Fewer than Ten Influential Books

Bloggers are writing about their ten most influential books, I hear. I don’t know why. There may be at least a little interest in proving our intellectual bona fides: "I'm the sort of person who is capable of being changed by a book." Well, I am whether I blog about it or not, and whether anyone cares or not, so I’ll take a run at it.

Scott McLemee has a good point: influence and pleasure are not the same. A list of the books I found most enjoyable would be quite different from what follows. Perhaps I will make that list also, and see how it interacts with this one.

In no particular order, five books that have changed me, since I can't think of ten just now without dipping into a second tier of books less formative than these:

1. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Julia Child et al. This got hold of me before there was a Food Network, or at least before I knew about it. The mayonnaise recipe captured my imagination and my heart. Making mayonnaise was magic. French cooking has been through a revolution since it was published, a kind of Kantian turn to the ingredient, and I never cook from Mastering anymore, unless I’m making coq au vin, which I still love. I didn’t know about the turn to the ingredient when I discovered the magic of mayonnaise and of coq au vin, though, and this book inspired me to stop making it up as I went along and learn cooking for real.

2. The Irrelevant English Teacher, by J. Mitchell Morse. One of my parents, probably my mother (an English teacher when it came out), had this little volume on a bookshelf. When I picked it up, I was an adolescent student of some painfully relevant English teachers. That is, we spent most of our class time sharing our ignorance about what we called “issues.” Morse showed me it didn’t have to be this way just before I started AP English in my senior year of high school. That class brought a flesh and blood irrelevant English teacher into my life. Thanks to Morse, I knew how to appreciate her and finally started learning to read and write. (As a trailer for the "most enjoyable" list, in case it never gets made, I want to mention Stanley Fish's romp, Save the World on Your Own Time, which makes a similar argument.)

3. The Unsettling of America, by Wendell Berry. Ernest J. Yanarella, my Political Science advisor at the University of Kentucky, assigned Berry’s discussion of the loss of family farming in America for a seminar on food policy. (If I made a list of influential people, Yanarella would be on it, though I'm appalled at myself for not having talked with him since I graduated. In those days he was an intently counter-cultural academic. Now I see he has short hair and a tie, and sits on UK’s Board of Trustees. Amazing.) The Unsettling of America was important as much for bringing Wendell Berry into my life as for anything in the book. Berry's lucidity and independence of mind intrigued me. One day it dawned on me that he was on the faculty at UK, and would therefore have office hours. So I found his office and started talking with him. What we said and why it was important is another post, but let's just say the man is at least as lucid as his books.

4. The Nature and Destiny of Man, by Reinhold Niebuhr. “Man has always been his own most vexing problem.” Always will be. Two people can have a relationship and work things out. When a third joins them, you get politics. Politics is therefore unavoidable and should be approached with seriousness. But politics is never going to make things much better. This is a crucial line of thought for keeping my sanity.

5. The Fifth Discipline, by Peter Senge. There are many ways to learn there are no easy answers when you’re working with people. I finally got it for good by reading Senge. For a long time I kept a notebook, a kind of journal, where instead of writing I drew diagrams of situations. Having put so much energy into what I learned from Senge helps me see things like feedback loops, process delays, and unintended consequences. Sometimes that is like seeing the oncoming train when there's still time to get out of the way, which is hard to overvalue.