Cowen, Yglesias, Wilkinson, Douthat, Continetti, Caplan, Kling — who will win the Top Ten Influential Books Game?
By Austin Bramwell
Earlier this month, Tyler Cowen posted the ten books that have influenced him the most, and “encourage[d] other bloggers” to do the same. Ross Douthat of the New York Times called Cowen’s invitation “irresistible,” which, judging by the number of bloggers who responded, it was. The Top Ten Influential Books Game gave bloggers easy material — namely, themselves — for a quick post. It also gave them a chance to prove that they are part of the club (that is, the club of influential bloggers).
Most importantly, Cowen’s Influential Books Game gave bloggers an excuse to promote themselves by composing lists designed to excite the maximum of reader admiration. Which is not to say that any lists were insincere: on the contrary, the top bloggers ended up sounding all very smart and thoughtful precisely because they really are just the sort of people whose lives were changed by reading Nietzsche. Still, as vehicles of self-promotion, some lists were better than others. To succeed, an Influential Books List needs to satisfy several competing criteria, namely: erudition (it should show how widely the blogger has read), plausibility (it should not claim that the blogger read Principia Mathematica at age 10), inventiveness (it should be unpredictable), freedom of thought or freedom from dogma (it should not unwittingly depict the blogger as an ideologue) and gumption (it should show that the blogger is unafraid to defend unpopular opinions).
Given these constraints, it is not surprising that bloggers generally agreed on what types of books should be included. I list them below. Who came up with the most impressive list? Let’s take a look! The contestants: Bryan Caplan, Matt Continetti, Tyler Cowen, Ross Douthat, Arnold Kling, Will Wilkinson, Matthew Yglesias. The categories, identified by the “signal” each is designed to send:
1. “I admit that I was pretty silly at age 18.”
- Caplan: Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness
- Continetti: None
- Cowen: None (Cowen cites Ayn Rand but, showing gumption, does not express any adult reservations about her.)
- Douthat: G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy. “What Ayn Rand is to young libertarians,” Douthat writes, “Chesterton is to teenage Catholic conservatives.”
- Kling: None
- Wilkinson: Frank Herbert, Dune; Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
- Yglesias: Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey. Kingston, Yglesias explains, convinced him not “to be the kind of jerk who thought education was being ruined by PC demands to represent more women and minority writers.”
Best choice: Yglesias. Showing both erudition and freedom of thought, Yglesias conquered at age 18 a dogma that is uncritically accepted by seasoned intellectuals. Second prize goes to Douthat, whose early discovery of Chesterton shows erudition.
Worst choice: Continetti. Continetti admits that he grew up reading Ayn Rand and Rush Limbaugh, but still cites big conservative names such as Russell Kirk and Irving Kristol on the sophistic grounds that Rand and Limbaugh are “where you start, not where you end up.” Excluding Rand and Limbaugh, even though they influenced you, betrays dogmatism (only Russell Kirk is worth of serious attention!) and lack of gumption. If you like Ayn Rand or Rush Limbaugh, say so!
Ideal Choice: The best youthful obsession I can think of is C.S. Lewis’s obsession with the Sagas of Icelanders and other Norse legends. For a libertarian, love of Icelandic sagas has the added benefit of plausibly leading to an interest in stateless societies.
2. “My interests are more diverse than you know!”
- Caplan: Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
- Continetti: Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance
- Cowen: Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
- Douthat: Roger Angell, Late Innings
- Kling: Bill James, The Baseball Abstract, 1987
- Wilkinson: Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
- Yglesias: Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey (doing double duty here)
Best Choice: Cowen. A prolific writer and academic economist, he’s also read all of Proust! Now there’s a cosmopolitan. Second prize goes to Douthat and Kling, although they lose points for lack of inventiveness, as it’s slightly cliche for writers to love baseball.
Worst Choice: Several bloggers show questionable literary taste, but Caplan shows none at all. Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid appears seemingly at random as the only book on his list (apart from Zarathustra) that isn’t ideological or related to economics, and then, as it turns out, only because Reid helped cure Caplan of his Randianism. As Yglesias notes, Caplan’s interests are strikingly narrow.
Ideal Choice: Proust is hard to beat, though I think the best choice might be Rabelais. A taste for Rabelais is as plausible as a taste for Proust yet requires even more erudition. Someone like Yglesias could have plausibly cited Borges, another good choice. Many of these bloggers could have done simply by citing a volume of poetry.
3. “I have read deeply enough in the Western Canon to consider the Great Books my friends.”
- Caplan: Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- Continetti: Plato, The Republic; Smith, The Wealth of Nations
- Cowen: Plato, Dialogues
- Douthat: Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
- Kling: None
- Wilkinson: Aristotle, Nicomachean ethics
- Yglesias: Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals
Best Choice: Yglesias. Wilkinson also cites the Genealogy of Morals, but in Yglesias’s case you can tell that Nietzsche really got him thinking. Wilkinson’s choice of the Nicomachean Ethics and Continetti’s choice of The Republic lack inventiveness, as they rank too high on the list of best books of all time.
Worst Choice: Douthat. Douthat tries a shortcut by citing Fukuyama as a “gateway drug to Plato and Aristotle, Machiavelli and Nietzsche.” If you were truly intoxicated with the Great Books, however, you would not lump them together so blithely. Douthat’s choice shows lack of erudition and suggests Great Books curriculum dogmatism. Second worst is Continetti’s choice of Adam Smith, which lacks plausibility. Does Continetti really expect us to believe that he has read and pondered the entire Wealth of Nations?
Ideal Choice: Genealogy of Morals is good, but a bit too obvious for a young intellectual. I would go with another difficult but compelling philosopher such as Spinoza or Pascal (with a slight preference for Spinoza, as Jeeves’s favorite philosopher).
4. “I am not afraid to defend a book that you may hate.”
- Caplan: Rand, Rothbard, Mises; Paul Johnson, Modern Times; Murray and Herrnstein, The Bell Curve
- Continetti: Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation
- Cowen: Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal; Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae
- Douthat: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- Kling: Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man
- Wilkinson: Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged; Murray and Herrnstein, The Bell Curve
- Yglesias: None.
Best Choice: Douthat missed a chance to score big here. When a religious conservative praises Brave New World, it’s almost certain that he picked up his admiration from biotechnology skeptics such as Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama. If I am right, then Douthat should have showed more gumption by citing the oft denounced Leon Kass.
Worst Choice: Caplan. Caplan, showing dogmatism, lists a panoply of libertarian ideologues whom non-true-believers find tedious.
Ideal Choice: Herbert Spencer might work for a libertarian. Conservatives have no shortage of hated writers, from Joseph de Maistre and George Fitzhugh to Carl Schmitt. I could not find a liberal blogger citing anything very radical. I suppose only moderate progressives such Yglesias and Ezra Klein read Tyler Cowen’s blog.
5. “I may have my biases, but I have still learned from the other side.”
- Caplan: None
- Continetti: None
- Cowen: John Maynard Keynes, General Theory
- Douthat: Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites
- Kling: None.
- Wilkinson: Rawls, A Theory of Justice
- Yglesias: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From the Underground
Best Choice: Cowen’s choice of Keynes is excellent, but Yglesias truly shines here. By citing Dostoevsky, the religious anti-utopian, Yglesias shrewdly overcomes the problem that conservatives have not produced great works to rival those of Mill, Locke or Rawls. Yglesias acknowleges the aesthetic power of reactionary ideas — which shows freedom of thought — but ultimately dismisses them with the memorable epigram, “sober thinking about big issues is boring.” An outstanding performance.
Worst Choice: Douthat’s choice of Christopher Lasch shows lack of inventiveness, as Lasch has long been conservatives’ favorite leftist. But Continetti and Caplan show no interest in understanding the other side whatsoever. When asked to cite your influences, you should at least try to establish that you’ve considered other points of view!
Ideal Choice: You can’t beat Yglesias’s choice here. A liberal would also do well to cite Joseph Schumpeter, the most brilliant conservative of the past century. Conservatives and libertarians could be more inventive than to cite Rawls. Charles Taylor, Foucault, Habermas, Amartya Sen — any of these would be more interesting choices.
6. “I have a well-formed, coherent worldview.”
- Caplan: Rothbard, Mises, Richard Posner
- Continetti: Burke’s Reflections; Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind; Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism
- Cowen: Hayek, Individualism and the Economic Order
- Douthat: Chesterton, Orthodoxy; C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
- Kling: None.
- Wilkinson: Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty; Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture
- Yglesias: Derek Pargit, Reasons and Persons; Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family
Best Choice: This is a dangerous category, as being enamored with the canonical writers of your ideology shows lack of freedom of thought. I like Kling here, none of whose choices seems to have been chosen for ideological reasons. Cowen and Yglesias also excel by making clear that the lessons they have learned from various books are narrow, not ultimate.
Worst Choice: Caplan and Continetti again show dogmatism by citing a string of works popular only among like-minded readers.
Ideal Choice: The best strategy is not to cite a famous worldview-forming work at all.
7. “Gosh, I sure was precocious as a kid!”
- Caplan: Rothbard
- Continetti: None
- Cowen: Plato’s Diaologues
- Douthat: James Hibbert, Wolfe at Quebec
- Kling: None
- Wilkinson: Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
- Yglesias: Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals
Best Choice: Cowen. In Cowen’s case, you really can believe that at age 12 he had his nose buried in the Apology of Socrates.
Worst Choice: None is really a bad choice here. Douthat’s tale of how he learned so much “historical arcana,” however, seems artificial, as it turns out that the book in question did not actually make a deep impression on him.
Ideal Choice: Plato’s Dialogues. It’s surprising that not more teenagers read Plato, whose dialogues are often very entertaining. Other plausible and erudite choices would be lively classical historians such as Herodotus or Suetonius. For the blogger with a reputation for braininess, Godel, Escher Bach would work nicely.
8. “I’ve got some serious candlepower up here.”
- Caplan: Hard to say, since the most difficult works are all in his field
- Continetti: None
- Cowen: Quine, Word and Object
- Douthat: None
- Kling: Again, it’s hard to say, as the most difficult works are all in his field.
- Wilkinson: David Armstrong, Universals: An Opinionated Introduction
- Yglesias: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained; Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Best Choice: Cowen. Though an economist by training, Cowen has still read some rather hefty philosophy. (Yet he somewhat undercuts his victory in this category by drawing a “meta-lesson” from Quine about how to arrive at a deeper understanding than the one you already have. This often means that the reader has not actually understood the book in question.) Yglesias’s choices are good, but he loses points for lack of inventiveness by picking the two recent works of analytic philosophy that non-philosophers might have actually read.
Worst Choice: This category isn’t really fair to Continetti and Douthat, since they’re competing against academic economists and amateur philosophers. Still, apart from Continetti’s implausible choice of Adam Smith, neither selected any book that would really strain the old bean.
Ideal Choice: The ideal choice would separate the real brains from the pretenders by revealing that the blogger understands and could independently derive, say, Godel’s incompleteness theorem. The ideal blogger would cite Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind, while making clear that he doesn’t accept the conclusions.
9. “There’s no way the rest of you guys have read anything as obscure as this.”
- Caplan: None (works in his own field don’t count)
- Continetti: None
- Cowen: Susan Love Brown, The Incredible Bread Machine
- Douthat: None
- Kling: None
- Wilkinson: None
- Yglesias: Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution
Best Choice: Surprisingly, only Yglesias and Cowen compete in this category, which is ripe for displays of inventiveness. Yglesias cleverly picks a famous author’s less famous book. Cowen admits that he picked up libertarianism very early on, but from a surprising source.
Worst Choice: No bad choices here. Continetti, Kling and Wilkinson picked science fiction books, but only the most popular within their genre.
Ideal Choice: So many possibilities! I’m going to go with an actual personal choice, namely, Chateaubriand’s Genius of Christianity, a monumental apology for Western civilization that is hard to find in English translation.
10. “I may be highly literate but I’m not a snob.”
- Caplan: Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
- Continetti: Harlan Ellison, Deathbird Stories
- Cowen: None
- Douthat: Tolkien, Lord of the Rings
- Kling: Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
- Wilkinson: Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns
- Yglesias: None
Best Choice: I’m not competent to judge comic books, fantasy or science fiction, so I’ll have to call a tie between Continetti, Kling and Wilkinson. Douthat’s choice of Tolkien lacks inventiveness. Also, his defense of fantasy goes a bit overboard. Sure, fantasy “re-enchants” the world (read: it’s about gods and spirits and stuff) but that’s a far cry from saying that it captures “more reality” than the alternatives. At most, it captures a neglected piece of reality. In fact, while it does re-introduce supernatural spirits, fantasy also simplifies natural human spirits, so the results is actually a net loss of enchantment.
Douthat’s re-enchantment theory also fails to account for the appeal of its cousin genre, science fiction, which is fantastical but not supernatural. Finally, both genres appeal almost exclusively to geeky males who (as our blogging contestants themselves prove!) normally prefer non-fiction. This suggests that the appeal of fantasy is not in its supernatural elements but its elaborate system-building.
Worst Choice: No bad choices here. Ironically, Cowen, a leading anti-snob, is the least tempted by popular culture!
Ideal Choice: It may not be a perfect choice, but you couldn’t go wrong by citing P.G. Wodehouse. An admiration for Wodehouse is highly plausible and also shows erudition, since all voracious readers love him. Surprisingly, no took up the obvious challenge here, namely, to make a plausible defense of an author whom everyone else thinks unworthy of consideration. Douthat, however, gets extra credit for defending Stephen King as a “runner up” influential author.
Overall Winners: Tie between Yglesias and Cowen. (Cowen, however, should be handicapped since he started the “contest” and thus may have designed it so he would win.)
Just so there’s no misunderstanding, I should acknowledge that the Top Ten Influential Books Game was not set up as a competition nor was it taken as such (at least not explicitly). In “judging” the winners, I have my tongue in cheek. Still, this exercise confirms some general impressions, in particular that Cowen is a freakishly clever polymath and that, of those who have made blogging their trade, Yglesias has the most depth. The others are all very smart, worth reading, and brilliant in their areas of comfort, but not of the same general caliber.
http://lhote.blogspot.com/2010/03/books-that-have-made-me.html#links
Hilarious. This is better than reading the lists themselves. I think citing Livy (all the volumes, of course) would have neatly captured erudition (epsecially if read in Latin), plausibility (a rip roaring read), inventiveness (unpredictable), freedom of thought (no one else cited it, so there you go) or freedom from dogma (not officially part of the Great Books or any entry level Classics course.)
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Love it.
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I am competent to rate the fantasy, sci-fi, and comic entries, and I’d go with Wilkinson. It shows erudition (this book, along with Watchmen, really put the comic industry on it’s ear. The changes reverberate through pop culture, and you can’t turn on the TV or go to a movie without seeing it’s impact), it is inventive (who else listed a comic?), it shows freedom of though (in addition to being a comic, it’s a very thoughtful comic that expects the reader to be conversant in both comic history and real world politics at the time) and gumption (again, a comic, although widely loved by those that read them).
I would add as an ideal choice any Robert E Howard Conan story. Dangerous and controversial even among fantasy fans, misunderstood by everyone else, and low brow entertainment with more than a few high brow ideas.
Minor point, but Remembrance is hardly all of Proust. There’s criticism, translation, another massive novel — few have read all of it.
Hilarious
[...] Bramwall has a smart, funny post looking at the recent “Ten Influential Books” meme as a contest. Tyler Cowen and I are proclaimed the [...]
I think Dennett may qualify for “I am not afraid to defend a book that you may hate”, in Yglesias’s case.
From his comments section:
“Seriously? Have you actually read any philosophy of mind? I’m not talking about a fucking survey course. That’s just pathetic. Read some Chalmers, or just about anyone else. There’s a serious discussion going on in philosophy of mind among reasonable people, and then there’s Dennett jerking off in the corner.”
To which Yglesias replies:
“The other way of putting it is that there’s a very intellectually skilled but mostly pointless discussion going on in the corner known as “philosophy of mind” and then there’s Dennett off someplace else telling people not to bother.”
Basically, philosophy of mind people hate and belittle Dennett (and philosophy is Yglesias’s field), but Yglesias buys his argument that the whole thing is pointless.
This is stupid. How can you criticize something so personal as books?
Cowen may have paged through Remembrance of Things Past as a tad, but it is another question what he got out of it. Cowen is fun and interesting to read but there is plenty of evidence that he will take second place to no one in intellectual one-upmanship, and little evidence that he has absorbed much of Proust’s subtle and elusive world view. A much more candid recollection might be the one offered by Joseph Epstein who says he read Proust at (I think) 19 and say he cannot imagine what he was thinking at he did so. His best guess: “Gee, I’m reading Proust!” (I quote from memory, but I think I capture the spirit).
I’m entirely willing to believe that Cowen has read Keynes’ General Theory although I wonder how old–really–he was when he did it. I suspect he is also smart enough to realize that Keynes is in fact a great conservative whose only real public concern was to preserve the stability of the money supply.
Surprising to find no mention of de Tocqueville.
[...] #3: Austin Bramwell at TAC keeps score Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)I (Almost) Read That [...]
I know Bryan reasonably well. I suspect that he left some important books off of his list. He doesn’t mention Lord of the Rings or all the Dragon magazine articles he used to read. Bryan has a strong personal moral code about loyalty and duty that I suspect were augmented by his interest in fantasy. (He’s also interested in fighting evil.) But I could be wrong. I didn’t know him in high school.
About fantasy re-enchanting. I think you’ve completely missed Douthat’s point. The re-enchantment of the world that fantasy does is not about gods and spirits and stuff. It is about how humans naturally understand and share their understanding with each other. The modern causal and empirical view of the world is a construct. Something we have to make effort learn in order to have. The more primitve and natural way for humans to view the way of the world is as human motivations. This is why animism is so common in different ancient religions. There is a thunderstorm because the god of thunder is showing off. The events of the world are given human motivations, thus making the understanding of the world a reflection of humanities understanding of themselves.
This is what fantasy does. It re-enchants the world by bringing the back the will as the driving force of the world. This is also why fantasy characters are shallow. They aren’t real people, but character-traits. Part of the human psyche. The real human in fantasy is the one reflected by the world.
Not much in the way of science there. Newton and Galileo in the Latin might be a bit much but has anybody read Darwin? Not much history either.
Classic philosophical works are useful for philosophers, historians of philosophy, and (generally less so) lay readers with an interest in philosophy. Classic scientific works are useless for scientists, a bit less useless for laypeople with an interest in science (and much more useless than secondary sources), and of significant value to historians of science. For non-scientists interested in learning about science, as opposed to the philosophy, history, and sociology of science, I recommend Peter Atkins’s books.
I’m competent at least to judge comic books. Dark Knight Returns may be a good canon if you were collecting comics books in 1986, but it´s still the story of a violent and psychotic beating lots of people. There are fair better comics books out there. The last albums of Tintin are particularly impressive.
I take exception to the view that my books do not show that I have learned from the other side. The very first book, by Halberstam, comes from the other side, and it ultimately leads to my support for the “other side” (Simon Johnson and James Kwak) on how to deal with big banks.
How do you know whether to believe Yglesias’ list? http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2008/12/yglesias-on-reading.html
An excellent analysis. I wonder what you would do with my list:
1. Nietzsche — Thus Spoke Zarathustra
2. Ayn Rand — Atlas Shrugged
3. Frederick Turner — The Culture of Hope
4. Milan Kundera — The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
5. Dostoevski — Crime and Punishment
6. J. T. Fraser — Time, Conflict, and Human Values
7. Don Beck and Christopher Cowan — Spiral Dynamics
8. Sophocles — Three Theban Plays
9. Walter Williams — The State Against Blacks
10. Goethe — The Sorrows of Young Werther
nobody’s putting kant in their top 10? groundwork of the metaphysics of morals?
I was surpeised by how little Fiction there was in the lists , except one ( I forget which). For that reason , I am cynical about the choices the bloggers listed . The lists sounded more like fiction . (Pun intended).
Hehe. This is a nice skewering.
But what do all these list-makers actually mean by “books that influenced them”?
I suspect they mean that these books crystallised ideas that were floating around in their heads already, helping them organise half-formed arguments and filling in the logical gaps in their arguments.
If that’s the case, then these books probably didn’t influence them much. They may have enjoyed them, but then that’s not influence. They may have provided some ah-ha moments, but then that’s not influence. They may have provided them with useful facts, but if that’s influence why did nobody cite the first arithmetic primer they used at school, or the geography textbook which showed a map of the world to make the point that other countries exist?
How did Rand influence all these clever people, unless it was by bringing into the daylight libertarian ideas that many teenagers have, and allowing them to be expressed in respectable circles?
How did Proust “influence” Mr Cowen, exactly, or is that an unfair question?
Um, yeah. Hilarious, brilliant analysis in the original post. I’m having trouble believing most of these too, especially if “influenced” is the tag of choice. If they are sincere, then they’re bizarre: the absence of history, fiction and science is bad… and biography? Where did biography go? I generally hate biography, but even then, I can count one or two that influenced me.
Maybe I’ll post a list in the morning just so Important People can take as many fair shots at me as I do at them, if they so deign. But I seriously wonder how that would go, since I can’t see any resemblance at all between these “Time-Life Great Books of the Earnest People” lists and any actual bookshelf I’ve seen in a real reader’s home or even an academic office in the last quarter-century.
Maybe the sample above would seem more more sincere without Will Wilkinson’s list. The others at least seem human, but his reads more like Bot to me. He was influenced by Hawking because it made him “feel confident about being smart”? Really? Wow. What I got from learning to talk to attractive women, WW got from cracking the spine on the world’s most sold, least read book. “Buddy, that’s not *physics* you’ve got in your hands…”
And Schlaes? Mr. Kling, was anyone really *influenced* by Schlaes, or was everyone simply grateful for a chance to have their existing biases reinforced? I’m just astounded that one of the most flawed works of history in recent memory is also one of the few works of history cited above. For the record, I sympathize with at least half her argument (Hoover as activist, the New Dealers were making it up as they went along, the NRA’s excesses, etc.). But it was just… bad. Sloppy. Careless. Why? Why? Why?
Continetti “lack[s] inventiveness” for citing The Republic, but Tyler Cowen gets a pat on the head for listing the complete Dialogues.
No, the people making the lists have more sense than Kant. To paraphrase part of the last line of “Groundwork”, from memory: “I know this theory I put forward is true because it’s incomprehensible.” Groundwork indeed!
[...] “ten books” blogger game is pretty much ruined now that Austin Bramwell posted the crib notes on how to win it (Scoreborad: Yglesias is remarkably erudite. Douthat is an pseudo-intellectual [...]
Prof. Kling — exception noted! Nobody ever said that this “contest” would be fair (or, hell, even accurate).
Johan – I don’t disagree with what you say, but I don’t think it undermines my point, namely, that at best fantasy only captures a neglected piece of reality (namely, the primitive experience of naively being able to attribute human agency to things), but only then at a substantial cost. What did Nietzsche say about slave morality making man interesting? You could say the same thing about disenchantment — it has made man more interesting. That’s why fantasy always seems childish.
Note for the record: In the candlepower category, I should have also credited Yglesias with reading Parfit (which I have not).
I must object to your statement that fantasy and science fiction “appeal almost exclusively to geeky males.” There are plenty of us geeky females who love them as well.
I guess this is what I get for putting forth a sincere, honest, effort to name books that influenced me as a child and young adult while trying to avoid status signaling. I get judged as if I’d signed up for an Olympic competition in status signaling and compared to a group of people who had the benefit of elite educations that were completely out of my reach. I guess I can take some consolation the fact that I did not, in Mr. Bramwell’s estimation, come off worst.
[...] having read The Wealth of Nations (depends what sort of a person Continetti is). Regardless, his rating of various blogger book lists is fun. Matt Yglesias and Tyler Cowen win the [...]
Will,
You think you’re underprivileged — I can’t even afford my own ski mountain!
http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/12/15/the-lost-world/
[...] Perhaps Daniels should get some hip young bloggers to tell him how to make reading cool. [...]
I can’t think of what a really good list would be at first glance, it takes more reflection than you realize at first. Generally speaking, though, I trust conservatives who “started” (that is started seriously thinking about political ideas of a non-leftist kind after being on the Left by default as almost everyone once was) with reading something like Kenneth Minogue’s great Alien Powers, or anything by Mel Bradford, or even Thomas Sowell’s Conflict of Visions a lot more than I trust conservatives who began with Fukuyama, Kristol, or Rush. Just prejudice, I suppose; everyone takes their favorite and favorite overrated books/writers very seriously. To Kill A Mockingbird, for example, may have been a very good modern American novel, but it never deserved to be THE mainstream novel that is endlessly studied in American high schools, and is certainly inferior to Gone With the WInd, which has been all but forgotten. Politics… about race, the south, etc., undoubtedly led to such a thing, instead of the books being reversed as they should be if cosmic justice ruled us. I also suspect Proust is overrated, though that’s entirely unjustified seeing as how I haven’t read any. Ha! I should someday, I just get beady-eyed and suspicious when people hold him up to Dostoevsky or even Shakespeare. Maybe it’s a French thing; the neos should appreciate me for that, don’t they irrationally hate the French?
[...] some bloggers made a discussion piece out of their personal lists of important books. There was a snarky and unfunny discussion that usefully compiles it but that itself can’t see that there is so much more to [...]
@Janice
I completely agree with you. My girlfriend reads a lot of science fiction and fantasy!