100 Most Influential Books Since WWII

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Perham1

2,500+ Posts
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Ok, this is a bit of a teaser and bait and switch. First no, I'm not claiming to have read all of these books. I doubt that anybody here can make that claim.

My point is that if I were to set out to tackle this list, there are some books I would "cheat" on. Meaning that I would read articles about the book rather than the book itself. Take Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations". Skip that. Read the reviews. Or do what the French guy recently wrote about - fake your way through....

But really, keeping up with the literary world through the likes of the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement is a great alternative to actually reading some of the books themselves. Blasphemy, I know....
 
They missed this one.....

A_Charge_to_Keep.jpg
 
Stupid list. No Ayn Rand book makes it, not even The Fountainhead but these others do? No science fiction books at all, but a bunch of economics books that few read do? Yet even though all these economics books are on there, Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, the only guy whose books actually changed US policy, didn't?
 
Did I miss Catch-22 on that list? I searched for "catch" and came up with nothing. I think it's pretty reasonable to use catch-22 as a litmus test for the greatness of post-wwII books.
 
Friedman's on there BT. Check # 57.

Rand is outclassed by all those on that list. And I wouldn't call it ideological bias with Friedman and Friedrich Hayek among those representing the conservative/classical liberal economic and political part of the spectrum.

If this were a list of influential books in the pop culture context, Rand deserves a mention.
 
2nd list is quite partisan, of course consider the source.

The Starr Report. Really? Left off Daniel Bell, End of Ideology. Fail.

Both left off Arthur Schlesinger's, The Vital Center. This was a seminal work that helped forge the centrist liberalism that still dominates our politics - both parties. What we call liberal and conservative are really nothing more than the opposing halves of the narrow range of acceptable options available to mainstream politicians. Reading the conservative works from Hayek, Kirk, even Buckley within the framework of TVC one can better understand the choices being offered. Boundaries were being pushed in the recent "conservative" era, rather than new frontiers being conquered. The center-right found its voice precisely when the center-left ceased to have anything new to add, and its excesses were apparent. That the extent of the rightward lurch was blunted would be expected by anyone who had read TVC.

That 2nd list is, no doubt, a list of books that influenced those panelists greatly. However, they left out a pretty big chunk of influential material.
 
I wonder what it says about me given I have read Philosophical Investigations (and all other posthumous works of Wittgenstein).

Am I that much of a freak geek?

Don't answer that...

That he puts Barth's Credo on the list instead of The Epistle to the Romans pretty much tells me that this is a very subjective list.

No Quine, no MacIntyre, no Taylor, no Hauerwas, but we have 3 works from Camus?

Dude's picking them out of thin air.
 
I've only read a few of the books on the two lists. Guess I'm not very educated. One idea of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn is that the new ideas come but the scientific revolution doesn't occur until the old guys die off and the new ideas have room to take hold. I think that may no longer be the case now with the coming of the internet where ideas take off very rapidly.
 
Stupid list. No Ayn Rand book makes it, not even The Fountainhead
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I was going to include Atlas Shrugged, I do not know how that did not make a top 100 list.
 
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