The following 50 books each, for good or for ill, helped shape the person I am today. The first 10 or so were easy, came right off the top of my head. After that, I slowly scanned the shelves and waited for the strongest memories to hit. 

• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth
• Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
• The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
• Empire by Gore Vidal
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
• The Sea Wolf by Jack London
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• Couples by John Updike
• Candide by Voltaire
• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
• A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby
• Priority by Iselin C. Hermann
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
• Democracy by Henry Adams
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• Europa by Tim Parks
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
• The Clothes They Stood Up In by Alan Bennett
• Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier
• The Fermata by Nicholson Baker
• The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
• The Quiet American by Graham Greene
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Bunker Hill by Howard Fast
• The Girl of the Sea of Cortez by Peter Benchley
• The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd
• West with the Night by Beryl Markham
• Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
• Guerrillas by V.S. Naipaul
• Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
• The Magician’s Assistant by Ann Patchett
• The Farewell Party by Milan Kundera
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
• Centennial by James A. Michener
• A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
• The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
• On Photography by Susan Sontag
• The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
• Angel of Lucifer by William Kircher
• Beachcombing at Miramar by Richard Bode
• The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

Michael Kircher’s camera has taken him from Washington, DC, to Paris; from the Pacific Northwest to the Appalachian Mountains; from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mediterranean Sea. On an ever-evolving photographic journey, he is equally at home on city streets and backcountry trails. Kircher’s photography and/or photographic essays have appeared in Granta, National Parks, Maryland Life, and burn.