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 could 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?
The Raven
There were sequels to Godstalk, see: http://www.pchodgell.com/site/index.php?module=htmlpages&func=display&pid=1
Ian Welsh
Yes, I’ve read them, didn’t like them as much, though the last one was a decent novel on its own. Hodgell’s prose has become a bit too dense for my tastes.
rumor
I’ll just add these to my pile of waiting books…
You are so exactly right about the internet eating up reading time. When I was in university and busy as hell, I would read at least a couple thick books a month, if not several. In contrast, I haven’t finished very many books at all in the past couple years, even though I think I spend more time reading per day than I used to.
Off the top of my head, the most recent set of books that influenced me were Diamond’s Collapse, Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies, and Limits to Growth, all read close to each other. It’s Tainter who really pulls it all together in the end, providing the underlying perspective on thermodynamic limits to the complexity of civilisations (and some talks he has recently given, available online but I don’t have the links handy, really tie off the knot), but each of these books provides a different way at looking at the same fundamental problem, and I enjoyed the demonstration of how the scope of perspective really makes a difference in conclusions one can draw from a situation.
senecal
1. A Low Dishonest Decade, by Paul Hehn. Documents the financial entanglements of Bank of England and Germany leading up to, and in some ways necessitating, WW II.
2. The Price of Power, by Seymour Hersh. About Nixon, Kissinger, internal infighting, Vietnam, secret diplomacy, etc.
3. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoi
LorenzoStDuBois
Zinn, of course.
“Downsize This” also hit me like a ton of bricks when I was 17 and just getting into politics.
Tony C.
The Nature of Personal Reality (Jane Roberts)
Steppenwolf (Herman Hesse)
CMike
Jane Jacobs is exactly the type of thinker whom, I assume, Paul Krugman dismisses because she didn’t rely on mathematical models. Jacobs wrote about supply-side aspects of the work for which Krugman won his Nobel, when you get into the details she is more accessible to the general audience than he is, and Jacobs beat him to the discussion of these matters by a decade or more.
Here’s an Arvind Panagariya comment in Forbes about Krugman’s work:
alyosha
You have a lot of good titles on your list, Ian, some that I’m aching to get into – not easy at this point with eyes that are weary from decades of reading and computer work (I’m heavy into audiobooks these days). I’ve read a small library of non-fiction, but very few stand out at this point in my life. Some recent favorites:
“The Fourth Turning”, Strauss and Howe
“The Prophet’s Way”, Thom Hartmann
“The Portable Coach”, Thomas Leonard
“Autobiography of a Yogi”, Yogananda
“108 Discourses on Awakening”, Mark Griffin
“Living With the Himalayan Masters”, Swami Rama
“A New Earth”, Eckhart Tolle
“Courage”, OSHO
Mandos
Hmm, I suppose you mean “influenced” as in “influenced our political/personal psyches”. It’s tough to choose, but the biggest ones I’d pick.
* Various political lecture/interview collections by Chomsky.
* Edward Said’s Covering Islam, about how Western media representations of Muslim societies distort the popular understanding of these countries and affect policy towards them.
* Linda McQuaig’s Shooting the Hippo, and then the Cult of Impotence, about the development and popularization of ideologies that militate against the use of the levers of government to improve people’s lives. Prophetic in many ways.
* A number of essays from feminist writers like Andrea Dworkin and Joanna Russ; these people are massively misrepresented on the web, even if I don’t necessarily agree with some of their conclusions, they’re rarely saying what a lot people say they are.
But I read most of these a while back, as professional reading (a whole other list) overtook what energy I have for off-Internet non-fiction political reading, except:
* I did read Marcy Wheeler’s Anatomy of Deceit about l’affaire Plame; I had just attended a couple of days of the fascinating trial of Scooter Libby.
However, I do consume a lot of fiction for relaxation, some of which has doubtless affected my political thinking, sometimes quite subtly. I tend to read mostly SF and some fantasy, which I do think has a lot to say politically.
* Hands down, the bulk of the SF oeuvre of C. J. Cherryh, who touches on so many relevant points it’s hard to count. Inter-cultural/species conflict (social and political), great power resource wars, the nature of sovereignty and government, the basis of intelligence, human rights in an attenuated state, genocide, and so on and so forth…
* Sir Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” series, almost all of it. These are brilliant, gentle, humane fantasy satires of real life running the gamut from monetary policy to gender to Machiavelli. I recently read his latest Unseen Academicals which is about genocide and sports culture. His Making Money on monetary policy came out just before the extent of the 2008 leg of banking crashes became really apparent. Unfortunately, he’s dying of a rare form of Alzheimer’s that apparently affects his motor skills more than his memory—so he may still have books in the pipeline.
* Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: I’ve mentioned it several times before. Any would-be prophets of collapse should read it. Utterly prophetic near-future collapse-of-America story. She died in an accident, leaving a lot of unfinished work, apparently.
* Lois McMaster Bujold’s half-satirical Vorkosigan SF series. Beautifully written and plotted, and content-ful in its own way about power and personal responsibility and gender relations in a technological time.
* Julian May’s three Galactic Milieu series(pl.). A little “lighter” on the political and social commentary than the above, but very focused on the human psyche. It’s about the development of psychics among the human race in the sort of “Heroes” style, except it does a very good job of connecting it to ideas about fundamental aspects of the human emotional make-up.
Then there’s all the stuff that high school English teachers made me read, some of which had its intended effect, I guess. Like Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities and Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. Most people I assume have read these or things like these, though.
Mandos
Oh, and how could I forget Tolkien, particularly The Silmarillion from whence I took my screen name, now a surprisingly long time ago. But that affected me more deeply than mere politics.
David Kowalski
Lots of them.
Carl Sandburg’s Life of Lincoln. The one volume edition. I wore that out in grade school.
I’ll go along with Bullfinch’s Mythology, as well.
All The President’s Men.
Custer and Crazy Horse. There is something powerful and intriguing about a car wreck.
Mark Twain particularly Huckleberry Finn, Puddnhead Wilson and Roughing It.
Bill James, particularly the early Baseball Abstracts. I loved the way he took traditional wisdom and shattered it with simple statistics. And made it fun.
Sherman: Fighting Prophet. A biography from the 1930s based on interviews with surviving acquaintainces and friends. Colorful and classic.
People of the Lie. Scott Peck’s other books sold more but this was more personally useful.
Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
The Sherlock Holmes books.
The Mind of the South.
The Strange Career of Jim Crow.
Wooden on Management. By the coach himself.
Something along the lines of Presentation in Everyday Life by Goffman. It was a sociology book dealing with the complex faces that people assume in their different roles of everyday life.
Ian Welsh
Yes, Goffman influenced me a fair bit. I loved the Vorkosigan novels, could never get into Cherryh due to her writing style, though I did like Paladin and I struggled through the first two “Tower” books. I have both Tainter and Diamond in my to read pile, though I’ve read so many reviews of Diamond I feel like I’ve read it already, which makes it hard to read now. Limits to Growth I read young.
Mandos
I don’t recommend Cherryh’s fantasy (e.g. the Tower books) over her SF, but I agree that people either love or hate the writing style. It can be difficult. It took me 2-3 attempts to get into her magnum opus, Cyteen, because she hits you immediately with the sheer paranoia of her characters; but the book is genius in every way, not least because it’s from the perspective of the great enemy power in the rest of her Alliance/Union series. Her books often have “happy” endings, but not ones that you the reader might be happy about, merely the characters, whom you aren’t always expected to like.
Her long-running Foreigner series is a much easier read though, and has wormed its way thoroughly into my head: a interspecies culture shock story.
I hope you don’t mind a bit of volunteer thirdparty plugging: she is now selling ebook versions of some of her backlist on her website in various formats for $5 each as an experiment in disintermediating the publishing industry. More of her backlist will appear the more successful the experiment becomes. I’m personally eager that it work and other authors adopt it.
Mandos
Oh, I too read Limits to Growth back in high school. It’s amazing how many people read that book really young.
alyosha
Mandos, I’ve often wondered if some studio has optioned “Parable of the Sower”. It would make a fantastic movie. Way more accessible and provocative than “The Road”. I was in a conversation with someone about tea-baggers and meth labs, and it occurred to me that today’s rural meth heads are Butler’s “Paints”.
A couple more favorite titles came to mind:
“Finite and Infinite Games”, James Carse
“The Cultural Creatives”, Paul Ray & Sherry Anderson
Suspenders
Thanks, Ian, for posting these. I remember a while back, someone asked you in the Firedoglake comments section what economics books you’d recommend, and you mentioned Jane Jacobs at that time. After that, I ended up reading most of her books, so thanks for that great suggestion. I’m pretty sure you had more recommendations, but for the life of me I could never find that comment again, so if you happen to remember what they were, you’d make me very happy this bleary rainy day 😉
Some books that, for some reason or another, influenced me or I consider noteworthy;
A Night to Remember by Walter Lord= A book about the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic. I read this book, and parts of it, many times as a child. I was immensely interested in everything Titanic at the time; something about the hubris and tragedy of it all, the stoic and “gentlemanly” way a lot of the men decided to die (especially a lot of the super-rich), the injustices done to the 3rd class passengers, the fantastic opulence, etc. Lord’s interviews are top-notch.
Lord of the Rings + universe and Chronicles of Narnia= Chronicles of Narnia especially were my first foray into fantasy novels. “The Horse and His Boy” was the first fantasy novel I probably ever read. Been a huge fantasy fan ever since.
Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond= A fantastic look into the history of the world, from an environmental perspective essentially. Reading that book really makes you stop every so often and ponder what he’s saying to you. The criticisms of his theories are also equally brilliant; I suggest any fans of his work pore over some of those as well if you’d like something for your brain to chew on.
Groliers Encyclopedia Science Supplement 1982= One of my father’s friends is a pack rat, and around 1994-95 he gave me a copy of this, which is a collection of the best or most significant science articles from magazines of that year, covering everything from math and physics to sociology. There were a lot of great articles, including ones on alternative energy, M. King Hubbert and his peak oil predictions, saving Mono Lake in California, the throw-away society, conserving energy in the home, Star Wars special effects, and others. It’s especially amazing to see all the great ideas regarding solving the energy problem in the United States, and very sad to look back today at how much time has been squandered, and how many of today’s problems have the same solutions as back then, just no-one gave a damn. First place I learned about Hubberts curve.
Avro Arrow: The Story of the Avro Arrow From Its Evolution To Its Extinction= The story of the Avro Arrow has become something of a national legend in Canada. It’s really an incredible story, one of a tiny little country of Canada and it’s huge Cold war ambitions/paranoia which led it to creating, for it’s time, the most advanced warplane on the planet, easily 20 year ahead of any of its rivals, and along with it the worlds most advanced aviation and aerospace industry. Of course, it was all for naught as the Conservative Diefenbaker government, in this nations greatest industrial blunder, canceled the programme and had anything to do with it scrapped and destroyed, right down to photos, plans, and the tools and machinery used to build the aircraft. In the aftermath, the worlds greatest aviation minds and engineers, having lost their livelihoods, sadly left to work on Gemini, Apollo, the Space Shuttle, Concorde…if you asked them, they’d tell you the best time of their lives was working at Avro Canada. Hmm, I seem to like tragedies, heh.
Sarajevo: A Portrait of the Siege= I’m of Bosnian decent, but I’ve never really taken it seriously or had actually wanted to identify as one. I was always 100% Canadian. Around when I was 16, I stumbled upon this book, which is a black and white photo collection of the siege of Sarajevo, put together by the many journalists who were sent to cover the war in the early nineties. My, was it a grim and stark, and intensely emotional experience reading those pages and seeing those photos. Blood spattered streets, burning buildings, people dodging sniper fire, all mixed with the sad commentary of the reporters who took the images. I cried through most of it. For the first time in my life, I truly understood what nationalism, burning rage and hatred felt like, even if I didn’t understand where these emotions were welling up from. Up until then I had been your standard “we’re all humans and equal!” type that is pretty standard today in Canadas multicultural morass, but after that book I had to re-evaluate what ethnicity, and race and culture meant, because it sure as hell meant a lot more than I had thought previously.
By the way, sorry for the wall of text, I got carried away 🙂
Katherine Calkin
Betty Friedan: The Feminine Mystique – read when I was in my early teens.
Richard Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker – the most thorough and still the best introduction to evolution
Heinz Pagels: The Cosmic Code – A great introduction to quantum mechanics and quantum weirdness
Pamela Travers: Mary Poppins – I needed a well-organized, confidant mother, which I didn’t have, and Mary was a perfect fit.
Voltaire: Candide – The importance of addressing the remediable causes of human suffering rather than engaging solely in philosophizing.
Bolo
Here are some of the books that have influenced me (I might go by authors too):
Jane Jacobs’ works. Mostly the ones you outlined, and I think you (Ian) are also the person who introduced me to her ideas and compelled me to pick up her books. Same general assessment as you–very interesting take on economics and the complex systems inherent in cities and city life. Made a lot of the details about everyday living stand out and connect to each other. Plus, her larger works on cities and nations were very interesting and also made a lot of connections in my mind.
Alastair Reynolds (science fiction writer). Mostly his books Revelation Space and Chasm City, though just about everything he’s written has been fantastic. Reynolds’ fiction is saturated with factional intrigue, advanced technologies, and an overarching sense that the universe just doesn’t care. His attitude toward technological and social progress is very interesting for a scifi writer–basically, technology and science are not the rational, incrementally improving fields that we tend to think of them as but are just as prone to luck, happenstance, and coincidence. I could go on, but if you want to read more I made a post at the Agonist some time ago. I’d probably rewrite some parts of it now, but it still largely stands.
Martin van Creveld. Especially The Rise and Decline of the State and The Transformation of War. Rise and Decline was a sweeping look at the creation, peak, and beginnings of the decline of the state in world history. This has definitely shaped my thinking about how authority and violence will be perceived in this century and in the future. It also puts the dynamic and temporary (“socially constructed”) nature of our current world system into perspective. The Transformation of War was very interesting and there was a lot in it, though the one major takeaway concept from it (for me) was that someone inevitably breaks a taboo on particular weapons, styles of warfare, etc. This is why I think a limited nuclear war is likely in the future (especially in the context of weakening state power). More on van Creveld here.
From Dawn to Decadence, by Jacques Barzun. A giant book that covers 500 years of the West’s rise and evolution into its current “decadent” state. Once again, great for that long-term perspective. All the more impressive that it was released when Dr. Barzun was 93 years old. I think he’s still publishing today at 102!
War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin. Again with the large scale historical analysis (are you sensing a pattern yet?). Dr. Turchin examines historical records from large, agrarian empires and tracks and analyzes their rise and fall. His other works are relatively math-heavy, but this one is very accessible. This inspired the strategy game that I’m working on (and will probably never finish, but hey, why not?).
Propaganda by Jacques Ellul. I picked this one up on a whim and it turned out to be very interesting. Ellul examines the forms and content of propaganda, with a specific emphasis on WWII and the post-war era (the book was published in the late 60s). My big take-away: Propaganda is most effective not when directed toward “the enemy,” but when directed toward allies and “the homeland.” If you don’t share the same cultural context and approximate beliefs of the propagandizers, then their products will seem ridiculous to you. There’s a lot more in the book and I need to go back and re-read it. Its very dense, by the way–not a light read.
Reconstructing Earth by Brad Allenby. This guy’s one of my advisors here at college and his ideas are pretty outside-the-box. The basic premise of this book is that there really isn’t an objective, separate “nature” that we’re trying to preserve and the Earth is instead becoming dominated by human activities. We are (and have been) constructing our own idea of what nature is and what it should be. So, the environmental movement, while having valid concerns, is fighting the wrong battles and will fail if it doesn’t learn better. There’s a lot more in the book on topics such as economics, politics, and technology. The book itself is styled as a collection of essays with brief chapters to introduce each topic area. He has a new book coming out titled The Techno-Human Condition.
W. Brian Arthur. I’m still trying to get my hands on his book titled The Nature of Technology, but I’ve read his other works and haven’t seen anyone else who has put together as coherent an explanation of technological development and evolution–basically, its not like natural (biological) evolution at all.
Various other fiction authors have influenced me at different times in my life, so I’m just going to list them briefly here: Larry Niven was the first author I latched onto in middle school and introduced me to scifi. David Weber’s Honor Harrington series is a great blend of political intrigue and military scifi action–that was mostly high school for me. The Bolo books by Keith Laumer (and various authors) as well–I took my screename from them. Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn Trilogy was excellent, if a little slow to start out. I’ve moved away from these books now (and really far away from military scifi in general), but they had their places and times in my life.
I’m sure that I’m forgetting some.
Ian Welsh
Interesting list Bolo, I’ll have to pick up some of those.
I’m not a huge fan of military SF though I did read some. Enjoyed Honor Harrington up to a point. Weber’s one of the military SF writers who is actually a decent writer, imo.
You might find Randall Collins MacroSociology: Essays on the long run, worth picking up. He summarizes a lot of macro sociological research (summary: people keep rediscovering things about long run history and the rise and fall of nations which sociologists already know.)
I think you’d also find Weberian sociology in general interesting. Move past the Protestant Ethic, there’s a lot worth reading in Weber and the Protestant Ethic was only a small part of his mature intellectual framework. I’d start with Collins “Weber, a Skeleton Key”, which you can find at your university library. The goal is to move to his “Economy and Society”. Weber’s concepts of authority, legitimacy and the various different organizational modes of society, of class and prestige and so on have massively influenced later thinkers. (Including Creveld, by the way.)
George
Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann)
The Lonely Crowd (Riesman)
Walden (Thoreau)
Woyzeck (Buchner)
Murphy (Beckett)
All truly eye-opening experiences for me. From the sociologists, I learned to take a much more critical look at the society I grew up in. From the fiction writers, I learned to understand the outsider.
Bolo
Ian: Yeah, my military SF phase was late high school and early college. I slowly grew out of it. I think the wake-up call was reading some John Ringo. Oh god was he bad. Then discovering Hamilton (not really military, more space opera-y) and eventually Reynolds made me realize that most of the rest of the mil SF I had was pretty bad.
I’ll take a look at Weber. I know of him from a Sociology 101 class I took, but that class really didn’t require us to do anything beyond scratching the surface.
Oh, I thought of one more big influence, though its a TV show and not a book: Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex (first season) and 2nd Gig (2nd season). Hands-down some of the best TV I’ve seen. The second season is especially interesting, but you need to see it all in order.
someofparts
Yes on the Jane Jacobs. I have actually used her ideas about what makes cities safe to move around the cities where I have lived without coming to harm.
I own a copy of Second Sex and haven’t read it. Shame on me. Shulamith Firestone and the Redstocking perspective made sense to me, because feminist analysis cast in Marxist analysis terms resonated with my worker bee self.
When I was still in high school I fell into reading Salinger- all of it- with great satisfaction. Holden Caufield and his siblings were so much like me and my friends and so entirely unlike the frat-boy culture where I spent those early days. It felt like a message in a bottle reassuring me there were others like me out there.
New Industrial State, John Galbraith. I gather that this particular Galbraith title has attracted some substantial critique since it was published. Be that as it may, it gave me some beginner’s insight into the way industrial economies are structured. The message that a pure free market approach never could, would or should be taken when an economy reaches that scale has remained with me.
The Orestia trilogy. Best script ever. And FWIW, I’ve always found the notion of a Cassandra Complex a bit off. I mean, Cassandra wasn’t ranting about things she just dreamed up. The stuff she foresaw was destined to happen. So where is the complex in that?
Autobiography of Malcolm X. I’m not black, but I am southern. This was the first voice I ever heard from the other side of the wall of apartied behind which I was raised.
Chomsky rearranges the furniture in my head for the better every time I read anything he’s written. Gore Vidal too.
Ian Welsh
I meant Cassandra complex in a different sense: Cassandra was accurate prophet, and everyone ignored her. I feel like I, Stirling and various others have been more right than wrong, and ignored.
Mandos
The late Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote a book, Firebrand, telling Cassandra’s story from her own perspective. I skimmed it once but never read it. I probably should, it looked intriguing, but I think it’s old enough now to be out of print.
Ian Welsh
I read all of Bradley’s stuff up until the mid eighties, then stopped reading any of it, pretty much.
Big fan of Darkover, however.
someofparts
If only we lived in a world where you and Stirling were heeded.
rumor
Diamond hammers a simple concept in Collapse, and if you’ve read about his book, or one of his many essays online, you’re already familiar with it. I would still recommend Collapse not to familiarise yourself with his thesis, but for the details in the book behind his thesis. Very, very fascinating archeological survey (for laymen, of course) of a seemingly disparate set of societies. His defense of business approaches to environmental moderation near the end of the book are also interesting to read. Quite thoughtful and obviously influenced by his experiences, very much trying to find a middle path, but in the end I found that part too naive.
Mandos
Re Darkover: lots of people I knew thought that Darkover was the weaker part of her oeuvre, but I never found that to be the case. I found it really hard to get into The Mists of Avalon—her magnum opus—and only really “read” it cover to cover by watching the Juliana Margulies miniseries. On the contrary, the Darkover books, especially the ones about Recontact with the Terran Empire and it’s simultaneously dire and salutary economic and social impacts, were innovative and interesting.
Ian Welsh
Yes, “Mists of Avalon” is where she lost me as a reader.