This meme has been floating around the Internet the past few weeks. I saw it first on Terry Teachout's site, then again at Patrick Kurp's Anecdotal Evidence. The rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.
Here are mine:
Pauline Kael's I Lost it at the Movies
Greil Marcus's Mystery Train
H.V Morton's A Traveller in Rome
Janet Flanner's Paris Journal 1944-1965
Ian McEwan's Atonement
Edwin O'Connor's The Edge of Sadness
John Williams' Stoner and Augustus
Joseph Epstein's In a Cardboard Belt!
Peter Devries's Madder Music
Joseph Ellis's Founding Brothers
Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France
Jean-Francois Revel's How Democracies Perish
Paul Johnson's Modern Times
Keeping The Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought
George F. Will's The Pursuit of Virtue & Other Tory Notions
The Kael and Marcus books I included because they introduced to me when I was very young (I read them both for the first time when I was a teenager) a different way of thinking about two of the things I love most - movies and music. In particular, they allowed me to see that no movie, no music, no art, is created in a vacuum, that everything is influenced by what came before it, and that seeing or identifying these influences in a work made us enjoy it all the more. Most importantly they taught me that a work doesn't necessarily have to be art to be enjoyable. Indeed must of what we love the most in these fields could justifiably be termed trash (Ms. Kael, of course, would later expand on this critical aesthetic in her famous essay, Trash, Art, and the Movies - "It’s preposterously egocentric to call anything we enjoy art—as if we could not be entertained by it if it were not; it’s just as preposterous to let prestigious, expensive advertising snow us into thinking we’re getting art for our money when we haven’t even had a good time.") Finally, both books introduced me to works I may otherwise never have encountered, works that I now love.
The Morton and Flanner books I include because they are among my favorite books about two of my favorite places. Both books gave me a deeper appreciation and understanding of the cities they chronicle.
The McEwan, O'Connor, and Williams novels I include because they all moved me deeply, are beautifully written, and, like the rules above state, have stuck with me. Seldom does a week go by that I don't reflect back on at least one of these wonderful books.
The Epstein and Devries books I include for they both combine a wonderful sense of the comic with a deep sense of humanity. Essentially, both these men make me laugh out loud, over and over again, page by page. Their comic vision is the product of their deep and generous understanding of human nature. (I should mention that these books were picked almost at random from each author's voluminous catalogue. Almost any of Epstein's collections of essays or Devries' novels could be substituted in place of those I've chosen. It is through the bulk of their work that their talent and spirit can be seen most clearly.)
The Ellis book I include because, better than any book I know, it brought to life the men of the founding generation along with a giving me a fuller understanding of the issues those men dealt with. It is a profoundly brilliant book which I would recommend to anyone.
The Burke, Revel, and Johnson books I include because they made clear to me the nature of totalitarianism in the modern world. I read them all in my twenties and they instilled in me a belief that free people must be constantly vigilant of their freedoms. At this moment in history, in the United States of America, perhaps we should all be reading these books.
The final two books I include because they were the two books most influential in my becoming a conservative. They taught me the fundamentals tenets of conservatism in common sense language using the issues of the day. Reading them both were a for me a kind of epiphany: they created a harmonic convergence out of what previously had been just a jumble of stray thoughts. I've never been the same since.
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