What 10 books have you read that will always be with you?

These are ordered by the time in my life I read them (roughly speaking).

1. The Neverending Story - Michael Ende

Ok, I’m cheating a little here because the movie is what most affected me. In kindergarden we watched the Challenger launch on TV. When it exploded, the teachers promptly put on this movie instead and I was enraptured and a little scared by the world Bastian discovers in an antique bookstore. The resulting mix of emotions has been with me ever since, and if I was psychoanalyzing myself, was probably the germination of my used bookstore fetish.

2. Juvenile astronomy books, circa 1985

I wish I had a specific title to cite here. When in grade school I voraciously read anything relating to space. What child of the 80’s didn’t want to be an astronaut?

3. Walden - Henry David Thoreau

A man goes to live by himself in the woods–a plan I can get behind. I was a big fan of the Transcendentalists in high school. This pick was a toss up between Emerson and Thoreau. I picked the master of the pithy quip.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

4. Animal Farm - George Orwell

“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

Orwell distills the flaws with the socialist conception of equality and its ramifications into a potent and accessible allegory.

5. Collected Poems - Dylan Thomas

In Freshman Composition at Roberts Wesleyan College I wrote a paper titled “A Refusal to Mourn the Death of Pioneers”–an homage to Thomas, Ende, and the Challenger. I wish I kept a copy. Thomas’ poetry is at once broken and triumphant with the rhythm of a lullaby.

6. The Divine Comedy - Dante

I’ve read Dante’s masterpiece three times in three different English translations. The unintended lesson I learned? Hell is more interesting than Paradise.

7. Nausea - Jean Paul Sartre

I am stuck in my own head. Others are stuck in their own heads. Humans are fundamentally incapable of making a complete connection with another human or any other object in existence and as a consequence are utterly alone. So goes the thought process of the eight-year-old David Maddock. Fast forward to adolescence and I found a friend in Sartre.

8. Economics in One Lesson - Henry Hazlitt

This was one of several books that helped me clarify my thoughts on society and economics and allow me to identify myself as a classical liberal. Heck, I’m a borderline anarcho-capitalist.

9. How to Make Money in Stocks - William J. O’Neil

There’s a lot of snake-oil finance gurus out there. Some would even criticize O’Neil for being one of them. (He publishes the stock-centric newspaper Investor’s Business Daily.) Following my conscious adoption of classical liberalism, I decided to become financially responsible. I read a lot of personal finance and investing books; the majority are garbage. What I loved about O’Neil’s book is that he took a very programmatic approach to stocks. In the 60’s he built a method of stock speculation around a kind of proto-data mining–he built a database of stock data and identified common characteristics in stocks prior to big uptrends.

10. The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture - Bart Ehrman

I read several of Ehrman’s more popular books before taking on this scholarly one. It has been my experience that people who hold very strong opinions often know very little about the subject to which the opinion relates. Of course, for me those opinions tended to be religious ones. Regarding the study of the New Testament, what believers have to say about it is often wildly different that what scholars do. Most of us don’t really consider that what we call “the Bible” is a conflagration of many, many manuscripts which do not all agree on what the text is. This book is a compelling critique of such manuscript differences and how some of them are a result of scribal changes in opposition to various ideas in the early Christian movement which have come to be considered “heretical”.

I also much enjoyed his Teaching Company lecture series on the New Testament. Rarely do we even consider the fact that the authors of the New Testament (and Old too for that matter) were not all trying to say the same thing–in fact, were explicitly trying to say different things (as in Matthew and Luke’s revisions of Mark).

This work has been greatly overrated. Sure, in the world of comic books, this is absolutely the best one I’ve ever read. (For some context, I collected comics in middle school. I liked the X-Men and Spiderman series in particular.) It is absolutely fair to assert that this is an important work of art for the genre, etc. However, this is not a great novel–at best it’s a decent one.

The writing, by which I mean the words printed on the pages, is unremarkable and suffers from a goofy tone that is indigenous to comic books. Dialog is frequently formulaic and unrealistic. For instance, a bad guy in a prison calls someone a “loony toon”. Generally, one would assume this is a limitation of the medium given the typical audience of comic books, but also included in this series is mass murder, rape, sex, nudity, impotence, and mild cursing (hell, bitch, asshole, etc.). This is just one example, but there is a lot of such dialogue.

However, there is a lot the book gets right. The writing, by which I mean plot and character development, is great–fantastic for a comic. Watchmen’s world deals with real issues that would result from a host of masked heroes prowling the streets. The heroes too (insofar as any are heroes), deal with real personal problems resulting from such a life.

Bottom line: if you like comics anyway, you will love this book. If not and a friend who does recommended it to you as a quality piece of art, you will finish it wondering what the fuss was about.

Note: This old review of Kafka is my most liked review on Goodreads.

I suspect interpreting Kafka says more about the reader than the author so here’s some insight into my psyche:

Gregor’s family are losers. Gregor takes over the “bread winner” position after his father’s business fails and provides enough money for the family to live as well as help to pay down the large debt his father’s business incurred. The rest of them are fine to let him and sit on their asses. Gregor’s father is perfectly healthy, but is happy to mooch too. Then, we find out that his father has been squirreling away Gregor’s money on the side to boot.

Gregor works for five years in this manner, never missing a day of work, and the first day he is ill they are jerks. Yet, when the vermin dies and they are employed, they all sit down quick to write letters of excuse for themselves. When the vermin’s alive it’s an excuse to not leave the house; when he dies they can’t work.

They deplore the fact that the vermin cannot understand them despite evidence to the contrary when he hears them talk and follows their instructions (eg. to get back in the room, etc.). Furthermore, they make no effort to communicate with him. I’d like to think if a loved one turned into an insect and I decided to keep them alive in a bedroom of my house, I would get around to trying the blatantly obvious “Hiss one for yes, two for no” routine.

In short, f—— you Gregor’s family. You suck.

Carse is a whore for needless semantic paradox. The first 20 pages are an interesting description of a rather artificial and naive world view of life as a set of games–some which must end and some which must forever continue. The remainder of the book is a tedious exposition of examples wherein Carse blithely redefines words to force various concepts into his dualistic model.

Can I tread water a little longer
Holding these things above my head?
I can drift ‘til the tide gets stronger
And let it pull me back to land.
So, I’ll just kick my feet.

I can feel the warm salt water
As it dries upon my face.
Crystalizing, compromising.
How do they justify this place?
How?

Fly, Robin, fly.
Yours is the sky
But you must take it,
No one else can claim it for you.

You say you long to scale a mountain
But the peak can seem so far.
Turn around see where you come from.
The air is getting thin right where you are.
Have you looked behind?

What can I say so you believe me?
What do I do to make you see?
The more you carry the slower the climb
So drop those stones and make it in half the time.

Fly, Robin, fly.
Yours is the sky
But you must take it,
No one else can claim it but you.