Please help me kick my tail back into gear!

[beetiger]

At some point, I'm not quite sure when, due to some combination of depression and antidepressants and inertia and not having much external motivation available, I seem to have become dull. I've lost my spark. I'm not feeling very intelligent. I'm not feeling, to use postvixen's term, very flourescent. I don't know whether I'm still at all interesting to the rest of you, but I've lost track of a lot of my ability to delight and inspire myself.

I think I'd better fix this, especially if I'm looking forward to both a likely period of unemployment and a possible period of sitting in conveyances of semi-public transportation. I need to be able to use my mind to amuse myself better than I have been, of late.

Perhaps I just need some new mental food that isn't junk food. Would you all please help me? What I'd like from each of you is a recommendation for two books, one fiction, one nonfiction, that you think could get me going again. Any genre, any topic.

I'd like every single person who is reading this to answer. I'd like you really to only choose two books, though I know most of you could produce wonderful reading lists for me a mile long. I'm going to make a committment to follow up on every single suggestion I get here though, and that would be about 70 books at two suggestions from each of you, which is enough.

I'm completely serious about this.

Comments

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

While these are a little off-the-cuff, they're perhaps appropriately coyote:

Fiction: Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver
Nonfiction: Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

Hey, I read Desert Solitaire in college! It was a class on 1960's lit, and it largely shaped my current personality. Most misanthropic book I've ever read, and that's a compliment. :)