{"id":1452,"date":"2004-12-07T17:06:38","date_gmt":"2004-12-07T17:06:38","guid":{"rendered":"\/ifbookblog\/?p=10"},"modified":"2004-12-07T17:06:38","modified_gmt":"2004-12-07T17:06:38","slug":"three_books_that_influenced_yo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/2004\/12\/07\/three_books_that_influenced_yo\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Books That Influenced Your Worldview: The List"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I was thinking about the fact that books were the crucial element in the formation of my world view and wondered if that is the case with younger people. My guess yesterday morning was that people over 40 would easily come up with a list of books that influenced their way of looking at the world. Also – and this was probably the key idea I was testing – I assumed that when baby boomers came of age, specifc books (let’s say a dozen titles) were a crucial element in a shared cultural zeitgeist. By contrast, today I don’t see particular titles dominating the scene as they did 35 years ago.
\nWell . . . turns out I was pretty much wrong, at least as far as the 100+ people in my 40+ and 35- sample groups were concerned. Very few titles made it on to more than one list and I don’t see dramatic differences in the lists based on age.
\nOne remarkable fact which you’ll notice when you look at the lists is the fantastic diversity in print culture. One can only dream that we will one day have such rich variety among works which are born digital.
\nThis experiment of course hints at the bigger question: are books as important today in terms of forming world view as they were 35-40 years ago, and if not, what is taking their place? Most importantly: if not, what effect does the shift in dominant media have on the creation of world view?
\nIf this gets anyone’s juices flowing, we’d love to have suggestions about how to explore these questions further.<\/a><\/b>
\nContinue reading for the list…<\/p>\n


\nTHE LIST:
\nAnne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi
\nAnne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
\nLeo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
\n\u2022
\nNorman O. Brown Life Against Death
\nPaul Goodman Growing Up Absurd
\nJack Kerouac On The Road
\n\u2022
\nThe Universal Traveler, Koberg and Bagnall
\nSummerhill, A.S. Neill
\nThe Whole Earth Catalog
\n\u2022
\n1. Ayn Rand’s _Anthem_ (I know, I know…liberal me shouldn’t like such
\nthings; but it came to me in a period that I needed to hear it was OK to
\nstand up to evil things going on all around me).
\n2. Mark Twain’s _Letters from the Earth_ (his very dark, late writings that
\ncompletely transformed how I looked upon human belief and action)
\n3. Kenneth Burke’s _Language as Symbolic Action_ (I didn’t encounter this
\none until graduate school, but his definition of man–“the symbol-using &
\nsymbol-misusing animal”–has been indespensible on understanding things like
\nthe latest election…).
\n\u2022
\nmerleau-ponty ‘the visible and the invisible’
\nwilliam mc donnaugh and michael baumgarten’s ‘cradle to cradle’
\nsimon critchley ‘on humour’
\ntho i might say that william gibson’s ‘neuromancer’ ranks closely as
\nformative through being what i resist rather than embrace
\n\u2022
\n1984, George Orwell
\nIndependence Day, Richard Ford
\nThe Marketing Imagination, Theodore Levitt
\n\u2022
\nCommunist Manifesto
\nStory of O
\nMasterpieces of French Cooking
\n\u2022
\nMysterious Island, Jules Verne
\nInvisible Man, Ralph Ellison
\nCandy, Terry Southern
\n\u2022
\nLanguage, Thought, and Reality
\n(Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Psycholinguist)
\nThe Tao Te Ching
\nThe Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty Soetsu Yanagi
\n\u2022
\nhere are three that come to mind, for different reasons, in the order I
\nread them:
\nBoris Vian, L’\u00c9cume des jours
\nJean-Paul Sartre, Les Chemins de la Liberté
\nJoseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
\n\u2022
\nIn Dubious Battle\/John Steinbeck
\nFeeling & Form\/Susanne K. Langer
\nThe Art of memory\/Frances B. Yates
\n\u2022
\nbeckett waiting for godot
\nkuhn structure of scientific revolutions
\nwallace stevens the necessary angel
\n\u2022
\nLife After God – Douglas Coupland
\nMists of Avalon – Marion Zimmer Bradley
\nThe Rebel – Albert Camus
\n\u2022
\nearly books would be People’s History of the united states and the underside of american history collection and probably some literary work like Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations.
\n\u2022
\nCatcher in the Rye, Salinger
\nTo Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
\nKatie John– Mary Calhoun, A book for adolescents about a tomgirl who lived in a brick house in Mississippi and was a bit of a female Huck Finn.
\n\u2022
\nbooks I read young enough that they may actually have had an impact on my
\nworld view:
\nLittle Women
\nBridge to Terabithia (Katherine Paterson)
\nPortrait of the Artist as a Young Man (well, the early parts) (James Joyce)
\nbooks that were crucial in forming my world view because they led to a
\nviolent rejection, at least at first:
\nS\/Z (Roland Barthes)
\nHouse of Mirth (Edith Wharton)
\npoets who helped to form my sensibility:
\nRilke (Duino Elegies)
\nShakespeare (Hamlet)
\nMilton (Paradise Lost)
\nChristopher Smart
\nLucie Brock-Broido
\nbooks that had a big impact but partly because I spent time learning about
\nthem:
\nthe dictionary \/ the OED \/ History of the English Language
\nthe works of Anna Trapnel (obscure 17th c. prophet)
\nVas de Caminha
\n\u2022
\nThomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
\nKenneth Burke, Counter-Statement
\nRobert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
\n\u2022
\nTo Kill A Mockingbird
\nCatcher in the Rye
\nBeloved
\n\u2022
\n1. Karl Marx – Capital (honest!)
\n2. Georges Bataille – Visions of Excess
\n3. Howard Zinn – A People’s History of the United States
\nbonus two:
\n4. David Harvey – The Condition of Postmodernity
\n5. Mike Davis – City of Quartz
\n\u2022
\nFemale Man by Joanna Russ
\nSynners by Pat Cadigan
\nThe Social Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckman
\n\u2022
\nHegel, Phenomenology of MInd
\nVirginia Woolf, Waves
\nRilke, Duino Elegies
\n\u2022
\n100 Years of Solitude
\nExecutioner’s Song
\nHoward’s End
\n\u2022
\nA Tree Grows in Brooklyn
\nZen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance
\nWhen God Was a Woman
\ni’ll bet all of the men list Catcher in the Rye. \ud83d\ude09
\n\u2022
\nwith apologies…
\nThe Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (probably the same for architects but who would ever admit it?)
\nCatch 22 by Kurt Vonnegut (which is why i understood that i could put the Fountainhead first)
\nThe Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard (which took me to structuralism and politics before I knew it)
\n\u2022
\nFranny & Zooey – Salinger
\nCatch 22 – Joseph Heller
\nBe Here Now – Ram Dasst
\n\u2022
\nto kill a mockingbird
\nthe sun also rises
\na doll’s house (okay, it’s a play, but still…)
\n\u2022
\nall of Plato
\nMagic Mountain
\nBirth of Tragedy
\n\u2022
\nRem Koolhaas’s DELIRIOUS NEW YORK
\nElaine Scarry’s THE BODY IN PAIN
\nJoyce’s PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST…
\n\u2022
\nGenet by Edmund White
\nHeretics of Dune by Frank Herbert
\nThe Persian Boy by Mary Renault
\n\u2022
\nAgainst Nature – Huysmans
\nMorris’s Disappearing Bag – Rosemary Wells
\nUniverse – Freedman & Kaufmann
\n\u2022
\nDarkness at Noon (Arthur Koestler)
\nThe Long-Distance Runner (Michael Harrington)
\nDon Quixote (Cervantes)
\n\u2022
\nThe Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
\nWCWilliams’ Paterson
\nStephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning
\n\u2022
\nUlysses, James Joyce
\nBehavior in Public Places, Erving Goffman
\nThe Communist Manifesto, Marx & Engels
\n\u2022
\nCamus, The Rebel & L’etranger (count as one book … read in Jr. High)
\nOld Testament, New Testament, Koran, Gita (count as one book … read in High School)
\nFalukner, Yoknapatawpha Co novels … read in HS & college (actually lots of different books could have gone in this slot … Blake, Ginsberg, Kesey, Hemingway, Hesse, etc. come to mind ….)
\n\u2022
\nZorba the Greek
\nCall It Sleep
\nCrime and Punishment
\n\u2022
\nD’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths
\nThe Book of Genesis
\nWilliam Butler Yeats: Collected Poems (specific ones: Leda and the Swan, The Second Coming, A Prayer For My Daughtar, The Collar-Bone of a Hare, Under Ben Bulben,Lapis Lazuli, The Circus Animals’ Desertion, and so many others).
\n\u2022
\nI’ve listed three books that had, shall we say, an “early” influence and then three books that have been part of a more “mid-life” re-arrangement of this world view:
\nThree formative books:
\n1. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams
\n2. Tristan Tzara, “Dadaist Manifesto” (not a book) along with Lao Tze, Way of the Tao
\n3. Nabokov’s Pale Fire
\nThree RE-formative books:
\n1. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey
\n2. Hardt & Negri, Empire
\n3. Virilio, War and Cinema
\n\u2022
\nCharlotte’s Web
\nSummerhill
\nThe Book of Laughter and Forgetting
\n\u2022
\nThe Big 3 books:
\n— In college years, Jack Kerouac, beginning with “On the Road” and moving to ” Dharma Bums,” “Visions of Cody,” “Big Sur,” and “Dr. Sax.” The whole beat category had the greatest single impact on me in the pre-Vietnam years. But if a single book of the batch has to be named, it’s “On the Road.” Not the best, but the one that put the rest on the map.
\n— young adult, Thoreau’s “Walden Pond,” “Civil Disobedience,” and essays
\n— after 40, Jerry Mander’s “In the Absence of the Sacred”
\n\u2022
\nThomas Mann’s ” The Magic Mountain
\nArthur Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine,
\nThomas Kuhn’s “Scientific Paradigm”
\n\u2022
\nIshmael by Daniel Quinn
\nWoman by Natalie Angiers
\nSlapstick by Kurt Vonnegut
\n\u2022
\nBirdsong, Sebastian Faulks
\nThe Killer Angels, Michael Schaara
\nNory Ryan’s Song, Patricia Reilly Giff
\n\u2022
\nthe truly disadvantaged by william julius Wilson
\nmy varian microeconomics textbook
\ncatcher in the rye.
\n\u2022
\nForming my world view huh?
\nWell, just to warn you, you’re not going to get my favorite books or one’s that I would necessarily recommend to others,
\nRespond back if you meant novels, more contemporary works, or were looking for an answer with greater utility. I can make lists all day.
\nbut answering the question as literally as possible…
\nFriedrich Nietzsche – Beyond Good and Evil
\nGottlieb Frege – The Foundations of Arithmetic
\nEmile Durkheim – The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
\n\u2022
\nHARD QUESTION, perhaps:
\nEl Quijote
\nProust’s In Search of Lost Time
\nNeruda’s Canto general.
\nHowever
\nDostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment
\nThe Arabian Nights
\nMann’s The Magic Mountain
\nPlato’s Dialogues
\nHesse’s Siddartha
\nand much more. Take your pick, I can’t.
\n\u2022
\nnikos kazanzakis, Report to Greco
\ntolstoy, war and peace
\nmichel foucault, the birth of the clinic
\n\u2022
\nCamus The Stranger (big bang in high school, not sure how i came across it but remember my father recommending i put it aside and read augustine instead)
\nAristotle Poetics along with Pre-Socratic fragments (freshman year, raptured by how the ancients put the world together)
\nHenry James Portrait of a Lady (while hitchhiking through europe and sleeping in train stations, it emboldened me to think i could put my own life together how i pleased. tho, when i reread it in my 40’s it was an entirely different book)
\n\u2022
\nMalcolm X Speaks (the first book I ever read that talked about a world as I saw it–found it when I was about 18)
\nMao Tse Tung Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art (actually the book is Mao on Lit and Art. But the essay was most important. It spoke to questions I was trying to solve within my art as a young artist. Then I began to get into how he is really exploring questions of work in a united front under the leadership of the proletariat. I literally read the cover off the book I read it so many times)
\nDictatorship and Democracy and the Socialist Transition to Communism by Bob Avakian. Though this is a very recent book it is quit challenging and it encouraged me to deeply question some fundamental assumptions that I had held about Marxist theory and practice.
\nBecause I have trouble counting, I want to put Beloved by Toni Morrison on the list. It is the most amazing piece of literature ever written. It doesn’t form worldview in quite the same way as “political theory” but I wouldn’t be the same person without having read this book.
\n\u2022
\ngeneaology of morals — nietzsche
\nepitaph of a small winner — machado de assis
\nbirds of america — lorrie moore
\n\u2022
\nThe Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
\nFanshen, William Hinton
\nConstantine Cavafy, Poems
\n\u2022
\nIt’s tough to narrow it down, of course. I guess The Invisible Man, The Bright Shining Lie (Neal Sheehan as I recall) and A Room of One’s Own. As achild I read everything James Thurber wrote several times over. So I guess that would count for the absurdist streak that still reigns over all –but the formative stuff was all about injustice and deception.
\n\u2022
\nThe Iliad\/The Odyssey
\nThe Book of Job
\nAt 42, Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival
\nWhen I was 17, Joseph Conrad, Victory
\nWhen I was 27, Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
\n\u2022
\nthis is a difficult request. my list isn’t very stable. three books i keep returning to are,
\nsociety of the spectacle by guy debord
\nilluminations by walter benjamin
\nand lastly the publications of semiotext(e), particularlly the foreign agents series. these little books are wonderful. favorite titles include, speed and politics by paul virilio, nomadology by deleuze and guattari, communiist like us by negri and guattari. if i had to reduce this down to one book it would be the recently published hatred of capitalism\/a semiotext(e) reader, edited by chris kraus and sylvere lotringer.
\na bonus pick hit just for the pleasure of the rant is t.a.z. the temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism by hakim bey
\n\u2022
\nthe Torah
\nThe writings of Rumi
\nplays of Shakespeare
\nmost recently –
\nGolas’ The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment
\na while ago
\nWatzlawick, Weakland, Fisch – CHANGE
\nand a long time ago
\nThe Wind and the Willows
\n\u2022
\nsamule beckett murphy, molloy, waiting for godot
\n\u2022
\nRichard Dawkins- The blind watchmaker
\nEdward O. Wilson- On human nature
\nSteven Pinker- The language instinct
\n\u2022
\nA New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
\nCeremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
\nThe Soong Dynasty, by Sterling Seagrave
\n\u2022
\nI guess I’d really have to say that the Lord of the Rings trilogy was huge for me. I know that’s not massively intellectual but it was the first time I cut class (stayed in the dorm 3 days and devoured the whole thing). It shaped my views about courage, among other things. It’s so pop now that it may not count.
\nMore seriously speaking, you are probably going to chuckle, but Alan Watts’ The Book on the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are was seriously formative. Going back earlier still, Stranger in a Strange Land was a huge deal when I was a teenager, and I’ve re-read it several times since. Finally, Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.
\nI could go on and on about formative fiction but somehow I suspect that’s not where you’re going with this. Discovering magical realism as a genre was almost as important to me as discovering science fiction. My favorite fiction authors are Louise Erdrich, Charles De Lint, and Sue Miller at the moment.
\nAs a reader of plays it’s hard to separate books out.
\n\u2022
\nHmmmmm, that’s tough, but this morning I’ll go for
\n1. Ulysses, Joyce: made me realize how vast eternity is if one day can be so large
\n2. St Joseph Sunday Missal, the standard Amercican Catholic prayer book of the 50s and 60s and likely still. Catholics didnt read the Bible as such, so the Sunday Gospels and Epistles (Latin facing English) are all upbeat New Testament stuff and I was largely unaware of the violent, vengeful, nasty God of the Old Testament. Jesus still sounds good, if you actually look at what he says.
\n3. Lolita, Nabokov. At 20 I was only dimly aware of the scandal of older Hum with teenie Lo: the fun of the language and dark hilarity of the hero were enough to tip me permanently into life as satire.
\n\u2022
\nBible
\nInvisible Man
\nOne Hundred Years of Solitude
\n\u2022
\nThought and Action by Stuart Hampshire
\nThe Hidden INjuries of Class by Sennet and Cobb
\nCapital by Karl Marx
\nThe Informed Heart by Bruno Bettelheim,
\noops over already and that does not include fiction and works about love, sex and etc.
\n\u2022
\nI guess Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth qualifies.
\nThat’s one.
\nDiscovering Paul Valery’s notebooks and M. Teste was monumental.
\nThat’s two.
\nIn lieu of a third, you get the list including authors that were more affirmative than formative:
\nBorges (Labyrinth, Fictions)
\nDiderot (Jaques Le Fatalist)
\nDidion (everything, but especially White Album) and
\nNabokov (Speak Memory if I had to pick)
\nCortazar (Hopscotch)
\nwait, I forgot an entire category:
\nthe classic dystopias I read in junior high:
\nAnimal Farm
\n1984
\nLord of the Flies
\nnot to mention The Diary of Anne Frank …
\none more category:
\nthe civil rights lit from the 60’s:
\nBlack Like Me (no one reads that or even knows about it any more)
\nSoul on Ice
\nAutobiography of Macolm X
\nThey qualify as formative, but they never come to mind when I get these questions.
\n\u2022
\nCrime and Punishment: the complexity of ethics
\nAnna Karenina: how tragic love is
\nMarjorie Morningstar: how not to marry a boring guy
\n\u2022
\noff the top of my head i can think of john berger’s ways of seeing. parts of the old testament are also pretty powerful to me. as are many companion books of feminist theology… i could say ‘standing again at sinai’ by plaskow.. and there were years of holocaust related books which informed my world view alot. it’s hard to narrow it down… of course.. just here to help!
\n\u2022
\nFear of Freedom by Erich Fromm
\nDon Quijote de la Mancha by Cervantez
\nThe Prince by Machiavelli
\nThe Odyseey by Homer
\n\u2022
\n“Sex, Time and Power” by Leonard Shlain
\n“Constantine’s Sword” by James Carroll
\n“The Origins of Consciousness in The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” by
\nJulian Jaynes
\n“The Tao of Physics” by Fritjof Capra
\n“The Spell of the Sensuous” by David Abram
\n“The Holgraphic Universe” by Michael Talbot
\n\u2022
\nThe Count of Monte Cristo
\nA History of the 20th Century (still reading)
\nThe Stranger
\n\u2022
\nMichael Strogoff (Jules Verne)
\nNiels Holgerson’s Wonderful Journey (Selma Lagerlof)
\nThe Red and the Black (Stendhal)
\n\u2022
\nAs a child, I was mesmerized by fairy tales, Aesoph’s ables and Greek mysthology, loved Tom Sawyer and the Wizard of Oz, books by Erich Kaestner, as well as a
\nbunch of Croatian books.
\nAs a teenager, up to my mid twenties I was very drawn to dark, existentialist literature. My favorite book of all times is “The Return of Filip Latinovicz,” a
\nbrilliant Croatian book by Miroslav Krleza, the best author we ever had. Also, I was extremely shaken up by “Kinder von dem Banhoff Zoo” by Christianne F. And
\nfor good reason.
\nThen much later the Tao Te Ching came my way and I immediately connected on it very deeply. Never been the same since. Guess Hesse’s books also had a pretty
\ndeep influence on my, particularly since my father was very fond of them too.
\n\u2022
\nWilliam James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
\nChogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior.
\nIsaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity
\n\u2022
\nGulliver’s Travels
\nDon Quixote
\nCandide
\n\u2022
\n“nine stories,” j.d. salinger
\n“self help,” lorrie moore
\n“the portable dorothy parker” (her fiction is grievously underknown and
\nunder-read; focus is placed on her poetry, which indeed was witty and clever, but her fiction was so much more than that – hugely sensitive and insightful, as well as angry and politically\/socially astute)
\nis it strange that these 3 “world-view forming” books are works of fiction? and not overtly political? nowadays, i’m reading more nonfiction than fiction, and almost everything i’m reading is politically oriented. but when i was a teenager\/ college student, my leisure reading was fiction mostly.
\nwhen does a world view form, anyway? when are we officially finished forming one? i was fairly politically active in college; then i basically slept through the entire clinton administration, and through most of bush the elder, too; but in recent years i’ve read more and done more, in terms of politics and activism, than i ever had before. and i’d say i’m more to the left than i used to be? or maybe it’s that the democrats, in whom i used to place a decent amount of faith, are more to the right than they used to be. ?when i went to sleepaway camp at age 12, there was a vegetarian meal-plan option, and i picked it. i’d never been a vegetarian before and hadn’t realized i was about to become one. but when presented with the choice of a good diet with meat or a good diet without meat, there was, for me, no question. i’ve been a vegetarian ever since. you could say that the meal-plan option changed my world view by showing me that if i did not have to eat meat if i didn’t want to, an idea that, at 12, i hadn’t yet grasped on my own.
\n“fear of flying” was one more world-view-shaping book for me, when i was 17 or so. seriously. it’s known for the sex but honestly it is not very sexy, in my opinion: it is an honest, well-written, well-woven story of family, partnership, religion, autonomy, monogamy, ambition, and how to survive these things.
\n\u2022
\nSociety of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
\nCircles of Confusion by Hollis Frampton
\nThe Divine Comedy by Dante
\nThough the early Marx, Benjamin’s essays and he Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas H. Kuhn would be contenders as well.
\n\u2022
\nI picked these because I was totally immersed in them (read them over and over and over) when I was very young. (I have a few books that I do that with as an adult too, but I don’t think it’s the same.) I actually don’t know if these had any particular effect on my world view, but I figure they must have, because the exposure was constant and intense.
\n\u2022
\nBefore I could read: Goodnight Moon
\nRight after I learned how: a beautiful, large-format, illustrated Cinderella (I know. Yikes.) I don’t know who the illustrator was or what the edition was. I could probably find out from my mother.
\nA couple of years after that: Mad magazine, supplied by my older brother
\n\u2022
\nNarcissus and Goldmund
\nThe Bible
\nA Soldier of the Great War
\n\u2022
\n1. “A Pattern Language”, Christopher Alexander et. al.
\n2. “On Growth and Form”, D’Arcy Thompson
\n3. “Codex Seraphinianus”, Luigi Serafini
\n\u2022
\nit sort of depends on what stage of develoment of that view you are getting at. like the lion the which and the wardrobe has always been on my bookshelf since I was a kid. marshall mcluhan got me interested in what i do today . . . but now i don’t find his books really relevant or even interesting. so i am not even sure how to answer this one, but here’s a shot. i’m giving
\n1. The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility: The Ideas Behind the
\nWorld’s Slowest Computer, Stewart Brand
\n2. The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord
\n3. Silence, John Cage
\n4. it’s not a book but was like a book on tape for me – Laurie Anderson’s box set
\n5. Andy Warhol Diaries
\n\u2022
\nThe Communist Manifesto _ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
\nCorazón de Piedra Verde_Salvador de Madariaga
\nBersonism _ Guilles Deleuze
\n\u2022
\nDoris Lessing, Golden Noteook
\nJean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers
\nCarl Schorske, Fin-De-Siecle Vienna
\n\u2022
\ngrimus by salman rushdie
\nthe bluest eye by toni morrison
\na people’s history of the united states by howard zinn
\n\u2022
\nmont st. michele and chartres adams first edition (the book)
\na timeless way of building christopher alexander
\nessentials in education rudolf steiner
\nmedium is the massage mcluhan
\nthe idea of \/ lovers discourse roland barthes
\n\u2022
\nBrave New World
\nCatch -22
\nA Portrait of a Marriage
\n\u2022
\nFilm as a Subversive Art– Amos Vogel
\nThe Origin of the Family, private property and the state-Fred Engels
\nAmazon Odyssey–Ti-Grace Atkinson
\n\u2022
\nFanshen by William Hinton
\nBlack Like Me, John Howard Griffith
\nTrotsky (3 volumes) by Isaac Deutcher
\nSumma Theologica, Thomas Aquinas (sad but true–but it was a way of getting to Aristotle)
\n\u2022
\nHard to remember back to when my world-view was forming, but
\nhere’s some things that had some influence (in all cases there were probably several books by the same author involved, I’ve picked one)
\nAbbie Hoffman: Revolution for the Hell of it
\nHunter Thompson: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail
\nNoam Chomsky: The Chomsky Reader
\nThen there’s the books that started my obsession with quantum mechanics,
\nlike Werner Heisenberg’s “Physics and Beyond”, but that’s kind of a different story…
\n\u2022
\nA Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
\nBlood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
\nThe Electronic Word, by Richard Lanham.
\n\u2022
\nBaghavad Gita
\nStranger in a Strange Land (but only until I reached the age of 25)
\n100 Years of Solitude
\n\u2022
\nTurning The Tide, Noam Chomsky
\nThe Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
\nHomage To Catalonia, George Orwell
\n\u2022
\nA Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius by Dave Eggars
\nMultiple Intelligences by Howard Gardner
\nSon Rise by Barry Kaufman
\n\u2022
\nThe Grapes of Wrath
\nThe Diary of Anne Frank
\nGreat Expectations
\n\u2022
\nWalden (pond) h.d.thoreau
\nLipstick Traces, greil marcus
\nMax Jamison wilford sheed
\n\u2022
\nMelville, Moby-Dick (the power of metaphor\/ambiguity)
\nGaddis, The Recognitions (the place of artistic creation w\/r\/t forgery)
\nJoyce, Ulysses (structure & style, design)
\n\u2022
\nTaylor Caldwell’s Captains and Kings
\nLeon Uris’s QB7
\nOrwell’s Animal Farm
\n\u2022
\nThe Iliad by Homer
\nWar and Peace by Tolstoy
\nThe General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez,
\nall because they take the long view on human nature.
\n\u2022
\nLao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
\nAlbert Camus, The Outsider
\nDonna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women
\n\u2022
\nWhen books were still able to rock my world – that was in my teens.
\nSo the first most shattering experience with reality (in Germany) was the follwing book I read in high school:
\nno1
\nChristiane F. – Wir Kinder From Bahnhof Zoo
\n(10 years later they made it into a stupid film)
\nmuch later: no2
\nSculpting in Time, Andre Tarkovsky
\nmuch much later: no3
\n“The Book of Kings vol 2y” – Klaus Theweleit
\nex aequo:
\nThe Telephone Book – Avital Ronell
\n\u2022
\n1. Marx, German Ideology
\n2. EP Thompson, Making of the English working class
\n3. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature
\n4. Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rich and the Super Rich
\nI’m not sure that the last holds up but I remember being affected by it in reading it in the late 1960s when it first came out.
\n\u2022
\nthomas kuhn, structure of scientific revoultions
\njohn donne, devotions
\nwilliam burroughs, naked lunch
\n\u2022
\nGulliver’s Travels – Johnathan Swift
\nGödel, Escher, Bach – Douglas Hofstadter
\nPrometheus Rising – Robert Anton Wilson
\n\u2022
\nfor my early self
\nchronicles of narnia or the hobbit
\nfor my college self
\nleft hand of darkness
\nfor my grad school self toss up between
\ndiscipline and punish:the birth of the prison, michel Foucault and
\ngender trouble, Judith butler
\nalso: jeanette winterson’s, the passion
\n\u2022
\nAutobiography of Malcolm X
\nSummerhill
\nWe the People, Leo Huberman
\nGolden Notebook
\nHistory of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Jean Daubier
\n\u2022
\nA Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilbur
\nThe Hydrogen Economy, Jeremy Rifkin
\nUnderstanding Media, The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan
\nThe Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume II (The Power of
\nIdentity), Manuel Castells
\n\u2022
\nL’étranger, Camus
\nNeuromancer, Gibson
\nDistinction, Bourdieu
\n\u2022
\ngroups. for shaping how i see and interact with the world, i have 5. aside from the first they’re in no particular order.
\n1) “men in dark times” by hannah arendt
\n2) “italian folktales” by italo calvino
\n3) “waiting for the barbarians” by j.m. coetzee
\n4) “the education of henry adams” by henry adams
\n5) “self-reliance and other essays” by r. waldo emerson
\n\u2022
\nMovement for a New America
\nBrecht on Theatre
\nThe Free-Lance Pallbearers (Ishmael Reed)
\n\u2022
\nMaking of the English Working Class by EP Thompson
\nIsaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky
\nCatch 22 by Joseph Heller
\n\u2022
\nKarl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
\nGeorge Eliot, Middlemarch
\nStephane Mallarme, Collected Poems
\n\u2022
\nCS Lewis Narnia titles
\nHow to Lie With Statistics
\nAusten\/Pride and Prejudice
\n…Shakespeare, Kafka, Machiavelli
\n\u2022
\nA giacometti portrait
\nHemmingway’s “In our Time”
\nand maybe Ulysees.
\n\u2022
\nProust, La Recherche;
\nBenjamin’s Illuminations;
\nFlaubert’sSentimental Education.
\n\u2022
\nZen Mind, Beginners Mind – Suzuki Roshi
\nA General Theory of Love – Dr. Thomas Lewis
\nStranger in a Strange Land – Heinlein
\nFicciones — Jorge Luis Borges (in college)
\nBreakfast of Champions — Kurt Vonnegut (in high school)
\nAlexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day — Judith Viorst
\n(as a youngster)
\n\u2022
\nChildhood’s End (Arthur C. Clarke)
\nOn the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche)
\nCrash (J.G. Ballard)
\n\u2022
\na cool million by Nathaniel West
\n100 years of solitude, Marquez
\nEdie: an american biography. (edited by George Plimpton)
\n\u2022
\nThe Fourth Way – P.D. Ouspensky
\nThe I Ching
\nBrother Karamazov – Dostoevsky
\n\u2022
\nUnbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
\nPortnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
\nWe Would Like to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families
\nPhilip. Gourevitch (non-fiction about genocide in rwanda in ’94)
\n\u2022
\nThree books that have influenced my current weltanschauung (and when I read
\nthem):
\n1. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (summer 2003)
\n2. American Woman by Susan Choi (winter 2004)
\n3. The Island at the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto (fall 2004)
\n\u2022
\nJ\u00fcrgen Habermas: The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity;
\nRaplh Elison: Invisible Man
\nHarold Cruse: The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
\n\u2022
\nI chose my three on the basis that I already get
\nunrestricted access to the bible and shakespeare and maybe
\nFreud thrown in… is that a deal??
\nThe Alexandria Quartet. Lawrence Durrell. Actually first
\npublished as four books initially…but also published as a
\nsingle volume very commonly..so I claim as one. Same story
\nfour perspectives is not the same story
\nOn Not Being able to Paint. Marion Milner. A diary of her
\ngiving up trying to paint and draw according to
\n‘instruction manuals’ and embarking on a road of art self
\ntherapy.
\nRoland Barthes by Roland Barthes. (Only read in
\ntranslation) stands in for all his writing that affected me
\nenormously as a student.
\n\u2022
\ncharlottes web,
\nSiddhartha
\nno exit
\n\u2022
\ngaston bachelard, the poetics of space
\nsalinger, catcher in the rye
\nnabokov, Lolita
\n\u2022
\nT. H. White, The Goshawk
\nAnja Meulenbelt, The Shame Is Over
\nAldous Huxley, Point CounterPoint
\n\u2022
\nTravels With Charley
\nThe Doh of Homer
\nHiroshima
\n\u2022
\n1. Jonathan Livingston Seagull – Richard Bach
\nThis is a tiny little book with an immense, immeasurable content. You read it in one breath, however, you constantly need to go back over and over again to “soak” dialogues\/thoughts. It is about courage to be different, to be an early bird, to be considered and regarded “odd”, weird, loose cannon, you name it. I have read it long, long time ago in Belgrade while I was in my high school, and believe you or not, I still remember reading it, the excitement to get to the end of the book. I may like this book so much as it reflects my own feelings about being brave to be different, in thinking, dressing, whatever, but still keep your integrity, passion, and take responsibility for this oddity that people perceive about you…..finally it also speaks about the price that each person has to pay to be what he truly believes in and not bend to the formality of the society. A lovely book, you should read it if you have not already, only about 100ish pages.
\nLittle Prince – Antoine de Saint Exupery
\nAnother, little gem, written for kids apparently, however meant to be read by adults. This book has thought me about the value of friendship, and what each side has to give for friendship. It is not something as granted! A friendship is like a rose, as Little Prince was told, you have to water it to keep it alive. We so frequently take friendship for granted, and yet there is somebody out there who may be waiting for our call, a sympathetic ear etc. Also, it has thought me that in a relationship, any date, one should be punctual and this is for the following reason, as a Rose has told to Little Prince …..you should come as you have told me, not with such long delay. I have prepared my heart for you, and I have been excitingly waiting for you for hours before the moment you were supposed to come. My excitement has been building prior to that hour. If you do not come as
\npromised, I will be disappointed, and worse, I will never know when to prepare my heart for you, so when you come I will be indifferent. These are not the actual words, however this is a message that has been living with me ever since I read the book…again in my high school days. As a matter of fact, I was with a friend in Boston in February, and I brought myself the book in English.
\n3. Difficult decision for the third place, I am in between Demian – Herman
\nHesse and Crime and Punishment – Dostoyevsky I will tell you about both. Demian – my high school favorite, it tells you about the magic and power of your wish! If you wish something deeply, deeply, from the heart and you never, ever has any doubts, not even for a split second, it will happen, it will occur, you will make it. Guess why it was my high school favorite…..I would meet a guy that I would like, he would not like me, but I would implement the advice from Demian……I will leave odds of my success to tell you in person.
\nCrime and Punishment – I love that book for the way it makes you feel about
\nthe poor, underprivileged people.\/ I just loved Raskolnikov, the murderer, and Sonia the prostitute. My whole heart went for them. I guess this book has thought me that not everything is black or white when people are concerned. I know that I may sound very opinionated on many occasions, however, believe me, I do not judge people for what they are doing. I could only say that I do not like it and would not do it + everybody, everybody, including the worst murderer, still has a bit of something nice, it is up to other people to find out about it……if you do not believe me than go and read Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse.
\n\u2022
\nThe Assistant, by Bernard Malamud
\nIn Our Time, by Ernest Hemingway
\nA Sentimental Education, Flaubert
\nSadly also, Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut
\n\u2022
\nbible
\nsan mao (“three hairs”)–chinese comic about impoverished, malnourished, semi-bald boy
\nthe decisive moment–Henri Cartier-Bresson
\n\u2022
\nRudolf Otto’s “Idea of the Holy” is hard to find these days, but was influential in terms of seeing “holy” as a broader thing than just Christianity.
\nI remember Pearl Buck’s “The Good Earth” moving me a lot in high school; made me think about all the development and urban sprawl issues more.
\n“Kenny’s Window” by Maurice Sendak has come back to me again and again with different layers of meaning poking through.
\n\u2022
\nThe Bible
\nThe Fountainhead (Ayn Rand
\nThe Kama Sutra
\n\u2022
\nTo Kill a Mockingbird
\nThe Sound and the Fury
\nHenderson the Rain King
\n\u2022
\n“Beat The Turtle Drum” (a “young adult” book) — Life sucks, and people you care about die.
\n“The Grapes of Wrath” — Life sucks, then you either die or work much too hard.
\n“Blown Sideways Through Life” — Work sucks, and it can always suck more.
\n\u2022
\nThe Hitcher’s Guide to the Galaxy, because it made writing seem fun and easy
\nMoby Dick, because it made writing seem laborious and futile
\nThe Odyssey, because it is better told than written
\n\u2022
\nSaul Bellow: Humboldt’s Gift
\nVirginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
\nCharles Dickens: David Copperfield
\n\u2022
\nThe Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jane Jacobs
\nCatch-22
\nAdvertising the American Dream
\nLies My Teacher Told Me
\n\u2022
\nas for 3 books forming my “world view” that’s hard to answer i guess (maybe easier when aimed at truer Young People?) so i will maybe swipe at a broad interpretation and guess The Little Engine That Could, Franny & Zooey, and a third to hopefully be determined by the end of this email.
\nlet’s see, my third. maybe the jungle? i’m having an awful time placing myself back in time. perhaps i’m trying too hard
\n\u2022
\n1. Georg Lukacs, “The Theory of the Novel”
\n2. Jacques Derrida, “Limited Inc”
\n3. Woody Allen, “Without Feathers”
\n(postscript: oh, and of course Leviticus.)
\n\u2022
\nWhen I think about the part books played (and still play) in forming my world view, I have to think about them as tethered to a set of circumstances. It is impossible to say, for example, whether it was Gardner’s Art Through the Ages that awakened my passion for visual art, or my teacher Gretchen Whitman, who introduced the book to me and led me through it.
\nThe book is part of a matrix that is difficult to parse. How is one’s world view formed? Certainly books are a part of the process, but maybe they function more as “tools” then as “beings.” Insofar as they are extensions of the people or circumstances that drove us to them. With this in mind, it’s not surprising that very few of these lists are the same.
\nIt’s interesting that nobody confesses that children’s books formed their world view. I was profoundly influenced by the books I read when I was a child. The Little House on the Prairie series, and the Wizard of Oz still resonate with me. Dorothy and Laura Ingalls were pioneers–girl scouts, who were always prepared and never complained. They were independent, pragmatic survivors. I’m not saying this is the best collection of virtues one could strive for, but, nevertheless I recognize them in myself and think, to some extent, they were engendered there by those books. Also, I must mention the fantastic strangeness of Dr. Seuss (who prepared me for surrealism), Maurice Sendack, Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson.
\nChildren’s books are there at the beginning, digging into our consciousness. The fact that children must, initially, be read to, illuminates something about how the book functions for humans. My son is 14 months old and he loves books. That is because his grandmother sat down with him when he was six months old and patiently read to him. She is a kindergarten teacher, so she is skilled at reading to children. She can do funny voices and such. My son doesn’t know how to read, he barely has a notion of what story is, but his grandmother taught him that when you open a book and turn its pages, something magical happens–characters, voices, colors–I think he has a given him a vague sense of meaning. My son understands books as ojects printed with symbols that can be translated and brought to life by a skilled reader. He likes to sit and turn the pages of his books and study the images. He has a relationship with books, but he wouldn’t have that if someone hadn’t taught him. My point is, even after you learn to read, the book is still part of a complex system of relationships. It is almost a matter of chance, in some ways, which books are introduced to you and opened to you by someone.
\nI think people who are resistant to electronic books worry that this intimacy will be lost in a non-paper format. But clearly, it’s not the object itself, it’s the meaning brought to it by and through people. The medium won’t really change that.
\nPost childhood influence goes to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude. And the book of Ecclesiastes, which I read during a particularly disturbing and enlightening business trip to Hong Kong in the late 1980’s. I read Ecclesiastes several times during that three week trip, always late at night alone in my hotel room while eating spicy Indian food. I don’t know if it was the food or the book, but I would have the most astounding nightmares after those sessions.
\n\u2022
\nGraham Greene once wrote that “it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives,” and in that spirit I’d have to answer honestly that the list would have to include:
\nJack London’s The Sea Wolf
\nPalgrave’s Golden Treasury
\nHoward Fast’s Citizen Tom Paine
\n\u2022
\nThere was one book that came to mind immediately as a transformative book : Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown. There are other books that I can think of as extremely enjoyable (100 Years of Solitude) or books that definitely shaped my thinking ( Childhood and Society by Erik Erikson; I and Thou by Martin Buber). But, at this moment, only Love’s Body was “crucial”.
\n\u2022
\nTao te Ching, by Lao Tzu
\nThe Animal Rights Handbook, by Linda Fraser (have read other material since
\nbuying this book at 16 but it was the most revolutionary – and shocking – to me because it was my first on the subject)
\nFrog and Toad are Friends, by Arnold Lobel
\n\u2022
\nwomen’s room by Marilyn french
\nmiddlemarch by george eliot
\nsurfacing by margaret atwood
\nor more recently
\nmiddlesex by jeffrey eugenides
\n\u2022
\nLord of the Rings
\nRedwall (by Brian Jacques)
\nThe Bible
\n\u2022
\nurgent? is the book dying out that quickly?!?
\njeez. in the interest of diversity, i’ll name 3 philosophy books that have influenced my thinking; otherwise, i’d have a hard time answering such a tough and broad question:
\nkant’s critique of pure reason
\nschopenhauer’s the world as will and idea
\nkierkegaard’s fear and trembling
\n\u2022
\nGreat Expectations by Charles Dickens
\nDispatches by Michael Herr
\nThe Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
\nSorry for the Vietnam focus, but I think both books belong on my list. The Herr because it so deftly lays out the folly of most wars, and the O’Brien because of what he says about more personal things, like love and courage.
\n\u2022
\nKind of like picking the three most important dandelions in a field, but:
\nDune, Frank Herbert
\nThe Essential Foucault
\nJM Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
\n\u2022
\nokay, great, interesting question. I’m not sure i have 3, but i’ll tell you what i can.
\nFirst, my favorite book of all time, and crucial to forming, or better yet, clarifying or explaining to me my existing worldview, is
\nSometimes A Great Notion by Ken Kesey.
\nAlso, The Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman.
\nummmmmmm…
\nReally not sure otherwise. i hope this helps. the Kesey is very true.
\n\u2022
\nthe toughest part is getting this down to three. to do so, I will avoid the cliche of The Bible, because that book was indirectly crucial; i think judaism in general was more crucial than the bible itself.
\nso I will say:
\nMoby-Dick by Melville.
\nSacred Fragments, a book about Judaism by Neil Gillman
\nGreatest American Leaguers, a YA book about baseball
\n\u2022
\n1) To Kill a Mockingbird
\n2) Brothers Karamazov
\n3) Old Testament
\n\u2022
\nBurnett, The Secret Garden
\nRoth, Portnoy’s Complaint
\nSaramago, The Stone Raft
\n\u2022
\nThe Bible
\nAnna Karenina
\nJohnny Learns to Type
\n\u2022
\nThe User Illusion — Tor Norretranders (about consciousness)
\nThe Path of Blessing — Marcia Prager
\nMoby Dick — Melville
\n\u2022
\n“Hiroshima” by John Hersey
\n“Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn
\nAnd third place is a dead heat between:
\n“An Actor Prepares” – Stanislavksi in combo with “Respect for Acting” – Uta Hagen; all of my high school text books in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, geography, environmental science and
\ncalculus; and The Complete Works of Shakespeare.
\nIf I have to pick, I’d say the textbooks more than anything else. If textbooks don’t count, let’s call it Stanislavski because he taught me how people work on the inside.
\n\u2022
\n– The New Testament
\n– The collected writings of Bertolt Brecht
\n– Howards End by E. M. Forster
\n\u2022
\nHoward Zinn: A Peoples History of the United States;
\nWhere do I come from? (a sex-ed book for children, my mom gave it to me as a young kid, and I think it was fundamental in helping me have an educated and appropriate understanding of the process of reproduction from a young age);
\nEnglish Grammar for students of Russian (without this book I wouldn’t be where I am today)
\n\u2022
\nSIX NONLECTURES BY ee cummings
\nNEW YORK TRILOGY by Paul Auster
\nDESERT SOLITAIRE by Edward Abbey
\n\u2022
\nThe Divine Comedy–Dante (does that count as 3 or 1?)
\nVarious dialogues by Plato (apology, meno, republic) Machiavelli’s ‘The
\nPrince’
\n1984–George Orwell–my world view has been much more laden with
\nconspiracy theory after this
\nPeople’s History of the US–Howard Zinn
\nIf This is a Man–Primo Levi
\nFrames of Mind:The Theory of Multiple Intelligences–Howard Gardner
\n\u2022
\nFicciones – Borges
\nAllegra Maude Goldman – Edith Konecky (precocious Jewish girl growing up in Brooklyn)
\nLittle Women – Alcott
\n\u2022
\n-Twelfth Night because of what it says about sadness
\n-Yeats complete poems because it’s Yeats complete poems
\n-Frannie and Zooey because it’s comforting
\n-Waiting for Godot because I didn’t realize that people talk different than they think
\n-War and Peace because if it were the only book in the world that would be fine
\n-The ecclesiastes part of the bible and some of the psalms
\n-The Lives of the Great Composers because it shows that good artists can come out of any era of history
\n-Reflections in a Golden Eye because it is possible to explain a certain aspect of the human psyche so exactly that there is no other way to explain it
\n-Winnie the Pooh because of what it says about anxiety
\n-The Aenied because I had to read the fucking thing in latin and the words are out of order
\n-Rimbaud’s complete poems because he STOPPED writing when he was 24
\n-Sickness unto death because of what it taught me about sex
\n-To Kill a Mockingbird because it actually isn’t cheesy
\n-Bonjour Tristesse becuase it was written out of revenge
\n-A Moveable feast because it taught me how to travel and because it’s so mean
\n-Dubliners because every playwright has to read that
\n\u2022
\n1) Geanology of Morals (F. Nietszche)
\n2) Being in Time (Heidegger)
\n3) Wasteland (Eliot)
\n4) Crime and Punishment (Dosto)
\n\u2022
\nThe Origin of Species – Darwin
\nDr. Dolittle – Hugh Lofting
\nA Book of Nonsense – Edward Lear
\n\u2022
\nYour questions got me thinking about certain books over the years. I stand by my earlier claim that it was the totality of many many books that did the job on me. But, still, there were a few, especially some very early ones that got me thinking one way and not another.
\nFor example, the first adult book I read all the way through — maybe at age 4 — was my father’s copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. I originally read it because I had gotten interested in the ancient Greeks (he was quite interested). But the last part of the book contained Norse myths and these were in some cases similar to the Greek ones. This got me to realize that these were just stories and needed more than claims to back them up. This helped tremendously in resisting the Bible during later attempts to force this on me.
\nAnother early book was a long one, also my Dad’s, Breasted’s Ancient Times, maybe read at age 6 or 7. Again, I originally started reading it because I though ancient (and “lost”) civilizations were cool (and loved the different architectures, etc.). But, I started to realize that human beings are driven to similar forms under similar conditions, etc. This led me to Anthropology later on.
\nA Life Magazine on the Holocaust (published in 1945, but I saw in in 1947 at age 7) completely horrified me, and made me afraid of adults to this day (and rightly so). This was likely one of the earliest insights and shocks that motivated my later long standing interests in helping children to think better than most adults do today.
\nWilli Ley’s Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel around age 8 had a big effect. One memory from this book was the strange idea that you couldn’t just aim a rocket at the planet you wanted to go to, but had to create an orbit for the rocket that would cause it and the planet to meet many months in the future. I can’t quite explain why this had such a big effect on me.
\nScience fiction, especially of Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, etc., had a huge effect, and got me to read many deeper books, like Korzybski’s Science and Sanity.
\nTo have a conversation with a professor who didn’t like grad students but did like McLuhan, I spent the better part of the summer of 67 really understanding Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. This was one of the biggest most useful shocks I got from a book.
\nMarvin Minsky’s Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines had a great effect on getting me to think more mathematically about computing (maybe 1968), and this led to McCarthy’s metadefinition of LISP in the LISP 1.5 Manual (a book of sorts), which was the key to really inventing objects “right”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I was thinking about the fact that books were the crucial element in the formation of my world view and wondered if that is the case with younger people. My guess yesterday morning was that people over 40 would easily come up with a list of books that influenced their way of looking at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[183,192,423,549,824,1087,1514,1576,1866],"tags":[2194],"class_list":["post-1452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book","category-books","category-culture","category-ebooks","category-history_of_the_book","category-literature","category-print_culture","category-reading","category-thought-experiments","tag-book-books-literature-reading-ebooks-history_of_the_book-culture-print_culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}