a library bag sale—yet opened me to a whole new world of literature. This particular world was that of the non-fiction graphic novel. It’s a niche market, sure, but a great one. In fact, I still hold out a minor hope that someday I’ll learn how to draw well (and consistently) enough to publish my own story and travelogues in this format. It’s a pipe dream, but one I enjoy having. Guy Delisle expertly handles China’s cultural quirks through which he struggled during his short time working in Shenzhen, and he later did the same for other places like Burma and Jerusalem. He’s a genius author and artist who lit a little spark in my life. And who knows—maybe someday, life will slow down enough for me to doodle, and then…

Impact: Making me question history—or at least history as it’s been taught to me

This is perhaps the most recent read in my list of 20 influential books. In this age of intensifying distrust in legacy and mainstream media—not to mention the rise of citizen journalism on X and YouTube—it’s so difficult to know what to believe. In this book, James Bradley unveils the reality that propaganda is nothing new, and that despite our “freedom of the press”, Americans have always been susceptible to lies. China’s KMD pulled the wool over many eyes in the 1930s and ’40s, and Christians proved especially gullible. While I don’t buy every claim that Bradley makes in this book, he certainly makes me consider—and honestly doubt—the history I’ve been taught all my life. It’s a healthy exercise to read occasionally those willing to attack revisionist history, even while being accused of revising history themselves.