Ten Books That Most Influenced Me

There’s a “list the ten books that have most influenced you” meme floating around some of my haunts in blog-land, starting with Marginal Revolution and drifting far and wide from there. Let’s see what I can come up with:

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
Great writing, good reporting, provocative ideas. It makes you think seriously about a subject that more of us ought to spend some time thinking seriously about.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
I “got” evolution via natural selection after reading this book, whereas before I had just sort of acknowledged it — and not just in the realm of biology but as a more abstract template that reveals patterns in economics, culture, and elsewhere.
Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
I read this again and again. It takes the place of prayer and meditation in my life. I still hope to commit it to memory one of these days. Every once in a while I pick up Ecclesiastes also, which strums the same strings for me, at least up to the point where the vandal takes over and spray-paints orthodoxy in at the end.
Ammon Hennacy, The Book of Ammon
As a book it’s a kind of hodge-podge of various letters, pamphlets, articles, and journal entries that can be repetitive and that bogs down in parts, so I hesitate to recommend it. On the other hand, it’s a rare book in that I think it swiftly made me a better person for having read it.
Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves
This book gave me hope that people who are fighting for a better and more humane world aren’t wasting their time but that sometimes the crazy visionaries chalk up a victory.
Myron Levoy, Alan and Naomi
I read this children’s book with a grown-up theme without being warned, so it took me by surprise and hit me hard, deep in my soul, and probably bears a lot of the blame for who I am today.
Fitz Hugh Ludlow, The Hasheesh Eater
Written in 1857, before any of the now-familiar clichés about the psychedelic inner landscape had been invented, it remains probably the best attempt to put the bizarrely magnified introspection available through the use of psychedelics into words.
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
An interesting argument, and also a fun, companionable ramble through a philosophical garden.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
I read it at a vulnerable moment as an earnest young liberal trying to keep an open mind, and, while I never went Randoid, I could never go back to being an earnest young liberal either.
Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government, Slavery in Massachusetts, and A Plea for Captain John Brown
I return to Thoreau often. He and I see eye to eye on a lot of things, and I read his writings to rally my spirits and forge ahead.

Those are my ten. Remember that this is supposed to be a list of books that have most influenced me, not necessarily those I think are the best or that ought to be the most influential. Here are some honorable mentions in the same category:

This leaves out many books that I found beautiful and inspiring, but that I don’t think I was particularly influenced by.

I can’t help but notice the scarcity of women authors in my list (there’s Arendt and Rand, and then Wendy Pini & Margaret Atwood get also-rans). This is also true of the lists by other people that I’ve seen. I’ve read some fine stuff by, for instance, Joan Didion, Laura Miller, Donna Kossy, Susan Blackmore, Claire Wolfe, Ursula K. McGuin, Mary Warnock, Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Lauren Slater, but none of it really much altered my trajectory (but this can be as much because I’m already on a course that harmonizes with the book as because the book doesn’t much move me) — any recommendations?

Timewise, the books in my top ten have a couple of clusters: one around and another around , with only one outlier, also the only book on the list from this century, Hochschild’s Bury the Chains.


The president signed another law the other day. This one has some tax implications that might be of interest to some folks who are using the DON method of tax resistance.

  • Section 179 depreciation is extended. If you are self-employed or own a small business, this makes it more convenient to deduct expenses for equipment you purchase. For instance, if you buy some software you need to use in the line of work, you can take the entire cost of the software as a deduction during the year you purchase it, rather than subjecting the cost to arcane depreciation rules. Section 179 only applies to certain business expenses, and not all businesses qualify, so you still have to tangle with some red tape before you know if this will do you any good.
  • If you are hiding money in offshore accounts, the new law has a number of measures designed to make this tougher and to make the penalties for getting caught worse.
  • The perennially-extended deductions for teachers’ classroom expenses, higher education expenses, and state property & sales taxes have been extended yet another year, through .
  • Your ability to make tax-free contributions from a tax-deferred retirement account to charity is also extended through .