A literary question

What book has changed your life? What one book should people read? What one book shouldn't anyone read. I tried these questions on my first-year students and discovered that nobody likes 19th-century novels any more.

My answers:

Changed my life: Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

Book everyone should read: more tricky - so many good ones, so many for particular reasons. The Communist Manifesto? The Wind in the Willows? The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

Don't touch with a bargepole: The Lord of the Rings. Atlas Shrugged. The Book of Mormon. Left Behind. Any of Dickens' 'funny' novels. The Narnia novels. Loads more…