When I graduated from college, way-back-when, I obviously had a Bachelor's Degree, but I still felt pretty ignorant. And so I spent a fair amount of time in my 20s reading, trying to fill in at least a few of the gaps. I realized that I had I had never read Moby Dick, never read Crime and Punishment, and so on.
Out of that experience I came to know many works that have stayed with me over the years. Some probably demand a re-reading; I wonder if they would hold up with the passage of time. But among my most influential books are these ten:
• The Age of Reason by Jean Paul Sartre - got me thinking about existentialism in an artistic way
• Irrational Man by William Barrett - got me thinking about existentialism in an academic way
• Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller - freed me up to think a little more radically
• Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins - ditto
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov - double ditto (and he's quite the wordsmith, too)
• The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud - helped me understand the psychology of religion
• Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell - made me realize the shortcomings of dogma
• The End of Faith by Sam Harris - a more recent read, but an important one
• Earthwalk by Philip Slater - got me to re-think Western culture and its values
• Animal Liberation by Peter Singer - propelled me toward vegetarianism
Of course, it's also worth mentioning The World According to Garp, Gandhi: An Autobiography, The Jungle, Breakfast of Champions (Vonnegut), Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche), The Faith of a Heretic (Walter Kaufmann), Fear of Flying (Erica Jong), and Teaching as a Subversive Activity (Postman & Weingartner). Suffice it to say that the world of books has been an important world that has shaped my view of just about everything. As with my fairly recent post about songs (October 13), feel free to nominate your personal favorites--I'm always looking for something that's worth reading.
2 comments:
Someday you'll need to tell me what the heck Thus Spoke Zarathustra is about. I read it a few years back, but I didn't/don't have the philosophical vocabulary to understand it.
Ah, don't let that stand in the way. You're smart enough to figure out most of it. Besides, I think it's more "allegorical" than "philosophical"--there's hardly any jargon. It's not like reading, say, The Phenomenology of Mind by Hegel.
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