A “Nine Books I’ll Never Forget” meme is going around. Considering how much I have read in the course of my life — close to three thousand books on this blog alone — that’s a daunting challenge, so consider this list only tentative. It lacks any CS Lewis, which horrifies me, and I know there are other books whose influence is so great I can’t even step back and contemplate properly.
.
Probably no surprises here for people who read me often, but I’ll try to precis each:
- The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius introduced me to Stoicism, which has been a bedrock of my spiritual-philosophical life for nearly 20 years now.
- Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs was reccommended to me on urbanism grounds, but it introduced me to the concept of emergent order and one sentence in it completely changed my life
- A Life of Her Own by Emile Carles was a pivotal part of my political evolution, though I’m sure I’d argue with it now. It’s the memoir of a teacher in a rural French village who was disillusioned by the state, religion, etc, and taught her students to think critically. We see the First and Second World Wars unfold through her eyes. This was my introduction to ‘democratic’ leftism, as I associated leftist/Marxist thought only with authoritarianism. It led to me reading deeply into the left for a few years, but at an oblique; I like to joke I went so far left I popped into right field with Ayn Rand and Russell Kirk
- The Righteous Mind is a hard book to summarize, in large part because it covers so much ground. One of its core subjects is morality, which the author explores from philosophy to natural history.
- Amusing Ourselves to Death is really a Neil Postman stand-in: I couldn’t decide between this and Technopoly. I remember reading Postman in the university library and copying long passages into a commonplace book & journal that I subsequently lost in a move, a loss that disappointed me so much I fell away from keeping a journal. Postman is the reason I didn’t have a smartphone until 2018, because he made me think about how technology shapes us and society
- Jayber Crow was my introduction to all things Berry, and Berrian thought is a cosmos into itself.
- Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel overturned the ‘chronological snobbery’ I’d inherited from textbooks and began my interest in the Medieval epoch’s intellectual life
- The Geography of Nowhere. Oh, where to begin with Jim Kunstler? Geography is a history and scathing critique of American urbanism since 1945. It made me think about why I was fascinated by cities; it gave me a vocabulary to understand why I found prewar cities fascinating and postwar cities utterly without interest; it led me to exploring more of Kunstler and starting to think about energy, food, and transportation infrastructure and policy.
- Bowling Alone was one of the many books I read in that oh-so pivotal year of 2013 when my worldview was shifting from college’s ideological purity to my present conflicted mess. It gave me the concept of society as an organic thing, not simply an abstraction — and like other organic things, it needed to be fed and protected lest it wither and die.
10 books the other day, 9 books today. Are you doing a secret count down?
Oh, that inspires!
7 Books I Spilled Coffee On
6 Books I Read While I was Supposed to be Doing Something Else
5 Books I Rescued from a Little Free Library
4 Books I found Weird Stuff in
3 Books I’d Take on a Honeymoon
2 Books I Keep in my Car
1 Book to Rule them All, 1 Book to find Them, 1 Book to Bring them all and in the library rebind them
Oh goodness, what beast hath I unleashed in my overweening comedic hubris? Alas and alack!
Well, you’re in luck. A hurricane appears set on blowing me away this weekend . :p
Make sure to hoard water, canned spam and all the ammo and guns you can carry 😉
I went into Walmart yesterday evening to get some fixings for supper and lunch, and the lines were so long I nope’d my way in reverse. Only thing I’m concerned about is cellphone pack….I have water, food, etc, but I’m always misplacing the cellphone pack that can function as a long-term ‘battery’ for phones during an outage. The last time a hurricane came through was Zeta in 2019 and it hit us pretty good.
Ohhh, batteries. Good call.
Well, I just remembered…my cellphone’s USB-C port doesn’t work, and I have to charge it wirelessly, so I think finding one my packs (in The Storage Tub of Computer/Electronic Crap) would be useless. But it’s supposed to hit at Cat-2 at best and it’s gotta plow through two hundred miles of pine trees before it gets to me. Hopefully all will end well.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a phone that charges wirelessly. Is it handy or a pain in the neck?
A little bit of both. It’s handy in that when it’s charging, it’s on a stand and I can see it clearly — the clock, text messages, whatever. There’s no fiddling with the cable; all I have to do is set it down and away it goes. However, it’s less versatile. I have charged wirelessly in my car before, but I basically have to ‘stabilize’ the dock by setting in the seat and then giving it support on either side so the phone doesn’t bounce off while I’m driving. They do sell wireless mounts you can attach to the interior of the car, but the ones I’ve seen are all too pricey to bother with.
OT (as always)… I’m just about to finish a book on the micronation of Sealand which has a scattering of Libertarian content you should find interesting. Review will be in about 2 weeks.
‘Sealand – The True Story of the World’s Most Stubborn Micronation’ by Dylan Taylor-Lehman (2020).
Pretty sure it was mentioned in Radicals for Capitalism (which has an entire chapter on wealthy eccentrics trying to create island micronations), but it’s been a while since I looked at it!