- My Brother Sam Is Dead, James Lincoln Collier
- Falls The Shadow, Sharon Kay Penman
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
- Lila, Robert M. Pirsig
- Animal Liberation, Peter Singer
- Writings On An Ethical Life, Peter Singer
- Practical Ethics, Peter Singer
- The Way We Eat, Peter Singer and Jim Mason
- The Lost Religion of Jesus, Keith Akers
- Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac
- Desolation Angels, Jack Kerouac
- Perelandra, C.S. Lewis
- Labor's Untold Story, Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais
- My Soul Is Rested, Howell Raines
- The Trumpet of Conscience, Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Rules For Radicals, Saul D. Alinsky
- A Black Theology of Liberation, James Cone
- The Black Power Revolt, Floyd Barbour (ed)
- Seize The Time, Bobby Seale
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley
- Roots, Alex Haley
- Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, Paul Avritch
- Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut
- Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
- Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
- Jailbird, Kurt Vonnegut
- Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
- Ishmael, Daniel Quinn
- My Ishmael, Daniel Quinn
- The Story of B, Daniel Quinn
- Providence, Daniel Quinn
- If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways, Daniel Quinn
- The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus
- The Rebel, Albert Camus
- Why I Am Not a Christian, Bertrand Russell
- The Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, Frederich Nietzsche
- Beyond Good and Evil, Frederich Nietzsche
- Whistling In the Dark, Frederick Buechner
- The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
- Small Wonder, Barbara Kingsolver
- What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Noam Chomsky
- The Culture of Terrorism, Noam Chomsky
- Collapse, Jared Diamond
- Plan B 2.o, Lester Brown
- Eye To Eye, Ken Wilber
- Being Peace, Thich Nhat Hanh
- The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
- Raids On the Unspeakable, Thomas Merton
- Life and Holiness, Thomas Merton
- The Way of Chuang Tzu, Thomas Merton
- The Tao Teh Ching, Lao Tzu
- Insight Meditation, Joseph Goldstein
- Harcore Zen, Brad Warner
- In Search of Paul, John Dominic Crossan and Jonathon Reed
- Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
- The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff
- Without Sin, Spencer Klaw
- Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
- The Bacchae, Euripides
- The Sickness Unto Death, Soren Kierkegaard
- Essays and Aphorisms, Arthur Schopenauer
- Meister Eckhart, From Whom God Hid Nothing, Meister Eckhart
- Voluntary Simplicity, NWEI
- Choices For Sustainable Living, NWEI
- Nothing Special: Living Zen, Charlotte Beck
- Walden and Other Writings, Henry David Thoreau
- Man's Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl
- Capitalism In Crisis, Fidel Castro
- Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, Che Guevara
- Anarchism and Other Essays, Emma Goldman
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn
- The Capitalist System, Edwards, Reich, Weisskopf
For no particular reason, and in no particular order, those are the 72 books that have had the biggest influence on my thinking. Not that I agree or disagree with any or all of them, but that they have left a certain sort of mark, beyond the mark left by other things I've read. These are all good books, in that they have made me think about some things, and have left a lasting impression.
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4 comments:
I have not read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. What did you learn from it that was worthwhile?
Hmmm. I read it a couple of times, but the last time was a long, long time ago, so I'd have to think about that to really give it a "complete" answer. What has stayed with me most is a "feeling," which is sort of hard to describe.
I guess beyond that, these things come to mind:
He talks at one point, actually in a forward to that edition, about his son's death (his son was a central character, died years later) and about "ghosts," defining ghosts as the aspect of the person that you continue to see, that sort of haunts you, and the way he described it struck me as very powerful at the time.
A large part of the book deals with the inability of the scientific method to start itself, for lack of a better way of putting it. There is a very rational, detailed thing out there known as the scientific method, but at it's root, it depends on direct experience or intuition or something undefinable to even get itself going. The "hypothesis" drives the scientific method, but the method can't lead someone to come up with that first hypothesis to begin with.
I remember good lines (now cliches) like "the only Zen you find on a mountain top is the Zen you take with you." At the time, I'd never read anything at all on Zen, and this got me interested in that.
This book also made me want to read "Walden," another great book.
There's a lot in here about mental illness which I found really good. Not analytical, just his experience of having had a breakdown and the need to search for answers and such.
His struggle to define "Quality," which I can't even begin to try to explain at this hour. I remember thinking that what he was describing was actually "Zen," but it's been a while, maybe that was not the best interpretation.
Some of the stuff that comes more easily to mind is, when I think about it, actually from "Lila," the second book in this "series" (in "Lila," he travels along rivers and canals on a boat, but it's the same basic sort of thing).
I also just really liked Robert Pirsig's writing style (basic, present tense, descriptive, sort of slow and thoughtful) and found that influencing my own writing style for years and years.
You know, I'd really like to read this again someday, because I look at the cover and I get a powerful feeling, I remember this having a serious impact on me, but when I try to put it into words, it's tough. And I was young then... so there's the chance that I was just more easily impressed, a little less experienced and less cynical.
Funny. I also read this book, not long after you read it for the first time, Jim, since you were talking about it all the time. Of course, I was like 14 reading it, and it was mostly over my head, and I mostly just hated it as symbolic of everything that I considered "leading you astray." I still have it on my shelves though - but I've never reread it since then. I would probably like it now. It's amazing how much the context of when/why you read something shapes how you read it.
Yeah, Beth, I remember you reading that and not being terribly impressed... I forgot how ridiculously young you were when I was demanding you read certain books.
I woke up this morning thinking "boxes" and "road trips."
I haven't read it in about 15 or 16years, which put me at about 20 the second time I read it... which meant that, like Kerouac and some others, one of the influences it had me was the intense desire to go on long road trips as a way of "finding myself" or something. I still like taking those trips, and I still starting talking like Kerouac or Pirsig by the third or fourth day. I can't help it. It just happens.
The other thing was the conversation in the book on boxes, though I've forgotten details. The gist was a contrast between standard "western" or "rational" thinking and "eastern" or more "intuitive" thinking. In the rational mode, Pirsig said, every thought, every concept, goes into a box. We put it in the appropriate box where it makes the most sense, where we can understand it, where we've sort of "dealt with it." This is useful in some ways, but it has its drawbacks, as our thinking and experimenting becomes compartmentalized and has to conform to certain pre-conceived notions. In the other mode of thinking, there ideally are no boxes. While this might be a drawback in some of the hard sciences, in the daily living of life it allows one to more directly experience reality, minus the limiting preconceptions, minus the rigid compartmentalization.
I still think of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" briefly, as sort of a flash, whenever I find myself getting too much stuck in box thinking, something I am very apt to do time and again.
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