Since Austin Bramwell has now joined the meme of political naming the books that have most influenced their view of the world, after poking fun at the whole thing a little earlier, I suppose it’s safe for me to indulge as well. The list below is not the same as a list of the books that have most influenced my view of politics generally or of conservatism in particular, though it would overlap with those in a few places. These are the books that have been keystones, or at least first bricks, in various segments of my worldview. For the hell of it, I’m listing them in the order in which I read them, with the year in which I read them noted in parenthesis.

1.  Robert Heinlein, Red Planet (1983). Since this was the first non-picture-book I read, it should be fair to say it influenced me.  The only conscious influence I can detect is that it sufficiently enjoyable that I was motivated to read more. Subconsciously, though, who knows? Heinlein was a Goldwaterite libertarian-republican, I learned what an IOU was from reading this book, and as I recall it ends with the young protagonist’s Martian friend having to leave his human society and rejoin his own people — something of a cultural particularist theme, perhaps?

2.  Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1990). I got more out of Adams’s Dirk Gently novels than I did from the Hitchhiker’s Guide series a few years earlier. This one improbably helped to shape my interests in poetry by introducing me to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That wasn’t much of an influence at the time, but a year or two later Coleridge would be important to aimless teenage efforts to attain culture.

3. Jerome Clark, Unexplained (1993). It’s sheer self-indulgence to include this, but I loved that book, so here it is. Clark is an agnostic investigator of Fortean anomalies, and this book is an encyclopedia of odd occurrences, extraterrestrial encounters, and excursions into cryptozoology. I knew what the Tunguska event was years before “X-Files” viewers heard anything about it. I can still tell you about the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, Spring-Heeled Jack, Mokele-Mbembe, the Lake Champlain Monster, and what’s underneath Mount Shasta. This book was great preparation for life on the right, since it fostered a love of weird folklore.

4. Vergil, The Aeneid (1995). This may be the only canonical classic and school text that makes the list. Reading this in Latin class during my junior year in high school was my first experience with close textual (and contextual) analysis, and it taught me both about the meaning of metrical forms and the propagandistic uses of great literature. Old Roman virtues and new Augustan programs are expressed by the structure as well as the content of the book, and learning how that could work was an illuminating experience.

5.  Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World (2000). I found this to be a spiritual tonic and antidote to paleo-pessimism. I took away from it the lesson that every age has its characteristic defects and virtues; the defects of ours may be more apparent to conservatives than the virtues, but that does not humanity has suffered a final,irrevocable collapse. The perspective it provides on the nature of history is only a tiny part of what makes this book valuable, however — read it for yourself and see.

6.  Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles (2001). One of my few forays into the modern novel. This one I enjoyed for its acerbic, post-leftist politics and psychological sci-fi dimensions. It remains, at least in my memory, a lucid commentary on the technological society, social atomism, and the failure the countercultural revolution — but from a refreshingly bitter lefty perspective rather than a smarmy right-wing one. It’s the literary equivalent of postpunk. I didn’t like Houellebecq’s next novel, Platform, nearly as much, and never got around to reading The Possibility of an Island.

7.  Andrew Bacevich, American Empire (2002). This one didn’t change my worldview (well, nor did Houllebecq, for that matter) so much as reinforce it. I still regard it as the single best volume on the grand arc of U.S. foreign policy over the last century — it’s not comprehensive, but it captures the essence. Not only that, but it evokes conservative and republican traditions of anti-militarism that have been long lost (and whose history is sketched in further details in Bill Kauffman’s Ain‘t My America) and the memory of a Midwestern progressivism that was all-American even as it was scathingly critical of U.S. militarism and corporate capitalism. I wish that Left hadn’t lost out to New Dealers in the ’30s and Maoists in the ’60s.

8.  Auberon Waugh, The Diaries of Auberon Waugh (2002). It’s all about the joy of malicious satire, a sterling example of what Waugh called “the vituperative arts.” Waugh’s capacity to mock anything in the name of judgmental freedom makes this book a bible of the Tory anarchist.

9.  Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality (2002). As with Waugh, here I found a kindred sensibility. My first encounter with Nisbet was The Twilight of Authority a few years before, which was also influential, but this volume was vital for showing me that I was correct in my only feebly articulated criticisms of the modern Right. I was already interested in conservative dogmatics — I had a much better sense of how to fit things together and analyze the Right after reading it, however.

10. Willmoore Kendall, The Conservative Affirmation (2008).  I had dabbled before, but I read Kendall closely for the first time in 2008, and while Contra Mundum and The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition also reshaped my thinking, it was while perusing The Conservative Affirmation that the importance of the Kendall method of analysis really sank in. It was in reading Kendall that I first understood the need for thinking like the author rather than just thinking like the reader, and to read a philosophical text from the inside rather than the outside. This is something philosophers must learn early on, but even knowing that that’s an important way to read a book, one doesn’t realize how important it is until one experiences it — it’s an art, not an idea. The upshot of this was that Kendall got me to take political theory more seriously and to look at theory and history in a new way.