1. ''THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS,'' Henry Adams
2. ''THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE,'' William James
3. ''UP FROM SLAVERY,'' Booker T. Washington
4. ''A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN,'' Virginia Woolf
5. ''SILENT SPRING,'' Rachel Carson
6. ''SELECTED ESSAYS, 1917-1932,'' T. S. Eliot
7. ''THE DOUBLE HELIX,'' James D. Watson
8. ''SPEAK, MEMORY,'' Vladimir Nabokov
9. ''THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE,'' H. L. Mencken
10. ''THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST AND MONEY,'' John Maynard Keynes
Now The Guardian has somehow gotten into the act. The state:
1. The Sixth Extinction
2. The Year of Magical Thinking
3. No Logo
4. Birthday Letters
5. Dreams from my Father
6. Brief History of Time
7. The Right Stuff
8. Orientalism
9. Dispatches
10. The Selfish Gene
This is an interesting comparison. Two on the first list are women, three on this list are. One on the Times is about science and two on the Guardian. Personal recollections there are many. One could make up lists that have had impact. In the Guardian list one could ask; who has read more than three at best.
The key question is; did any of the books have a lasting impact and which ones. Clearly Keynes did. Silent Sprint eliminated DDT yet tens of million of humans died of malaria while the same number of birds survived. Good trade off? Watson records a tale of human intellectual competition. Brilliant and highly readable. Mencken ages too quickly in a caustic culture. Adams is too New England. Sixth Extinction is a trendy catastrophe book, and suppose it will fall in the genre of all the others so one wonders why it was Number 1. Dawkins does stimulate and writes well. I guess the President's alleged recollections is compulsory for The Guardian. The Time book was a great seller but I doubt many truly grasped it or even more so if any of it makes a difference in daily existence.
Marx and his writings made a difference as did Locke, Mill, Montesquieu and others. People read them and it changed their lives. I doubt than any of the Guardian list did any of that.
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