Jack
Thanks to CaptainCuntyBollocks. It's worth reading the "friendly hint" on the question here, and not including just a list of books (I am well aware that my previous reply makes me guilty here. Maybe this can redress the balance.)

The book that really changed my life was On The Road by Jack Kerouac. The contents are insane, and stuck as a sixteen year-old in South-West London with no access to endless roads, continents to unwind in every direction and friends of different persuasions and thoughts to explore these with, the book did the obvious on my mind. I drowned myself in American literature, pausing to breathe only rarely with the odd European volume, which invariably seemed somewhat pedestrian in comparison.

The effect of American literature was not permanent. I went through all Kerouac, mainlined some Burroughs, got wired out on Hunter S. Thompson and had a nasty McInerney/Ellis habit for quite a while. In my quieter moments, I flirted with Didion, Donne, Keillor, Frantzen and many others. I got high on Dirty Realism, and took quite a while to come down. My use was chaotic, and whenever I quit, a relapse was never far behind.

I am better now. I can take it or leave it (but occasionally relapse, and enjoy the old thrill enormously).

Throughout all of this, On The Road was still there. To be honest, the book doesn't really hold up to reading once you're beyond a certain age-like The Catcher In The Rye, it's book you read when you're in your teens, and then refer to as having read, without re-reading. Some friends gave me a copy of the "scroll" for my birthday last year, the original wild, raggedy madness that Kerouac wrote on speed in a fortnight or so, which I love as a book, but haven't read.

But the book which changed my life is still there. It's a 1958 American paperback version, bought by my father in San Francisco on his wanderings across America. For some reason, the place that it was bought and its battered state (the spine has all but gone and is held in place with brittle, aged sellotape, meaning that chunks fall out whenever it is opened) give it its attraction- a change from all the predictably-bound Penguins and Picadors, a racy charm compared to the other spines on offer.

That's the one I read as a teenager, over twenty years ago. That's the one whose pages I can see, when anyone mentions the book, and the cover (a crumby coloured-in line drawing of a guy in a striped t-shirt, standing in front of background scenes of funky women, cars and a Mexican-looking building) the one that inevitably comes to mind. It is far from a first edition, just a book bought far away and brought back, which fired my mind when I picked it from the bookshelves all those years ago.

I might well rescue it if the building were burning down-it was worth 60 cents when bought, but now a hell of a lot more to me now.
(groover j lazerus, Sat 17 May 2008, 17:23, 3 replies)

on the road?
i wanted to like this book so much as beat generation writing is my kind of thing. But i failed to become attached to it as my friends did. I am off to the states in 2 weeks for six months of travel and i'm gonna give it another go while crossing america.
(CaptainCuntyBollocks the man who can with a frying pan full of lamb, Sat 17 May 2008, 17:33, closed)

States
Do it, give it a try. If you don't like it, fair enough. If you go to San Francisco, go to the City Light bookshop, and pick something up- your offspring may well thank you for it (it's probably the best alternative bookshop out, was the launching point for the Beat movement, and where my father bought my treasured tome...)
(groover j lazerus, Sat 17 May 2008, 17:39, closed)

san francisco
SF is my first stop actually so i may pop in and have a look. It's either that or arse achingly boring academic books concerning avente garde sound design (no fucking way!). Cheers for the tip.
(CaptainCuntyBollocks the man who can with a frying pan full of lamb, Sat 17 May 2008, 17:45, closed)