A few days ago, I was trying to think of books that I'd read as an adult that had had a profound / memorable effect on me (so books read before the age of say, 18, don't count). I'm thinking about books you could happily return to, & where the quality of the story was such that your brain retained it, so that if somebody asked you what the book was about, you could tell them, accurately and in significant detail. I could think of very few -- really, really very few -- books that qualified. Mostly, the books I've recently read just leave a vague impression: "oh yeah, the one about the man who brings up his friend's son who turns out to be some kind of genius and then they find the Ten Commandments, in the original stone, in a church in Italy... or something ... I think ... it was okay ... I think ..." Anybody else find this? Maybe I just stink as a reader.