Tyler Cowen started this meme, which I noticed via Michael Martin. Arnold Kling took it up as well. I’ve already written a very long post about all of the books that influenced me.
The books on this list are by no means the ones I love or respect the most. Some of them influenced me in funny ways (i.e. I’ve forgotten what’s actually in a lot of these).
[Listed in the order I read them in]:
1. David Foot, Boom, Bust & Echo » While I was high school this got me in the habit of thinking about the future by focusing on social factors, rather than technologies and policies as if they’re separate from people’s lives.
2. J. D. Salinger, Catcher In the Rye » Over and above the usual reasons for listing it, Catcher crystallized my fascination with psychology and may have led to everything that followed (until then I wanted to be an architect).
3. Thomas Petzinger, The New Pioneers » A lot of the counterintuitive ideas about business in the 21st century are outlined in this book. It set me in the right direction relatively early.
4. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media » Not so much for the content. This is here because it’s the book that started my habit of taking careful notes and following up on the bibliography — otherwise I might not have read any of the books listed below.
5. Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea » Maybe the most substantial influence on my thinking. Like McLuhan’s, this is a great bibliographic hub that opened up a lot of insights and opportunities for further study. More importantly, it taught me to think about everything in evolutionary terms.
6. George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets » I read this to learn more about Goethe, loved it — I’m still living by some of the quotes — and then when I tried learning more about Santayana I was introduced to William James and Charles Peirce and they kept me pretty busy studying pragmatism for the next few years.
7. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality » I only read the first section (where he outlines his whole cosmological scheme). I don’t think I understand it, but in the attempt to grasp it I gained a whole new appreciation for how our minds affect our ideas about time and space.
8. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis » Another very useful bibliography, it gave me a lot of evidence-based corroboration of ideas I had already derived from people like James and Dewey, giving me the confidence to keep moving forward.
9. Jacques Barzun, The Modern Researcher » Barzun really helped elevate my discipline at exactly the moment I needed it — bringing everything together after years of intellectual grazing… I imagine him standing over my shoulder telling me I’m doing it wrong.
10. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Evolving Self » Another great bibliographical hub. This helped me connect most of the dots, connecting ideas from a lot of different fields [and finalizing much of the vocabulary I needed to articulate my thinking].
Honourable mentions: Thinking Learning For One’s Self: Essays on the Individual in Neo-Confucian Thought, by William Theodore de Bary; Destructive Emotions, edited by Daniel Goleman; Authentic Happiness, by Martin Seligman; Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, by Richard Rorty; The Malaise of Modernity, by Charles Taylor… and a whole stack of books by Whitehead, John Dewey, James, and José Ortega y Gassett.
