re: 10 most influential authors in your life?

Tolkien
Michael Moorcock
Douglas Adams
Tom Clancy
(Shakespeare counts, right)
Twain
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mark Bowden
Tolstoy
Dostoevsky

Hon. Mention - Philip K. Dick, Bradbury, Asimov

Excellent thread.
Surprised you didn’t include C.S Lewis

Mine are
1.Frank Herbert
2. Tolkien
3. C. S. lewis
4 Steven King
5. Poe
6. Shakespeare
7. Ray Bradbury
8. G. R. R. Martin
9. Bill Watterson
10. Ambrose Bierce

Including in some specific recs and synopsis, so will limit my list to 5.
(With apologies to the OP for introducing hooch to the thread- the scene called for it)

Faulkner- Select any title that strikes you, recruit a tee-totaler who is a good sport to drive.
Head to Jackson Mississippi.
Begin drinking in Brookhaven.
Take the Natchez Trace N of Jackson.
Start occasionally reading random excepts out loud.
Tent camp in Tishimingo; continue reading out loud by camp fire til passed out.

Dostoevsky- You are never alone if you are with Fyodor’s writing. Brother’s Karamazov

Tolstoy- You will never feel more alone than reading his writing. Death of Ivan Ilyitch, The Cossacks is an underrated gem, almost a Western. A titled landowner envies nomadic horseman on the Russian frontier.

Mikhail Bulgakov- In his one great and often hilarious work, The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov skewers communism, academia, bureaucracy, show biz, journalism and psychology. Throws in a guilty romance tragedy and examines the Gospels thru the eyes of Pontius Pilot. Manages to make all of the above tie together in a house of mirrors type way. The book is, I think, a refection on the author’s belief in the Gospel. Atmospheric, fascinating, impossible, easy to ridicule but eternally believable. That the book was written almost literally under the nose of Joseph Stalin and survived its author death to be published 20 years later is a testament of it’s own.

KJV’s Vulgate translators- TG for them, blessed by work, blessed by the One who inspired them.