Books I Think About

Some people seem to think that I'm well-read; the truth is, that I'm not. The truth is that I've read about a dozen books, and just continually quote those same books, and this leads some to believe that I know what I'm talking about. In the interest of demystifying my readers, I've decided to officially cite my main sources; if you read and absorb the following books, then you will know from where I derive a lot of the things I said. I learned from Joseph Telushkin (see below) that in Pirkei Avot this is rather important. The following books are by category, not by importance; they are not necessarily my favorite books, but have probably affected my intellectual development more than most others:

Fiction:
1) The Brothers Karamozov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
2) Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)
3) Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Franz Kafka)
4) Interpreter of Maladies, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri)
5) The Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
6) The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien)
7) Life on the Mississippi and The Innocents Abroad (Mark Twain)
8) Of Mice and Men and Travels with Charlie (John Steinbeck)
9) Persuasion, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
10) Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim (Joseph Conrad)

Poetry:
Nothing worth mentioning.

History:
1) Founding Brothers (Joseph Ellis)
2) Cultures of the Jews (ed. David Biale)
3) Imagined Communities (Ben Anderson)
4) Medieval Lives (Norman Cantor)
5) The Battle of Salamis (Barry Strauss)
6) The History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides)
7) How the Irish Saved Civilization (Thomas Cahill)
8) The Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan)

Philosophy:
1) Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (David Hume)
2) Persian Letters (Montesquieu)
3) Apology, Symposium, Euthyphro, and Phaedrus (Plato)
4) Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville and Jacques the Fatalist (Diderot)
5) The Prince (Machiavelli)
6) A Collection of Essays (George Orwell)

Judaica (Not counting written & oral Torah):
1) Hillel and The Book of Jewish Values (Joseph Telushkin)
2) The Guide to the Perplexed (Rambam)
3) Kuzari (Yehudah Halevi)
4) Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction (Joseph Dan)
5) The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture (Marc Hirshman)

This list, when you think about it, isn't that long for a lifetime of reading, but I think that it's representative of the books which I am likely to think about on any given day of the week. A dedicated reader could consume all of this in under a year. A list of movies or musicians I tried to make would be even feebler. Now, the next time I sound like I'm saying something impressive, you will have an idea of what author I'm parroting.

~JD

"[Jesuit and Capuchin] missionaries took pains to describe daily life and customs, and were not indisposed to denounce the slave trade since it interfered with their proselytization as well offending their sense of justice" ("Sexual Demography: The Impact of the Slave Trade on Family Structure," John Thornton).