Books which influenced me most

by Ian Welsh

Seems there is a blogger meme going around about naming the books which influenced you the most. This is a hard one to resist, so I'm not going to, though I know I'm certainly not going to "win" this, as my tastes are not high brow. While I've read Plato and Nietzsche and so on, they were not major influences on my thinking.

Jane Jacobs, "The Economy of Cities", "Cities and the Wealth of Nations", "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". These three books, especially the first two, may have influenced my thoughts on economics more than any others. Jacobs willingness to throw standard economics overboard and to look at particular details of how the world actually works on a basic building block level, and her mastery not of detail, but of the lessons which can be drawn from detail, made a big impression on me. She certainly wasn't right about everything, but she grabbed a few strings, pulled hard, and wasn't scared by the fact that what came up didn't match orthodoxy.

Bullfinch's Mythology. I spent the better part of grade 4 reading every book on mythology I can find, and this is just a stand in for all of them. I don't remember the names of most of them, but to this day I remember the stories: the Golden Fleece, Leda and the Swan, Ragnarok, and so on. Other youngsters had favorite superheroes or sports stars, I had favorite Gods (Athena, Artemis and Odin). My twitter icon is Odin with his two ravens, Hugin and Mugin (thought and memory). I seriously considered naming this blog "the Cassandra Complex".

Robert Parker's Spencer Novels, in particular "Early Autumn". Light easy reads, but Parker had a message about how to live life. Be good at something (it doesn't matter what), know what you will do and won't do, figure out the traits the person you want to be has, and work until you have those traits. When I was 21, and read all the novels published to that point in a couple weeks, that was a message I needed to hear.

Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". The cycle of how paradigms are accepted, filled out and then overthrown enthralled me. Read this one alongside Randall Collins' "The Sociology of Philosophies" to get an overview of how intellectual networks form, how they require change, and how intellectuals cluster into networks with "great" intellectuals tending to be major nodes.

Randall Collins, "An Introduction to non-obvious Sociology" and "Interaction Ritual Chains".  Collins meshes together a theory of how symbols are formed and how
interaction empowers or disempowers people into a construct which
explains important parts of phenomena as diverse as fandom, religion and
marriage. These books and his "Weber: A Skeleton Key" introduced me to
conflict theory, to Weber and to and in combination with Kuhn, helped
me understand not just how much "reality" is socially constructed (I
knew that at a young age) but some of the mechanisms by which it is
socially constructed.

"God Stalk", by P C Hodgell. Odds are you have neither heard of this book, nor read it, but in my teen years I probably read it over 30 times. The way the protagonist, Jame, manipulated belief to create and destroy minor gods fascinated me, but so did the fact that there was a reality which could not be manipulated, a bedrock where belief did not matter�it was what it was. Likewise her struggle to both be honorable and to live the life she wanted struck a cord. Raised as I was with a belief in noblesse oblige and that to be a man was to have a code of honor, Jame's dilemma, though written in the high relief of fantasy, seemed all too familiar.

Andrew Vachss "Burke" Novels. In my early twenties I was down and out, bloody fingernails away from the street, working at awful, humiliating menial jobs and suffering from the beginnings of an illness which would wind up costing me my health for the remainder of my twenties. My world was an ugly one: rooming houses, loading docks, screaming bosses, minimum wage and the possibility of a future which offered nothing better. I would look in the mirror and see myself at 50, older, wrinkled, worn and without hope. Vachss showed me a world even grittier than mine, which his protagonist and friends managed to live in with integrity: true to themselves. Certainly I was no martial artist, or clever ex-con, or mechanical genius, but still, the sense of despair, of making the smallest of differences, of the only thing that mattered being having your own rules and sticking to them, spoke to me. If Burke could do it, if he could use a moral code to wring dignity and meaning out of the world, so could I.

"The Second Sex" by Simone de Beauvoir. The second time I went to university, I became fascinated by feminism�by the anger, the hatred and the sense of injustice that many of the feminists I met seemed to ball up inside themselves, like eternally burning pitch�black and consuming. I took a number of courses on feminism, but in none of them was I told to read The Second Sex. Instead, a couple years later, I stumbled on it, and everything they had been trying to say clicked into place as I read Beauvoir. The Second Sex summed it all up and said it better than any of the feminists who came after. Beauvoir was angry, make no mistake, but her anger was kept on tight leash, it did not consume her, but instead served as fuel and illumination. Since then I've rarely read any feminist and not thought "Beauvoir said it better, decades ago."

"The Art of War", Sun-Tzu and "The Japanese Art of War", by Tomas Cleary. I read these two books around the same time, and they changed how I thought not just about strategy but about how to think and act. The principles of formlessness and concentration, the Japanese concept of how one masters an art by mastering the details till one forgets them, and the Buddhist concept of acting without placing a censor before one's actions all enthralled me. This lead to a further fascination with Buddhism, Taoism and the different ideas and paths towards, not so much enlightenment, but seeing the world clearly by seeing it without preconceptions. Later I was to conclude that if you aren't, indeed, enlightened, the best you can do is to choose the paradigms or glosses you place over the world, knowing that you are doing so, and knowing the advantages and limitations of whatever model you are using.

Barbara Hambly, The Darwath Trilogy. Not great fiction, not even great fantasy, these three books nonetheless made a huge impression on me because Hambly's theory of knowledge and power resonated with me. I have come to accept as true her maxim that people, things and even ideas give themselves to you when you love them for themselves, and not for what they can do for you. I have used this theory when leading teams, when making friends, and when learning new fields, and when I have been able to execute it, it has never failed me.

There are more books which have influenced me, of course. For much of my life I read at least a book a day, and sometimes more, and even now I read a couple a week and wish I read more (the internet sucks away my time and I sometimes wish it had never been invented.)
Still, these books have all helped make me who I am today. They have laid the bricks of my intellectual foundation and have taught me about what it means to create a life worth living in a universe which has the meaning we give to it, and nothing more.

What are some books which have influenced you, how have they influenced you, and why?