Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
Several years ago I came to the realisation that my exposure to great works of Fiction was limited and my efforts to rectify that problem were scattershot. So I decided to create a Lifetime Reading List. The list began at about 200 works and has continued to grow as new books strike me. I use the list not so much as a goal but as a guide – something to keep me focused as wander the aisles of bookstores and libraries.
Now, with your help, I would like to do the same for Non-fiction.
Here’s what I’m looking for:
1) This is a Lifetime Reading List – I am looking for works that will continue to be relevant in 10, 20, 30 years time.
2) Rule in every subject – I would like the list to be more wide than deep
3) Assume I know nothing about the subject – I would prefer big themes to granular analysis
4) Center-Right themes not necessarily required
5) Help me understand why the book you suggest is important for me to have read in my lifetime
Thank you, dear Ricofriends, for your help in compiling my list. I am very much looking forward to your suggestions and will be sure to share my Non-Fiction LRL with you upon completion.
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Dec '10
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
Democracy in America - Alexis deTocqueville
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon
The River War - Winston Churchill
Ah, so many more--most of which have already been mentioned!
I'll second the idea for a Ricochet Book Club/podcast. A reading discussion thread would be wonderful. It would be hard to organize so everyone would be on the same page (literally) but I'd imagine a reading discussion with this crowd would be great.
Jun '10
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
Anon
Ah, yes, I see. Manchester is unqualified and his work impure, according to the medieval history cognoscenti. I remember asking my History of WW II professor why Wm Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" wasn't on the course's reading list. His answer: Shirer isn't an historian. Then, as now, I view that contemptuous dismissal as protecting one's turf - and "revealed truth," a sort of unionization of a scholarly discipline." · May 20 at 5:29am
Speaking of William Shirer. His Berlin Diary (he was in Berlin when the Germans took Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and in the early days of blitzkreig in the West)--reporting the war from the German perspective. I found a beautiful, clean first edition in a used bookstore and felt like I'd found the holy grail.
It's a terrific book that makes you feel you were there. We often think the German masses loved all these wars. Shirer talks about the eerie quiet of the German crowds when Hitler invaded Poland. (Even then, you got the feeling they knew this wasn't going to turn out well). Great book, great read.
Read Rise and Fall as well.
Edited on May 20, 2011 at 6:28amJun '10
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
Sorry to keep jumping back in, but I love talkin' books.
A few years ago, National Review assembled a top-notch group of conservative of various stripes and backgrounds (Brookhiser, Keegan, and many others you'll recognize) to assemble a list of the top 100 non-fiction books of the 20th century: here.
I'm still keeping a running total of how I'm doing on the list (not quite half-way). You'll see many of the titles mentioned in this thread and a few that will surprise.
In looking at it, I would make special mention of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (which chronicles his experience in the Spanish Civil War and proved to him that Communists were bad guys) and Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies, his takedown of Hegel and Marx.
Edited on May 20, 2011 at 6:39amMar '11
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
Good to Great by Jim Collins- The best business book I have ever read. Actual cried a bit because here were quite a few Ideas I thought were right (in many cases I did not know how to articulate them) but the popular business practices/wisdom said otherwise. Always nice to be proven right when what one believes the run country to popular beliefs then really good solid research proves one right.
Irrational Exuberance by Robert Shiller- About the best summary of the studies and arguments on the stupidity of much investing/business media, and financial advice industry.
All the Devils are Here by Bethany McLean & Joe Nocera – in the middle of reading this. A lot of books have been written on the financial crisis. This is about the best summary of how it came about , also well written. About the only thing I dislike about it is the authors opinion on how to fix the problem and what would of prevented it. Being former New York times journalist, they are for more regulation, surprising is it not?
May '10
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
Haven't seen here fiction suggestions from the people who wrote in my native tongue.
So, a few of the outstanding examples of 20th Century Russian literature (I think all of them have come out in English translation):
- Short stories by Isaac Babel
- The Foundation Pit by Andrei Platonov
- Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
- Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
- We by Evgeny Zamyatin (a dystopia novel a generation before 1984)
May '10
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
Hmmm...lots of good books mentioned. I'm a bit late to the game, but I think I can still add a couple of works.
If you can track it down, I highly recommend Hans Morgenthau's Scientific Man vs. Power Politics. It's a somewhat under-the-radar book that deconstructs 'scientific' social engineering as well as any I've read, and ravages idealistic views of foreign policy.
Along similar lines, I'd also recommend Eric Voegelin's New Science of Politics and (after you read his Open Society and its Enemies - rec'd above) Karl Popper's Poverty of Historicism.
Edited on May 20, 2011 at 8:59amAug '10
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
genferei:
Capital, Volume 1 by Karl Marx. Fascinating, and not at all what one is given to expect by Marxists or anti-Marxists. (Subsequent volumes do not pay the same dividends.) And think of the look on your lefty friends' faces when you tell them you've actually read it - it's almost certain they haven't... · May 20 at 2:54am
I recently re-read part of Das Kapital and the experience was rather like reading late Ptolemaic astronomy, with epi-orbits used to explain anomalies recently discovered by the telescope. That is, he knows a lot of interesting things but his explanations are overly convoluted and the facts are explained much more parsimoniously if you abandon the labor theory of value and go to neo-classical micro-economics.
Also, I hate Marx's writing style, which basically alternates between laughing at his own jokes (which usually aren't funny) and screaming "don't you get it??? this is so obvious!!! what's wrong with you people???"
Dec '10
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
How about The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright? I expect this to be relevant for several lifetimes.
Apr '11
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
I'm really late to the game, but I have a couple of fiction entries for the list:
Life of Pi by Yann Martel - simply one of my favorite books of all time.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein - how can conservatives not love a book that has a chapter entitled "TANSTAAFL"?
Oops, and a non-fiction that I can't believe hasn't been mentioned yet:
Anarchy, the State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick - a better development of libertarianism from first principles you will not find.
Finally, I have to give a thumbs-down to Intellectuals. And I hate saying that because I greatly revere Paul Johnson. But that book struck me as an unfair muckraking exercise. Ideas should stand or fall on their own merits, not on the moral uprightness or lack thereof of their originators. Intellectuals has some juicy tidbits but IMO does not stand up as a "must-read book for the ages".
Feb '11
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
Lots have mentioned Victor David Hanson's works and Thucydides. Another great historian on Ancient Greece is Donald Kagan. I especially liked his book on the Pelopponesian War.
Mar '11
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
James Jones: I'm really late to the game, but I have a couple of fiction entries for the list:
May 20 at 1:12pm
Check out Fiction thread on the Member Feed
Sep '10
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
Ah, yes, I see. Manchester is unqualified and his work impure, according to the medieval history cognoscenti.
Manchester's work stands or falls on whether or not his historical assertions are true. If you can find the ones that are that would be helpful as he's bobbled so many of them that its become a cottage industry trying to catalog them all. If he had bothered to footnote his assertions, that would have helped, but I guess he was too busy.
Sep '10
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
I'm surprised no one has mentioned The Liberal Mind by Kenneth Minogue. A classic, truly.
Sep '10
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization by Anthony Esolen
Aug '10
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
Yes! Although its acronym (i. e. 'PIG') and cover are rather insalubrious, it is a wonderful book. Anthony Esolen is a magnificent writer (he blogs at merecomments, and writes for Touchstone magazine) who, among other things, teaches the classics at Providence, and translates Dante. Esolen surveys western civ rapidly, but never shortchanges its glories. This book is a tonic to anyone who's been forced to sit through a West-bashing college course (which means a clear majority of students in the last 40 years).
One more suggestion: Camille Paglia's mesmerizing Sexual Personae. It's a monster of a book, and Paglia is controversial, but it will give you a new perspective on western literature. Paglia believes much of the energy that drives the west is a product of the tension between cool Apollonian rationality and savage Dionysian frenzy. She also lays bare the Rosseauvian roots of progressivism, and shows how 'Every road from Rosseau leads to Sade.' Powerful, persuasive stuff.
Edited on May 20, 2011 at 5:30pmMar '11
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
How about a pre-reading podcast introducing a work.... how to read the text, some background, what to look for while you read... that sort of thing?
Sep '10
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
Sep '10
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
Ooops. Sorry to be so late to the thread. Great, great thread.
I just finished Mind and the Market by Jerry Z Muller. It's a review of what many of the great intellectuals (which is not a contradiction) of the last 200 years have had to say about the impact of capitalism on our lives. I'm really not doing it justice here.
Although well written, it was heavy sledding. But having finished it, the feeling is one of great appreciation for western civilization and satisfaction for competing a hell of a mental workout.
Also - I completely agree with the disappointment with Intellectuals by PJ. I've read just about everything else which he has written, and enjoyed immensely. But Intellectuals felt forced.
Edited on May 20, 2011 at 7:33pmJul '10
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
I second O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores. Frankly, all of his stuff is worthwhile, and he'd be a major coup for podcasts.
P.J., Stephen Green, Kennedy Smith, and a beer-drinker to be named later could put on a great show.
I also second The Bell Curve. Charles Murray, like O'Rourke, has been under-appreciated on this thread.
Here are a few from unmentioned liberals:
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.
An excellent analysis of the consequences of tv replacing print as a primary info source.
The End of Equality by Mickey Kaus.
Mickey at his best. He notes the impossible (or at least implausible) contradictions of statism married to tribalism & parochialism, while pushing for patriotism.
Liberalism and It's Critics edited by Michael Sandel.
Isaiah Berlin's lead essay: Two Concepts of Liberty, is worth much more than the price of admission. Reading the rest of it won't hurt too much, either.
Mar '11
Re: Ricochet Reading List - Need Your Help
A few more that I haven't seen on here (and if they're on here and I missed them I apologize):
The Way the World Works---Jude Wanniski.
Hollywood Animal---Joe Eszterhas. An great "inside Hollywood" book but a tragic personal story.
You'll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again---Julia Phillips. It's funny just reading about a young Steven Spielberg.
Both of Rush's books from early 90's, dated but shows libs never change. His biography from last year is excellent as well.
Open---Andre Agassi. Like no life story I have read about a contemporary popular figure.