Books Which Have Influenced Me Most

Economist and top-blogger Tyler Cowen was asked by a visitor to his blog to list the top 10 books that influenced him most. At the end of his list he invited other bloggers to do the same. It would be nice if many people would do so, with the same title, so that, if you do a search on Google, you get a whole list of similar entries. Here's mine.

Some preliminary considerations:

There's already a lot of information about some of my favourite novels elsewhere on the site, but favourite and influential are not necessarily identical. You can also track the books that I have read.

There are two ways of answering this question, one that attempts to reconstruct the books that had a major influence and one that lists the books that at this moment still cast their shadow. If I were to interpret the question as asking for books that shaped how I view the world, the list would be different. (That would also be an interesting list to try).

Ten is an arbitrary number, but it also forces you to think and choose. I am tempted to cheat by splitting the list into two top 10's, one for fiction and one for non-fiction. If I stick to the original format it would probably look something like this. In no particular order:

1. Homer: Iliad and Odyssey. I read it when I was a little child. I was already an ardent reader, but these stories really got me hooked. Of course books were also the one place where I could hide. Having read the Iliad and the Odyssey was one reason why I attended a traditional Dutch gymnasium, the highest variant in the secondary educational system of the Netherlands, which had Latin and Greek as compulsory subjects. I only studied Greek in 3rd and 4th grade, but I did study Latin from 2nd grade up and until my final exams. Just for the record, the exam used to consist of 7 subjects, but I took two additional subjects (and wish I had taken more) so I didn't lose much by way of more relevant subjects.

2. Douglas Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach. I read it when I was 15, too young to understand it all, but it had great impact on me. It nurtured my interest in mathematics, but I think deep down I already knew that I lacked the talent to become the mathematician that I wanted to be. (And so I ended up as a quant :).

3. Jacques Derrida: Margins of Philosophy. I read it during the summer holiday between my first and second year in philosophy (and my second and third year in econometrics, since I took up philosophy one year later). It was a major eye opener. A totally new way of reading texts and doing philosophy. More than in any other book I found in it the encouragement to think for myself.

4. Georges Perec: Life. A User's Manual. This is the one book that still stands out as the holy grail, because it is proof that it is possible to combine formal methods and expressionism, which of course is what I do or want to do in my own work. Like some of the other novels that are among my favourite reads it is a patchwork of stories and voices, again not unlike what I try to do in my own work.

5. Murray Gell-Mann: The Quark and the Jaguar. I don't remember whether it was this book or Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe that introduced me to complexity theory and self-organisation. I had read about it in magazine articles, but these books wrapped it up in a nice, coherent and visionary story. I have since applied some of these ideas in my own work. My finest hour was when I presented my research at a conference on complex systems in Boston and at a meeting of the Royal Dutch Mathematical Society.

6. David Carson: The End of Print. I was already familiar with some of the work David Carson had done for Raygun, but this book put it all together. It was another major eye-opener. It was like discovering a new world or a new universe and with that a whole new world of possibilities inside myself. I realized that all it takes to be a designer, photographer or choreographer is to design, photograph or choreograph. Just experiment with the material and keep experimenting.

7. Greg Girard and Ian Lambot: City of Darkness. A friend of mine owned this book. I was blown away. I bought my own copy in Hong Kong. Need I say more? I knew the work of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Steve McCurry from magazines and exhibitions. I only obtained a copy of Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places when it was re-released. So this is the one. Also because it got me to spend large amounts of money and time on travelling and photographing which in turn enlarged my world and got me into contact with a lot of people.

8. David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest. OK, so I only just finished it, but this is "the book". David Foster Wallace really could do anything with words, and how sad to speak in the past tense. This book kind of sums up where I stand right now and what I'm trying to do. It takes all the elements, achievements if you wish, from modernism and post-modernism, but uses it to tell a story, to say something about the world we live in. It is one of the few novels that is totally contemporary in the most emphatic sense of the word, or perhaps rather in a Nietzschean sense of being untimely (unzeitgemäss). It is also a book that opens up to the world, instead of closing in on a single place, person or event.

9. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner: The Way We Think. I only read it two years ago, but I had the rare sensation that a number of things fell into place and suddenly made sense to me. This is a good overview and introduction.

10. OK, so here I am going to cheat a bit.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaux and What is Philosophy? Because I spent several years of my life struggling with the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Occasionally I still find inspiration in their work, in spite of or because of its obscurity, inconsistencies etc.

Thierry de Duve: Kant after Duchamp. Because for many years I felt I had nothing to add to it. It seemed like the definitive book on contemporary art and aesthetics.

Fernando Pessoa: Collected Poems. I am not one but many. And so am I.

In my case this list will raise a few questions. Where are the books on economics? I read many textbooks, but no manifesto like book that for me really stands out. Where are the books about cognitive neuroscience? Years ago I did read some popular neuroscience books, but even at the time there was no single book that really made my heart beat faster. Obviously Alain Berthoz: Le Sens du Mouvement (The Sense of Movement) and Marc Jeannerod: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Action did encourage me to continue on that whole cognitive neuroscience path.

There are a number of books that didn't make the cut, so for the record: Jorge Luis Borges: The Book of Labyrinths (which I read in highschool), Claude Lévi-Strauss: Tristes Tropiques, Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow, Jacques Ranciere: The Emancipated Spectator and Malaise dans l'Esthétique, Jared Diamond: Collapse, J.R. McNeill and William McNeill: The Human Web, Slavoj Zizek: Looking Awry, Jean-Luc Nancy: Corpus, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations, Ray Jackendoff: Foundations of Language, Olivier Rolin: L'Invention du Monde, Peter Brook: The Empty Space, Rem Koolhaas: S, M, L, XL and of course, how could I forget, Djuna Barnes: Nightwood and Paul Bowles: The Sheltering Sky, both of which end with the principal character fleeing, escaping and vanishing into a forest (Nightwood) and the desert (The Sheltering Sky).