My Top ten books

General observations.  When choosing best books we are dominated by our circumstances:  I speak English and live in the early twenty first century.  I detest academic tomes and books where people presume to tell you how to live. Prose style is important to me - if it's not well written it can't be important.  I also cannot understand how you can have a greatest book list with no fiction, poetry or drama on it.  Aside from the Bible it is literature that struggles with the eternal questions.  A non-fiction life is flat, lacking in the things that truly make life worth living - as an example:  the 'great' non fiction books as a rule aren't funny and you gotta have funny.  Therefore my first three books are fiction, first, Drama:

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare - JC is my favorite of all his tragedies.  Caesar was a great man who because of his pride destroyed everything that he cherished.  It reminds me that even when we are within our rights we can make horrible destructive choices for others. It also reminds that we must choose which side we're on.  There are no neutrals in life.

Poetry: The Waste Land by TS Eliot - First of all Eliot is from the 'Lou (woo hoo) but even more importantly TWL is a piece of secular prophecy - it reflects the cacophony, alienation and despair of what in 1922 was the looming deluge.  This honor, belief and dignity destroying 'modern' civilization continues to tear at our souls and with each passing year fewer and fewer of us even understand what is happening.  Eliot the High Church snob saw this and despaired. Even his disjoint and disorienting modernist style serves to communicate the roaring bedlam that the world has become.

Prose Fiction: Huckleberry Finn by Samuel Clemens: HF is a book that reminds us that when we flee our problems we often are simply driving ourselves deeper into the heart of darkness.  That to try to live rightly is agonizingly difficult and yet the only option if we are to keep our selves.

The Protestant Bible: While not fiction it is not truly non fiction either because it speaks of things that depend on our faith.  It's about God and our relationship with him and all that foofera but I treasure it because of the incredible characters that fill its pages.  This was the first truly human book - the first to treat human beings as persons rather than symbols or categories. It remains the greatest explanation of why we are here and why we're  important. It was through this book that mankind first received the gift of dignity.

There are a couple of popular science books on my list.  Genome by Matt Ridley and Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert - The Genomic/Evolution and Quantum Mechanics theories are the two most culturally influential ideas of our age regardless of how accurate our understanding of them turns out to be.  The Genomic/Evolution theory has pushed God from the center of the action to the edge (though not necessarily from the center of reality) while the Quantum Theory has dethroned certainty.  You see ripples of these ideas everywhere.  These books are a bit old but the point is not the details but the impact on the lens that we see the world through.

Modern Times by Paul Johnson.  Johnson ties together the anomie of The Waste Land (#2) with the dislocation driven by the theories underlying Genomic/Evolution (#5) and Quantum Reality (#6) with a Catholic sensibility (#4 minus apocrypha) into a coherent narrative that explains how we have gotten here and what is happening to us. And he's a damn good prose stylist to boot.

The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker is a brilliant summary of what science knows about our natures.  In it the atheist Pinker surveys over one thousand studies confirming the traditional 'tragic' view of human nature as imperfect and unperfectable creatures while adding lots of fascinating detail to the picture.  It rubbishes all utopian fantasies whether by Marxists or Church ladies. A word of warning:  don't look at his photo on the back page because his perm will give you nightmares. Woof!

The Road to Serfdom by Fred Hayek.  Not really economics but  instead true moral philosophy of the highest order without the miserable aridity of academic philosophy.  A U Chicago man (my fair school) as well.  The anti-Krugman and anything that gives Pauly K conniptions has to be good.

Liberal Fascism - I agree with David Shane.  Jonah Goldberg's book explains our politics and specifically why the pursuit of power for its own sake in our world is so dangerous. Much of what our elites are doing from Rape hysteria to Climate hysteria to Redskin hysteria is inexplicable without understanding what Jonah has laid out.  Completely and totally freaked John Stewart of the Daily Show out - which is always a good sign.

Okay, that's my ten but I demand the right to add one more:

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - Actually three very good books (four and five are much weaker), The Hitchhiker trilogy reminds the arrogant part of each of us that no matter what we invent, write, build or achieve, sometime in the future someone is going to make a rude joke of it or use it in naughty ways.  And if that doesn't give you humility, nothing will.  Eventually everything becomes funny, particularly us.

Also, this exercise reminds me why I try to avoid being challenged to do things by gosh darn academics - it takes so much time and it ends up making you sound pompous as hell.  Darn you David Shane!