Fifteen books

My friend, Maren Wood (Dr. Maren Wood, that is), recently posted on "Facebook" a list of 15 favorite books that she could remember and list in 15 minutes. I thought it was quite interesting. I do not know if she believes these books reflect who she is, or who she has become, or just if she found these books amusing or interesting or informative.

I was going to do the same thing, but then I began to reflect on this exercise a bit. I am 66 years old. I have read a few more books than Maren but, more importantly, I read many of them a VERY long time ago. What did influence me? And, were my influential books ones that I enjoyed? Just what would I be saying if I made such a list? I still do not know the answer to all of those questions, but I made the list anyway. To be fair, I probably took 30 minutes to put it together. And, I am not surprised, in some ways, in regard to what I listed while I am stunningly surprised in other ways. The books I listed, I should note at the start, are ones that profoundly effected my thinking or my perspective at the time that I read them, and for some time thereafter. I cannot, on the other hand, quote from any of these books. Nor can I even tell you the summary of the story or the ideas or sometimes even all of the subject matter. First, I will list them, and then maybe I can explain some things.

15 Books

(in order of publication date, not importance, I guess)

1. Michel de Montaigne, Essays (1580)

(Montaigne had human behavior and individual aspirations and human foibles sorted out long before Freud or modern psychology or modern sociology)

2. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791)

(Paine invented modern democracy. He invented a modern journalistic style of argumentation. He articulated the true nature of society and its needs in a postive, even optimistic way. And, what did he get for this? The refusal the country he helped bring into being -- the U. S. -- to reclaim him as a citizen from a Jacobin prison cell. Admire George Washington all you want, he failed the morality and decency test on this one (as did a number of people). The only thing his critics then and now had right was that Paine could be a pain as a dinner or house guest.)

3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays (1841, 1844)

(I would not want to have dinner with Emerson either. Stuffy, arrogant and oh so judgmental, in a way only New Englanders can be. But I would like to write with the care and precision and insight with which he wrote. His themes and ideas on life and nature are broad, universal, and inspirational, with just the right dash of east Asian religious philosophy.)

4. Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1849)

(Emerson’s better half; and, to his credit, Emerson knew and admitted this. This is an essay for a young person. When you get older, you squirm uneasily in your seat as you read it, and realize you have not lived up to your human and civic responsibility. I could have included Walden (also written for the young), or Thoreau’s other naturalist stuff, which are just as important, but this essay lays our responsibilities on the line.

5. George Eliot (Marian Evans), Middlemarch (1874)

(I read this later in life. It is a romantic novel, and its sentiments would be syrupy or cloying in the hands of a less skilled writer. But Evans makes her characters warmly human and sympathetic, and as the pages turn you cannot help but feel better about individual human beings – well, about the potential she found in human beings. Some call this the best novel ever -- I will not disagree.)

6. Emile Zola, Germinal (1885)

(My brother brought this book home during his first year of university, and I may have read it that summer. In any case, I read it when I was young and had hardly heard of Marx or the miseries of industrialization or the need for social justice or – well, you get the idea. This novel was like a slug in the stomach. One of the best works of realism (well, it was one of the novels that introduced realism), it is moving throughout, despite being a long book.)

7. George Orwell, Essays (1920-1950)

(Orwell was a journalist and essayist. Animal Farm and 1984, while brilliant in theme, are not especially well written and are heavy-handed in satire and argument. Orwell the essayist is always engaging as an observer, as a critic of those modern forces that have overwhelmed humanity and deeply harmed fragile human beings. I do not always agree with his politics but as a 20th century critic he was not bettered by anyone.)

8. Hannah Arendt, On Totalitarianism (1951)

(I read this book in graduate school, and it introduced me to a thinker and writer whom I have admired and recommended ever since. All of her works set out the limits of human achievement. Besides articulating the “banality of evil” in individual and collective human behavior, Arendt sets out the profound underpinnings of totalitarianism in a manner that suggests its ubiquitousness and its persistence. Totalitarianism is still with us, as is fascism.)

9. Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (1963)

(As a science fiction story that I cannot remember, this novel is a bit of an oddity on this list. But I remember it as the best of Vonnegut. Sometime in the 1960s I made Vonnegut my summer reading, and I loved his whimsy and his sense of the absurdity of modern life. Many saw him as a fun read, but I think he was a powerful thinker with a lot to say for his time. By the way, Vonnegut apparently pushed this novel as his dissertation in anthropology, and finally won out!)

10. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)

(Nature, ecology, philosophy, religion, and sensuality (yes, beyond the cat scene in the opening; there is always something sensual about Annie Dillard, matched only by a brilliant intellect) all laid out by a brilliant young writer – well, she was at that time – articulated in the small compass of Tinker Creek in Virginia. I love her later stuff as well – especially For the Time Being.)

11. V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (1979)

(The persistent power of tribalism over nationalism and modernism and democracy, and the suffocating grip of the past over the future make this a dismal but compelling novel about Africa in general and the Congo in particular. I once took up Naipaul as my summer reading, and when I displayed signs of persistent depression and melancholy, and June discovered what I was reading, she made me quit. Good thing. Naipaul is too often right about the worst prospects for the future.)

12. William McNeil, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (1985)

(This is a brilliant work of big history. I made it the foundation for the latter portion of my History 1000 classes for the last 15 years of my teaching. The relationship of the economy and democracy and arms build-ups and war is frighteningly laid out by McNeil.)

13. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1985)

(While many other works might take the place of this work (some by Leroy Ladurie, for example), this was one of the first and one of the best representations of cultural history and its promise – at least for me. Being an old fashioned political historian, it helped release me from the dull statistics of social history and imagine a future for history that was vibrant and alive. It also encouraged another field to emerge – microhistory -- and this is a field that is going to be of as great importance as cultural history will be.)

14. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (1991)

(A lot of the historical interpretation I have brought to my writing has centered around human agency, autonomy and authority. Taylor takes on the existential, relativist side of these qualities and, again, while I do not always reach the conclusions he does, no one has seized this issue more intelligently than Taylor.)

15. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (2001)

(The best book I have read in the last ten years, again written by a journalist. Menand frames the real lives of the leading pragmatist thinkers – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Peirce, and William James – in a fascinating and engaging way. Menand’s book stands as one of three books – the other two being Wallace Steigner’s Wolf Willow (1955 ) and Norman McLean’s A River Runs through It (1976) – as the books I have either given away or recommended highly to a lot of people.)

Conclusion:

What surprises me is how serious most of this stuff is: I am not a fun-lovin' guy. I was also struck by how little of this list consists of "official" history; sure, I list McNeil and Darnton -- who are academics. And, Menand is a popular historian; Arendt is a philosopher who knows her history (what a rarity!), and Naipaul is a novelist who knows history and much more. But secondary works of history have not often impressed me, partly because I find them a boring read and partly because I find the analysis in academic history to be weak or limited. I believe that "history matters more," but not that certified historians matter more. I am also surprised to see how many of the things that have influenced me have been essays -- sometimes by philosophers, often by journalists. Montaigne, Paine, Emerson, Thoreau, Orwell, Darnton and Taylor are all essayists essentially. Perhaps I am too lazy for longer books; perhaps I like arguments presented in a short space without all of the footnotes and documentation. Six of my list are Americans, although their ideas range well beyond national boundaries, in the main. Only Thoreau, Dillard, and Menand have written on themes local to America, and even they are looking at a more distant horizon.

Ingmar Bergman begins his film Fanny and Alexander (1984) by portraying his nostalgic memories of Christmas at his grandmother's home. I somehow recall (but cannot locate and quote) a scene early on in the film, where Bergman's fictional grandmother -- Helena Eckdahl (played by Gun Wälden) -- admits that she never knew what a mother was, and that she only acted out what she thought was the role of being a mother. Becoming and imitating and role-playing rather than essentialist being is, of course, pure existentialism and pure Bergman. Looking at my list of books, I wonder if my life has not played out as a contest between essentialism and existentialism. Many of these books shaped my views of society, politics, human agency, cultural interaction, manners, morals, and nature. Have I just lived a life imitating the arguments, ideas and persuasions of books? Or, did I choose those books to read -- and to be influenced by -- because of already established proclivities of mind and sentiment? It is a "chicken and egg" question, I know, but the degree to which I give weight to either side of this question is of interest to me.