Yes I understand about the time out of joint thing. Messages flying back and forth!! One final point. What does it matter where or how you discover a book, as long as you discover it? No-one's asking you to agree ipso facto with the 100 choices, but it wouldn't hurt to sayyyyy...pick an interesting sounding text and hunt it down. Doesnt mean ya cant think for yrself. I mean if you for example recommended a great book on world war 2, I wld seek it out. Get yr goods where ya can I figure.

I think lists are great. Specifically provocative lists like this one. Specifically because they provoke people to defend their choices, argue, disagree, find consensus, etc. I disagree that this very list is the 100 Most Influential Books in the history of the Whole Entire World. That said, I agree with Ishmael (can I call you Ishmael?) that it represents a reasonable jumping off point for precisely this sort of discussion.

The Dummies guide to Moby Dick (last seen on Simpsons)- Call me Ishmael, dummy.
Well, I think we're just talking in ever decreasing circles now, eh kendocubano? Is there anything left to add? Oh, I might just say that I absolutely adore a lot of the books on this list--everyone human lifeform should read Don Quixote and Homer, just to name 2. Right then! Im off to make another list.

quote:

Originally posted by Ishmaelscoffin:
The Dummies guide to Moby Dick (last seen on Simpsons)- Call me Ishmael, dummy.
Well, I think we're just talking in ever decreasing circles now, eh kendocubano? Is there anything left to add? Oh, I might just say that I absolutely adore a lot of the books on this list--everyone human lifeform should read Don Quixote and Homer, just to name 2. Right then! Im off to make another list.

Umm. Yeah. It was a joke. Moby Dick is actually one of my all time favorites. I love pointing out that Starbuck is from that book.
Agree that thread is pretty much spent. See ya on the next thread.

thats interesting, now if i could just read them all...

I believe ya can do it....
...you're a girl, right?
Well then, you have years and yrs to conquer the list

I love lists. But I don't know if I agree with the list posted. I realize they're the most influential books, not the best written, but influential how? I am assuming from the books chosen, influential as to thinking, not the evolution of literature, itself.

Ulysses would have to be on the list if we were talking about the evolution of literature, and Mrs. Dalloway, Lolita, and many others. Certainly Don Quixote belongs on the list whether were talking about thinking or evolution of literature.

I didn't count how many of them I've read. Not nearly enough, I do know that.

This list is certainly as you say sunsplashed, about books influential in terms of thinking and society, culture, science etc.

Literature's influential children wld be a different list indeed. I mean, have you ever read "Origin of Species?". The compilers of this list sure didn't pick that for it's literary skill.

However The Voyage of the Beagle is quite delightfully written.

I wouldn't be sure about the list being chronological, considering Herodotus' History is after Thucydides'.

I read the Greeks on the list when I was a teenager and I enjoyed them a bunch. Most of the other works are cures for insomnia. Anyone here read the works written in Latin? Just wondering. I wish the people who compile these lists would explain how they are influential. Maybe I would be less apt to dismiss most of them as brain deadeners.

rockthief, surely you are looking for someone to rise to yr outrageous claims about 'most of the other works are cures for insomnia'.

I mean, really, saying such silly things....

no, not at all. That is my opinion. You might have a different opinion.

As much as I respect personal opinion when it comes to issues of art (De gustibus non est disputandum, and all that), I don't think the influence of these works on western thought is disputable. You might certainly argue whether these works are the most influential in the western (primarily) canon, but it is impossible to doubt that the bulk of these works is enormously influential.

Keep in mind that whether they influence you directly is not the issue. These works influence your thought whether you like it or not, as they have become the fabric of western thought.

I am an atheist. I don't believe that the Testaments, old or new, have any truth to confer beyond the literary or metaphoric. However, it would be senseless for me to argue that they were not influential. My government is currently prosecuting a crusade in my name (though without my consent) because of the stuff written in those books.

Do you find them boring? Good on you; you're within your rights. I've read some or all of most of the works, and found some of them dead dull. However, arguing that they're not influential is like arguing that there is no space between Europe and the Americas because you don't enjoy swimming in the ocean.

Why can't we all just get along, everybody is entitled to their own opinions. Some like lists, some feels it is a gross injustice/insult to the thousands of books that are left out in the cold by such a limited selection. Reading all the great books in the world won't make you a better person unless you possess a deep-seated self-actualizing core. Ramanujan only had ONE mathematical textbook to learn from and he became one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. Just that ONE book.

What about Mein Kampf? Perhaps it's just because I recently watched Ken Burns' The War, but that awful piece of literature sure turned the world upside down, didn't it?

Enormously influential, but, I think, only for a short, circumscribed period of time. Perhaps more egregious, and more influential, however, would be the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." I think that either could be considered among the most influential books of the 20th century. It may be too soon to determine their influence over the long span of human events. As terrible and as high an impact as the Second World War had on the century and into ours, I'd like to think that European anti-semitism will have seen it's last gasp. Two to three thousand years from now (roughly the time from now back to the earliest texts on this list) I hope and expect that a book like "Mein Kampf" will be forgotten.
Finally, it's not clear that the book, "Mein Kampf" was so influential, divorced from its author. Independently of Hitler, the book exerted, and continues to exert very little influence. Compare that to other "political" texts such as "Common Sense" or "The Second Sex," which one can expect to continue to exert influence independently of their authorship.

Good points. I guess the real influence came from Hitler's cult of personality and not his writings.

Sticking with the 20th century (and people I'm not fond of) where does Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom rank?

quote:

Sticking with the 20th century (and people I'm not fond of) where does Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom rank?

I don't know the book. Please educate me?

To be quite honest Kendo, I never actually read Capitalism and Freedom. We did spend a fair amount of time with Friedman in my Macroeconomics class and I remember a good amount of debate about his legacy last year when he passed away. It's hard to find anything on the man that is unbiased-- the liberals seem to demonize him while the consevatives want to canonize him. I found this using "the Google": Milton Friedman, although it mentions a book called Theory of Consumption Function as his "landmark work."

Wow, if this is the guy who gave us "supply side," and "trickle down," then I agree that he was dead influential, at least in the US. Abroad, maybe not so much, but we've been living, one way or another, with that view since the mid 20th century.