What are the books that shape you?
…that influence your beliefs>
…that change your mind?
…that transform you into the person you are today?
I was looking for something on the bookshelf the other day and came across a book that I hadn’t looked at in quite some time (Saul’s The Doubter’s Companion, fwiw), and saw the notes and underlining, clearly made with intent, by some other me decades ago.
So I dug deeper into the bookshelf, and came up with a list:
- John Ralston Saul, The Doubter’s Companion
- John Ralston Saul, On Equilibrium
- Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
- Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi, Creativity
- G.M. Peter Swann, Common Innovation
- Douglass Rushkoff, Program or be Programmed
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
- Raymond Williams, On Television
- Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor
- Dierdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics
- Richard Lanham, Economics of Attention
- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
- Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
- Eric Havelock, Origins of Western Literacy
- Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity
- Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics
- Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late
- Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality
- Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike, The Practice of Programming
Now, a few words. This is a foundational list. But there are several things that it’s not, so we’ll define it by that. It’s not a top ten, and it’s not in any order, save for as they came to mind. (This may reveal the associations and linkages in my mind, but no more). And looking at it, it is necessarily incomplete; it’s a start.
They may not be the most notable or celebrated work by some of these authors (though in some cases they are), but they are the ones I bought, read, experienced, and retained, and through all of them I can find echoes of my current beliefs, attitudes and outlooks, so in echo of Borges’ Quixote, I’ll note them down so the path can be retraced.
I think a book a week is a good pace for a re-read. Let’s dive into the foundations of the bookshelf…