Influential Books

I was going to do a post on Orwell, but it will have to wait. As too frequently happens, I stumbled upon something tonight that ended up taking a fair amount of my time, and I have precious little left for serious writing.

It was this post by Matthew Yglesias on the 10 books that influenced him most. Not necessarily his 10 favorite, or the 10 best that he's read, but the 10 that influenced his future thinking the greatest amount.

Seeing Nietszche, Dennett, Dostoevsky, Rorty, and Kuhn in his list made me read on. And On, through the comments, where quite a lively (and uncommonly civilized) discussion of the relevance of various philosophers and writers is occurring.

There are interesting references in there, too: Julian Jaynes, Wittgenstein, Quine, Chomsky, Rawls. Foder, Davidson, and Nagel make the list, also, as the various commenters reveal different influences, and discuss why.

It was refreshing to see an actual exchange - and others putting up their lists. More books, more ideas to meet and digest! I'm often disappointed in what I run across on the web (or, more accurately, the blogosphere) - I imagine that with blogging, people putting up ideas, discussing, proposing, etc. that it could be a wonderful re-creation of the free-for-all discussions that took place in the common room during my college days as we grappled to understand the information pouring at us. Too frequently, however, it's a reasonable post by someone positing or proposing an idea (or attempting to back one up), and a lot of name calling and ad hominem attacks following.

There's an interesting question here, too: Will the next generation provide a list of their 10 most influential books, or will digital media change it to their 10 most influential sites? Or, in the hopeful words of Yglesias, "...I hope and think digital media will mostly crowd out relatively low-value book-reading experiences and still leave room for some of the big deal reads."

I still can find no substitute for the reward that comes from engaging for a serious time an author's ideas by grappling with a large-scale book of ideas, and so, I'm inclined to suspect that he is correct.