Books

Tyler Cowen has been propagating a most influential books meme. His own choices are so serious and intellectual that one might be tempted to suspect a hint of pretension if it were anybody else. The only thing remotely disreputable on it is Ayn Rand in non novelistic garb, though on a reader's prompt he was forced to admit that Fisher's Sixty Memorable Games belonged there.

The comments contain lists from mostly lesser mortals, and a few more get propagated here and here and here.

The problem with such lists, if you can call it that, is that we tend to use them to try to show off - even if we are trying to be honest. My guess is that that doesn't make them much less revelealing. Most of Cowen's listers seemed to include some Any Rand in their lists, though some claimed to have outgrown it. I will stick with what the late Paul Samuelson said about Alan Greenspan - "You can take the boy out of the cult, but you can't take the cult out of the boy."

Anyway, I would like to invite any readers who are willing to submit their lists, and here is mine, which, if nothing else, might serve as a cautionary tale:

(1)Tarzan of the Apes has got to be number one, since this is the first book I can remember. I was a late reader - I couldn't really see very well - and my mother used to read to me, but when my brother was born, she got too busy and told me to read it myself. I read all the Tarzan books, and all the other Edgar Rice Burroughs. Children in my small town were allowed to check out four books from the library every two weeks, so I read mine, my older sister's Nancy Drew books, my younger sister's Bobbsey Twins books and everything else I could find - by this time I had glasses.

(2)The Modern Library Giant Treasury of Science Fiction. SF from the fifties and before. I got interested in science via science fiction.

(3)Three volumes by A D'Abro - early popular accounts of relativity and quantum mechanics. The Decline of Mechanism and The Evolution of Scientific Thought from Newton to Einstein. Science books were few and far between in 1950's Kalispell MT. I don't recall where I found these.

(4)Projective Geometry (author's name not recalled) A math professor sent me this book after I had asked a bunch of D'Abro inspired questions about tensors when he visted our high school. It was the first time it occurred to me that mathematics might be an interesting field of study.

(5)Poincare's popular science books Science and Hypothesis and The Value of Science. Hints of how a real scientist/mathematician thought, and the idea that it wasn't so strange to me.

(6)My high school English teacher believed that there were three sacred books that should be read and reread: Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace. Each deeply affected my vision of the world.

(7)Winston's Churchill's History of the Second World War and My Early Life.

(8)Gravitation by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler. Probably would have been a better influence on me if I had worked the problems.

(9)Classical Electrodynamics by John David Jackson. Every sensible American school teaches electrodynamics out of this book. Mine didn't. I blame that fact for my being so dumb about electrodynamics.

(10)Elementary Particle Physics by Stephen Gasiorowicz. This book had a lot to do with me not becoming a theoretical physicist. My QED teacher didn't believe in quantum field theory, or teaching it.

Hmmm? I guess there are some books that influenced me as an adult too. Later, maybe.