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

Cheating...

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

...I'm going to give a couple of each. I can't help myself. But they'll all be totally distinct, and one of them I owe you from when you last visited, anyway. :-)

Fiction:

• Dreams Underfoot, Charles de Lint. A short-story collection, so they're all bite-sized; one of my favorite authors with some of his very best stories. Wonderful stuff in a wonderful setting, with a sense of place that not much can match.
  
• Finder, Carla Speed McNeil. Comic, with three graphic novels available. I have a strong weakness for stories where the setting is one of the characters, and this is another one of those. You get the feeling reading it that, if you asked, McNeil could tell you the life story of that guy who appears in the background of page 3, panel 4, issue 19; it's just that well-realized. Her art is occasionally murky, but it's very well suited to the story, and her sense of graphic composition -- especially in service to storytelling -- shines.
  

On the non-fiction side:

• The Clock of the Long Now, Stewart Brand. A fascinating philosophical dissertation on time in the broad sense, in the context of the world's slowest clock (one that can count tens of thousands of years). One of those books that may well change how you think.
  
• The Elements of Taste, Gray Kunz and Peter Kaminsky. This is that nifty book on flavor that I was showing off to you when you were out this way; well worth checking out in more detail, and possibly even professionally justifiable. :-)
  

Sorry I couldn't quite stick to two, but at least I came close! Pick one of each, if you feel you must.