This fascinates me, the more because my own reaction is so different: it's more the feeling of being taken firmly by the shoulders and shaken by a sort of HELLO I THINK YOU KNOW ME sense of recognition.

Oh, that's interesting -- when I was trying to piece together what the common denominator was in this list that made these books "stick with me", I ended up in the opposite place. I do have books that do what I think you're describing, and they stay with me in a different way, but these ones that I listed were less about recognition (though in some cases that dynamic also applies). For whatever reason, the fifteen that popped into my head were where the reading felt like both an upheaval and a revelation.

So maybe it's more that initial reading experience that's stuck with me, sometimes even more than the books themselves. I've never reread White Noise or Middlemarch since I first read them over 20 years ago; I don't think I even have a copy of Kitchen and it's probably not my favorite book by Yoshimoto; I doubt I'll ever reread Neuromancer again (and I'd certainly turn to Gibson's more recent books first if I were in the mood to revisit him); and see my above comment to cathexys re: Kathy Acker.

But they did mark me indelibly, like scars or tattoos -- perhaps traces of a more adventurous time in my life. I suppose that I've become a more cautious -- or more jaded? -- reader in recent years. Much as I still enjoy books, I'm less likely to come upon them unprepared (by word of mouth, book reviews, etc.) and it's much more rare now for them to shake me up like books used to.