Influential Books
It seems like the meme du jour (at least, a meme to which I am particularly susceptible) is to list ten books that have had an influence on your life. What I'm finding interesting about this list is that most of the books are not directly influential. Rather, they've had a second-order impact on my thought or action, whether adversarial or more subtle. I guess it's because I (along with most people) react more to that which we find wrong or which offends us in some way. Most people have done ten, but I'm going to be lazy and stick to six. It's Saturday, it's beautiful out, and I have work to do.
These aren't the most influential books, necessarily, just the ones that come to the top of my mind when I think on the topic. If I were more exhaustive, I'd decide which books to select from Zola, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Hume, Goethe, and Spinoza. I'd also have to add a few books that have been influential on my professional life.
1. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, recommended by a friend.
It's not so much that this book convinced me of its premise, which has been used several times as a literary device, probably most notably in Neal Stephenson's books The Big U, Zodiac, and Snow Crash. It's a convenient explanation for some aspects of godly interaction, especially in the Hellenic and pre-Hellenic ages.
But anyway, whether I buy into it or not, Jaynes spent a lot of time discussing consciousness. It was really the first book I read where a large part of the melange of philosophy and cognitive philology floating around in my head aligned and gelled into a related whole.
It's junky and not especially well-written, and eases by some technical points in favor of accessibility, but this book put me on the course of a black hat for a short period of time. Previously, I was happy with Usenet (and rn!), email, FTP, and the occasional gopher site on a Z-19 terminal, but it became a bigger issue of what I could find and where after reading this. I won't go into the subsequent details (mainly because it's embarrassingly banal and my name's on this post) but again, this is where "the Internet" really clicked for me beyond the top layer of the OSI protocol stack.
I read this in my teenage years, not long after #4 on this list. Probably the biggest push from reading this book was not just a general understanding of basic capitalism, but the associated reading that led me to Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage. That theory itself has changed the way I evaluate work and management.
It wasn't that my father is or was a proponent of objectivism in general or Rand in particular, but he felt that the book was an important part of stretching one's mind and laying part of the foundation for later philosophical criticism. He first offered me Atlas Shrugged when I was twelve, thinking the more mechanical aspect of the plotline would appeal to me, but I found this book much more accessible.
This pretty much set the tone for a bad-ass, and any time I needed to exercise the F***-it Bone, I often think, WWLOAD? Whether pushing on through illness, wandering into places where one shouldn't, or even changing the way I travel internationally (I am always asked for directions by other tourists, who are often impressed with how well I speak English), Lawrence is as good a role model as any. Yes, yes, he did some vile stuff, but even his death inspired the creation of motorcycle helmets.
That's not in this book, by the way.
I judge all speculative literature against this book. It's extremely detailed and the depth of assumption makes it as credible as possible. It's obvious (as has been done by Herbert's son and others) that one could create a large number of books covering the millennia between our time and this fictional future, just fleshing out some throwaway incidents or statements for which most authors would kill. Side references to battles, enmities, government, and religion that are never explained but are consistent throughout the books and give me an opportunity to use one of my favorite words when describing literature: verisimilitude.
If I ever write a fictional book, I'll use Dune as a guide.
