BBB wrote:

About a month ago (which is like fifty years in Internet time) a number of my favorite bloggers were listing their top ten “most influential books”. I started putting a list together but I realized some of them don’t pass the serious-blogger giggle test.Would you like to take a shot at it? What ten books have most seriously shaped your world-view?

CVM wrote:

Geez, passing the giggle test, that’s a high bar! Though perhaps you and I know each other well enough to be beyond giggling.

It’s a tough assignment, and age-dependent. There was a time that Atlas Shrugged would have made the list, but not anymore, though it is no doubt incorporated into the sensibility that makes me more appreciative of libertarianism than I would have otherwise been, and I’m the better for that. On the other hand Heinlein has remained a far more important influence on my world view, though I’m not sure which of his masterpieces I would list on my top ten (Starship Troopers maybe, or Citizen of the Galaxy, or maybe even Double Star?). Then there are a whole spate of science fiction novels: The Stars My Destination, Wrinkle in Time, the Foundation trilogy, etc. Those however would definitely not pass the giggle test. Of my favorite other novels, Pride and Prejudice is pretty near the top, as are Great Expectations, Germinal, Madame Bovary, and Swann’s Way- I’m also terribly fond of Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, Inferno, and, supremely, Don Quixote.

However, I can’t exactly say they were “influential”- I just thought they were terrifically entertaining. Don’t even get me started with theater- if I could only take one book to a desert island it would be the complete works of Shakespeare, though I would miss the Greek tragedians. There are so many other works of fiction in the category of great reads however that I tremble to winnow them down to a mere ten. (I suppose I could include the Bible among these works of fiction, in that I have spent far too much time in my adulthood analyzing the true intent of the authors of these fantastic tales, in preparation for my deconstruction of the tome, but that doesn’t really seem in the spirit of the question).

Many other works have excited me in my mature phase, including Epic of Gilgamesh and Plato’s dialogs of the last days of Socrates, but mainly because I found in them support for arguments I have already formulated about historical views of immortality. Not so much influential as adding fuel to the fire.

There are countless (well I should be careful about that) popular books that I also enjoyed tremendously, from Grammatical Man to Everything and More (David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece on transfinite analysis, though again preaching to the choir), of course Gödel Escher Bach and A Brief History of Time, to who knows how much of Asimov? And you’ve heard about some of my more recent reads. I would hesitate for any of these to make the top ten though, since they’ve all mainly just added small pieces to an over-arching world view, though probably the closest would be A Brief History of Time (hence, perhaps, my affectionate rip-off of the title for my own book-in-planning).

You’ll perhaps be flattered that I would consider Decline of the West on my personal top ten, though as with so many of my youthful infatuations I now appreciate it more for the vividness of its vision (not unlike Atlas Shrugged) than for the degree to which it accurately captures reality (with due respect of course).

In the end there is only one book that I can say significantly impacted my world view at the time (though it was preaching to the choir even then), and whose power I would say has not lessened with my increasing sophistication, but if anything I have come to appreciate even more. That would be the remarkably short and accessible The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I read in high school (I ran across it in an old used book store on a rainy Saturday as a senior, never having heard of it but something about the title attracted my attention) and from which I perhaps have never recovered.

Your turn.

BBB wrote:

A wonderful and insightful post. I think the challenge, though, is to list the top ten books that influenced you, i.e. altered your worldview, not just to list the smashing good reads that are typically too numerous to mention. The difference, I think, is important… for example, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, but other than increasing my stock of one-liners, I can’t say it changed my view of anything at all. On the other hand, The Golden Bough is tough sledding, and in the abridgement demands a significant amount of interpolation, but is fundamental.

So, in that spirit, in no particular order, I would say my short list includes

o Decline of the West — well, unlike you, I have not outgrown my youthful flirtation with cultural morphology. I still find it a useful way to organize my understanding of the flow of history and culture and our place in it.

o History of Art by A.F. Janson. I read this right after I read Spengler. More than anything else I could name, it confirmed and solidified my understanding of cultural morphology and the fundamental way that our conception of space dictates the manifestations of art and architecture in our culture. If you have drifted into Spenglerian apostasy, perhaps this is the tonic you need.

o The Golden Bough — a century ago this was required reading. In the manner of the fin-de-siècle academy, however, I’ve only read the abridged version. Still, I have not read any book that comparably puts Christianity in the larger context of (mostly pagan) religions. “Killing the god”, indeed. You can’t really understand “The Hollow Men”, or Heart of Darkness, or “Apocalypse Now”, or, for that matter, American electoral politics, without the insight that Sir Frazer offers.

o Starship Troopers — whilst my compadres were absorbing Randite libertarianism, I found Heinleinian libertarianism elementally appealing. Now this I have (sort of) outgrown, inasmuch as I endorse the idea of a mixed economy, yet I still find Heinlein’s truths hard to deflect.

o History of the Second World War by B.H. Liddell Hart. Awesome, detailed history. Prior to reading this work, WWII was a fog of unrelated proper nouns for me: Corregidor, Anzio, Vichy, Rommel, Stalingrad, Tinian…. But Hart cleared up (almost) everything and gave me a framework to understand the significance of Bastogne and Bataan. And it led to a commitment to read histories of major conflicts from the Peloponnesus to Vietnam.

o Slaughterhouse Five — well, every other Vonnegut book falls into a certain template of 60-ish alienation in one form or another, but this one was different for me. If ever asked what character out of fiction I most identify with, I always respond: “Billy Pilgrim”. Like Billy, I suffer from chronosynclastic infundibulitis. I think it must be something out of DSM IV.

o Calculus: One and Several Variables by Salas and Hille. I read many mathematics texts in my youth (and even more in my dotage). This one stands out. Even today I have a mild Pavlovian response to the sheer tactile pleasure of handing this book, with its red cloth cover and its beautiful, hand-drawn graphs.

o There is a slate of books about the “Red Scare” or “McCarthyism” — or, as I call it, “The Era of Concern About Communism” — that I read mostly in succession. The authors are a who’s who of bêtes noire for the left, largely because they document a complex and dark phase of our history the facts of which the left would prefer everyone forget. Perhaps I should list Treason by Ann Coulter as influential, inasmuch as she motivated me to find out more about this period, but the truth is I simply didn’t believe a lot of what she wrote. However, my reading since then has largely confirmed her accusations, so I forgive a lot of the outrageousness that is her hallmark. One of the most important books in this slate was The Secret World of American Communism by Klehr, Haynes, and Firsov, which — despite the crankish vibe of its title — is a thoroughly researched, well-written academic work that took full advantage of the opening of the Soviet archives after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This reading led to other books by Klehr and Haynes, by Horowitz, by Radosh, by Whittaker Chambers….

o Quantum Field Theory by Lewis Ryder. A beautiful but uneven book, it contains a remarkable, lucid chapter that ties together non-Abelian gauge theories with general relativity — the connection between the “connections”, as it were…. überkühl.

o The Second Creation by R.P. Crease and C.C. Mann. A history of particle physics. It convinced me to pursue a doctorate in theoretical physics. And the rest is history.

And, turning it up to 11:

o Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, the autobiography (thru 1977) of the current governor of California . Inspired me to believe that — even though I would never master the dip-between-chairs — I could reach any goal that I determined to set my mind to. So this also played a part in my pursuing physics.