Books:
Ender's Game, anything by Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, jack kerouac, allen ginsbergs, flannery o'connor, anton chekov, ernest hemingway: the sun also rises, William Matthews, Harry Potter, Bill Shakespeare, Anne Lamott:Bird by Bird, the alchemist, Sidhartha, the god delusion, lord of the rings, ezra pound, t.s. eliot (especially the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock), bernard malamud, My name is asher lev, charles johnson: middle passage, some slam poetry stuff: Taylor Mali, Saul Williams, Roger Bonair-Agard, Albert Camus: The Stranger, william carlos willaims, charles bukowski, jack london: martin eden, 1984, Brave New World, the unbearable lightness of being, a people's history of the united states, noam chomsky, wendel berry, william saroyan, rohald dahl, tao te ching, ender's game (thats right, twice!), ender's shadow, gilead, denis johnson, joy williams, ranier maria rilke, madame bovary, and alot of others
Heroes:
all of the people that wrote the books above, and Richard Speakes