It's a guy thing

• The Guardian explores "the books that move men."

And the winner is... Albert Camus' The Stranger. (Apparently, across the pond it's known as The Outsider... po-tay-to, po-tah-to.)

Yeah... check. That one's been an all-time favorite ever since I read it in English class in 11th grade. But the Big 3, the books that really reshaped my conception of writing, were Richard Adams' Watership Down, George Orwell's 1984 and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Orwell, of course, gets the mention in the Guardian piece, but then again, he's a homegrown hero over there.

We found a strong sense of nostalgia among male readers as they looked back to their formative years; many had tended to lose interest in fiction in favour of non-fiction on entering into adulthood. One consequence of this was that several men admitted that they were reluctant to reread a book which had been almost painfully important to them at puberty. "I'm afraid I might find it mawkish now", "It might not live up to my memories", "It might read as dated now" became familiar responses.

Men also recalled a kind of "mentoring" by authors encountered as a teenager - the same word was used by a surprising number of those we interviewed. Having found an author who "spoke" to them, a man would have trusted them as a literary guide, reading all of their works, and also works quoted from or cited by them. Orwell, in particular, was cited frequently as having guided our male reader in his choices of author. This idea of mentoring had never cropped up in our survey of women's reading, though word-of-mouth recommendation by other readers regularly had (men mentioned word-of-mouth much less often).

I admit, I haven't reread any of the above books in many, many years, but not necessarily because I'm afraid of finding them to be lacking; it's just that there are too damn many other books I haven't read yet.

As for authors who've become mentors by proxy, well, I've read just about everything Stephen King has ever written, but I wouldn't necessarily consider him to be a guiding light. (Despite the fact that many of his books feature as a central character a screwed-up writer type.) I have, though, discovered authors and gone through phases where I read everything by them I could get my hands on; writers including (but not limited to) Richard Russo, Arthur Koestler, Don DeLillo, John Barth and T. C. Boyle have always left me hungry for more.