15 books ~ plus one

Facebook had a meme going around, in July 2009, encouraging folks to "name 15 books that will always stick with you."  I was curious about which books were most meaningful to me.  Here are my 15 books, in alphabetical order.  Plus one.  The bad part of making a list like this is later remembering a book that would definitely have made the list if only I'd remembered it in time.  In my case, that book was Herland (#16).

#1 ~ Agape Love: A Tradition Found in Eight World Religions ~ by John Templeton, 1999, religion, 10/10
#2 ~ The Gnostic Gospels ~ by Elaine Pagels, 1979, religion, 10/10
#3 ~ The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions ~ by Karen Armstrong, 2006, religion, 10/10
#4 ~ The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith ~ by Marcus J. Borg, 2003, religion, 10/10
#5 ~ Honest to God ~ by John A. T. Robinson, 1963, religion, 10/10

#6 ~ Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 ~ by Simon Winchester, 2003, history, 10/10
#7 ~ Miss Rumphius ~ by Barbara Cooney, 1982, children's, 10/10
#8 ~ The Mists of Avalon ~ by Marion Zimmer Bradley, 1982, fantasy, 10/10
#9 ~ The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity ~ by Hyam Maccoby, 1986, religion, 8/10
#10 ~ The Secret Life of Bees ~ by Sue Monk Kidd, 2002, fiction, 10/10
#11 ~ The Social Construction of Reality ~ by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, 1966, philosophy, 10/10
#12 ~ Time and Again ~ by Jack Finney, 1970, speculative fiction (New York), 10/10
#13 ~ Train to Pakistan ~ by Khushwant Singh, 1956, fiction (India), 10/10
#14 ~ Worlds in Collision ~ by Immanuel Velikovsky, 1950, planetary theory, 9/10
#15 ~ A Wrinkle in Time ~ by Madeleine L'Engle, 1962, YA fiction, 10/10
#16 ~ Herland ~ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1915, women's studies, 10/10

Herland ~ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915) is one I re-read about once a decade for quite a few years.

This utopian novel describes an isolated society composed entirely of women who reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction).  The result is an ideal social order, free of war, conflict, and domination.

Time and Again ~ by Jack Finney (1970) is my favorite time travel story.

"Sleep. And when you awake everything you know of the twentieth century will be gone from your mind.  Tonight is January 21, 1882.  There are no such things as automobiles, no planes, computers, television.  'Nuclear' appears in no dictionary.  You have never heard the name Richard Nixon."  Did illustrator Si Morley really step out of his twentieth-century apartment one night — right into the winter of 1882?  The U.S. Government believed it, especially when Si returned with a portfolio of brand-new sketches and tintype photos of a world that no longer existed — or did it?

Train to Pakistan ~ by Khushwant Singh (1956) is an historical novel I assigned students in my Religions of the World classes to read.

This book of fiction follows the fate of Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu inhabitants of one village during the violent 1947 partition of the Punjab region between India and Pakistan.  What could happen when people are forced to relocate because of their religion?