I really liked the exercise of just brainstorming instead of coming up with a Top 15 list -- it felt more intuitive than analytical. And of course I'm now kicking myself for not including Marguerite Duras, or Virginia Woolf, or Philip K. Dick, etc. etc.! But it's a decent snapshot.

And then I was dismayed that my list was so -- respectable? Even the genre stuff is pretty much all "legitimate" for literary highbrow types! But a lot of other possibilities that I sifted through were either really important to me at a particular time in my life, but much less so now, or else couldn't really be pinpointed to a single book but were more generally about an author or a genre as a whole.

I read Acker at just the right time in my life (and maybe the right time for the cultural zeitgeist?). The last time I tried to reread her, it kind of fell flat for me and I've been afraid to try again ever since.