Books that have influenced my thinking

[Deleted]

Here is a brief list of some books that have profoundly influencved my thinking over the years.

I will begin with political/economic works:

1 Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State.

2 Ramiro de Maetzu, Liberty, Authority and Function in the Light of the War

3 John Hargrave, The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift

4 Thomas Mackay, A Plea for Liberty

5 James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity

6 J D Bernal, A Prospect of Peace

7 Bob Black, Tha Abolition of Work

I would be interested to hear the contributions of other members!

[fretslider]

The Secret Doctrine - Helena Blavatsky

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Narziss and Goldmund - Hermann Hesse

The Road to Reality - Roger Penrose

English History 1914 - 45 - AJP Taylor

[beth]

In no particular order ..

Man and His Symbols - Carl Jung

Failed States - Noam Chomsky

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

The Masks of God & The Power of Myth - Joseph Campbell

The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche

... plus, most all Gore Vidal's books introduced me to the idea that novels could, indeed, be well written and served as a good measuring stick for finding books I enjoyed.

[Erasmus]

Heavens! 'Influence' comes in many forms doesn't it, including negative. I am sure that the most influential book on the generation before mine that they passed onto us, though they never read it was Mein Kampf, and that a purely negative influence to dissociate as far as possible from all that belief in it had visited upon them.

Books that have maybe less formed or altered my views than confirmed and extended them, or convinced me that is not the way to go, over the years, including some I had to criticise at school, probably go back before books as such to well-intentioned moralistic 'comics' like Robin and Eagle and some ancient mythology in encyclopedias originally belonging to my mother (Inside a modern airship I remember with great interest, these dinosaurs of the skies being extinct).

Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series since I spent most of my pre-teens in a rowing boat named after me. I admit to feeling that for the most part, the Amazons had the better idea of exploring and having fun and knowing how to look after themselves instead of playing pirates and needing somebody else to make the sandwiches.

At some early stage in my teens, various by Christmas Humphreys, despite the name a writer on, and populiser of Buddhism in the West (particularly Zen).

In my teens, authors I forget from the school library not at all surprisingly hostile to Socialist-Communist ideals who just convinced me how ideal these were and how horrible both the status quo they promoted and the perversion the USSR had made of them.

Flying Saucers have landed,half George Adamski's alleged alien contacts and half Desmond Leslie's account of UFO sightings through the ages. Much now looks or perhaps by US test pilots winding Adamski up but either way opened me to "More in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy"

Prosper Mérimée's short stories including the novella Carmen of which Bizet made an opera. They are all full of contrasting selfish pitilessness and faith to traditional codes pitilessness - as when the father shoots his son for inadvertently breaking the code of silence (Ummerta?) to the Authorities even though he would take revenge himself - he don't want no cops doing it in his name. Mérimée showed me the power of using vendetta mentality to shoot his son of six for honesty against itself that as easily protects those it resents against liberation from them. By hell! Today's American Tea Party and the like are full of Mérimée peasant fools fighting their liberators on behalf of their oppressors, and so have we all been since 1980 or even 1975!

Later, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, which may have some wince-making moments but at the time spoke for a freedom we thought ourselves on the edge of achieving.

Mary Renault's The King must Die and sequel The Bull from the Sea, which put the legend of Theseus in a setting of clash between archaic matriarchal values sacrificing the individual to the common good and individual aggression that also paradoxically allowed the group to evolve.

Germaine Greer's Female Eunuch which taught me that some people held some things more important than working together for mutual support as a family-clan-village-tribe - but with her help, we were on the verge of disposing of them and restoring humanitarian matriarchal values ahead of economic patriarchal ones.

Margaret Murray's The Witch Cult in Western Europe, giving a sort of ideological and mystical justification of sacrificing men (literally!) for the Group (Race) Good.

Elaine Morgan's Descent of Woman giving what I suppose is a precursor to Evolutionary Psychology to explain how and why the need to perpetuate the Race and females' choice of mates might develop the restriction of men into warriors and workers (like in ancient Sparta) who might then through pure force achieve political control. I subsequently read her Aquatic Ape which is less concerned about restrictive gender roles, but makes a lot of sense. There is another one I have not read.

Above all in that genre, Margaret Meade's 1948 Male and Female that possibly impressed on me most how gender is a purely cultural construct, and later Simone de Beauvoire's Second Sex from the same year that showed how our culture teaches to despise what is expected of the feminine role and admire of the masculine instead of sharing and treating them alike, and (in contrast to Meade) feminists to think of female roles as inferior, masculine as superior instead of recognising both of equal value and expecting men to share in t5raditionally feminine roles and values asd equals.

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which in outlook I could never understand what he found wrong with it, yet in cold fear of natural biology as degrading and shameful I felt echoes exactly what is wrong with modern culture and especially the repudiation of emotional values for economic that came to call itself later (or 3rd-wave) Feminism. He said himself in 1957 essays Brave New World Revisitted 30 years after the original "If I were to write it now, I would set it 60, not 600 years in the future and substitute Television for 'Soma'" Even 60 years was probably an over-estimate.

Also his Ape and Essence, presaging religious fanaticism with "They must be punished for being punished" as the ruler of a post-holocaust Satanist England explains. (Nuclear mutation has made them all sex maniacs for one month in the year, but the Satanic theocracy only allows them half of it for sexual freedom).

George Orwell's Animal Farm that showed how it is inevitable that Revolution compared to Evolution like trying to build a road through a mountain by planting a nuclear bomb or by gradually tunnelling through: the bomb is too much too fast and causes more obstruction with people just drifting back to where they felt comfortably secure before.

Various writings of course by Aleister Crowley, Alex and Maxine Sanders,

In more recent times, just about everything by Terry Pratchett and Ursula le Guin's The Dispossessed showing that even a Utopia can have its hidden empires, but better them than the enshrined ones, Kim Stanley Robinson's 1990s Mars trilogy.

Most recently The Revolution Betrayed 1936 by Leon Trotsky that restores my faith in the humanitarian motivation for the Communist ideal, though I feel we have moved on from those times to much more femininine (and so anti-femininist belief in supremacy of traditional masculine ideology).

It's not only reading though: we have acted media on the same level, and I felt as some Catholics might about Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, about Harvest Home and The Wicker Man as ideals of liberation from impersonal economics back to human personal pro-female values - and one hell of a lot of the Blakes 7 science-fiction series fighting for personal freedom against impersonal Market Forces

[sadie]

Dr. Seuss.......who taught me at an early age to love to read and taught me to not take any situation too seriously.

[sadie]

You know.....I wasn't trying to kill this topic.......I have read some Friedrich Nietzsche and a little Carl Jung......but other than that all of you are way over my head.

But I was kinda serious.........some of my first memories are of reading Dr. Seuss.....and I love, love, love to read....which I think has been a HUGE influence on my life. It has lead me to all sorts of discoveries, emotions, and enlightenment. Also....all of you kinda know my warped sense of humor......so who knows....besides my family maybe some of my sense of the absurd maybe came from that too!

[beth]

I like Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel) a lot, Sadie. Used them with my children, too ... to make sure they knew lots of different kinds of people are cool .. not just the kids next door. I especially liked the Sneetches ("But, because they had stars, all the Star-Belly Sneetches Would brag, “We're the best kind of Sneetch on the beaches.” ) and Horton Hears a Who ("A person's a person, no matter how small").

[jaysparrow38]

Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig

A Peoples History of the United States, Howard Zinn

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory: 1874-1932, William Manchester

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone: 1932-1940, William Manchester