Books Every Educated Person Should Read

Some candidates: Doing Our Own Thing (John McWhorter). Never mind his thesis. McWhorter’s book
stands on its own as a cultural survey book.
Influence (Cialdini), as necessary as a flu shot, but much more enjoyable.
The Crooked Timber of Humanity (Isaiah Berlin), again, a good survey book.
The Mind’s I (Hofstadter & Dennet)
because at one point or another, you’ll have
to speak with geeks. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Edward Tufte)
is a good lesson both in how to write and how
to read a graphical argument.
How about fiction?

May I request a followup post with a condensation of the suggestions into a coherent and easily copied list?

Chance and Necessity, Jacques Monod. _The_ great popularisation of neo-Darwinism, absurdly neglected in the English-speaking world.

The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat – Oliver Sacks. Very popular as neurological freakshow fun, but repays more thoughtful reading.

1.
The History and Geography of Human Genes, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.

I’ll have to think about others.

James C. Scott, “Seeing Like a State”
Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Return of Martin Guerre,” and/or Carlo Ginzburg, “The Cheese and the Worms”

Also, I second Jon H’s request.

Hard to pick from so many. But I’ll go for

Philip Roth, _American Pastoral_ (1998).

and

William Shawcross, _Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia_ . (1979)

Justice as Fairness and Beyond the Limits

Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics. Probably a bit intellectually underpowered for the CT crowd, but a good intro to thinking about ethical issues. Also Parfit’s Reasons and Persons.

Abiola forgot the after 1970 bit and also thinks “underinformed rant” and “useful antidote” are equivalent.

Chris,

Thanks for pointing that out. My mistake.

Chun,

Do you make it a hobby of yours to be an asshole?

Gravity’s Rainbox has to be in there, absolutely. And, I would like to see The Satanic Verses on the list as well.

JR — William Gaddis
After Virture — Alaisdair Macintyre

Incidentally, anyone have a link of Duirant’s original list?

The Stone Raft .
By Jose Saramago

Up In The Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell

The Triumph of Politics by David Stockman

It is interesting to see so few Math & Science books in this list. Why?

(1) Is it that this forum is more liberal arts inclined?
(2) Is it assumed that any educated person will know enough about Math & Science?
(3) Is it because, unlike liberal arts, the books that a educated person should read in Math & Science are textbooks?

In any case, my contribution to this thread are Feynman’s Lectures on Physics. He makes the subject appear maddeningly easy.

Stephen E. Ambrose, “The Rise to Globalism” and Paul Fussell, “The Great War and Modern Memory.”

Adaptation and Natural Selection by G. C. Williams[1]
Beloved by Toni Morrison

…but, really, there could be so many more. I suggest these because they’ve not yet been mentioned.

[1] Admittedly, this doesn’t quite qualify as the original publication date was 1966.

Limiting to fiction:

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, by Patrick Suskind.

I second the Proust, esp. the new Lydia Davis translation, esp. “Combray,” the first half of “Swann’s Way.”

If the cut-off date were earlier, I would suggest either Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence series (1952-69), or her The Golden Notebook (1962). Otherwise, I’d echo the suggestion of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and add (deep breath) Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (1975).

“The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins

“General Relativity from A to B” by Robert Geroch. It’s a treatment that only uses geometry and simple algebra.

The question is akin buying contemporary art: the best strategy is to discern genuine esthetic value, figuring that it what will make the work most likely valuable/valued fifty years hence.

So this question is like speculating what book is most likely to be read fifty and hundred years from now as the Second Treatise, Critique of Pure Reason, Don Quixote, Origin of the Species are read today.

One reasonable guess is Rawls’ Theory of Justice.
Larkin (too early?) and Heaney?
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics

Anyway, the game goes to ENDURING worth and being incapable of supercession. Philosophy and literature have it easier than social science and history.

John Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice” (1971)

Jurgen Habermas (pick one);
-Knowledge and Human Interests (1971)
-Towards a Rational Society (1971)
-Legitimation Crisis (1975)

Ronald Dworkin;
-Law’s Empire (1988)

Don Delillo;
-White Noise (1984).

Pynchon,Gaddis,Rawls,Nozick as above. 4 books but short post.

I’d go with:

The Ecology of Fear by Mike Davis. I don’t know how accureate his predictions will turn out to be, but apocalyptic eco-marxism makes for a compelling read, and re-read come to that.

I see no-one’s mentioned JG Ballard: pick any from Cocaine Nights, Crash, Rushing to paradise…in fact, pick any.

(1) Women and Human Development, by Martha Nussbuam

(2) Development as Freedom, by Amartya Sen

The Prize – Daniel Yergin, understanding the oil industry in the Petroleum Age.

Gulag Archipelago has been mentioned, but since the fall of communism is surely the most important event of the last 30 years, I’ll add “The End of History and the Last Man” by Fukuyama and the just published, yet powerful, “Red Color News Soldier” by Li Zhensheng.

I think some type of non-fiction on computers is warranted as well, so I’ll go with “The Age of Intelligent Machines” by the mastermind Kurzweil.

Finally, de Soto’s “The Mystery of Capital” is the most important development book of the last couple decades, especially given the overwhelming respect he recieves from world leaders, both on the left and the right wing.

Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae.

Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (published in 1970)

Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (published posthumously in 1982)

From religion/theology but for a general reader:

Stages of Faith: Psychology of Human Development by James Fowler. Virtually all non-fundamentalist clergy-types of several faiths have read this.

History of God by Karen Armstrong. A strong intro to the three monotheistic traditions.

Why Religion Matters by Huston Smith. A re-mapping of religious options by the premier expert in comparative religion.

I’ll second that call for Dispatches by Michael Herr. Damn fine book.

As a companion for The Prize one might include The Reckoning by David Halberstam.

Roberto Calasso’s “Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony,” and Rushdie’s “Shame.”

Can someone please tell me why it is that an “educated person should have read” Toni Morrison at all?

(For that matter, why “Orientalism”? Hasn’t Bernard Lewis savaged the late Said enough? Why should any educated person have to wade through “post-colonialist” posturing? Sure, it’s an “important” book, but not in a way that means you have to actually read it. Its importance is at this point mostly historical and probably entirely negative. But I’m sure people will strenuously disagree with me… which is fine, but I want to know why.)

If I’m allowed to cheat:

Carl von Clausewitz – “On War”, translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret with accompanying essays by Bernard Brodie. Yes, the book was written in the 19th century, but this is the definitive translation and was published in 1976.

Field Marshal Viscount Slim – “Defeat into Victory”. Again, this was written (and the first edition published) before 1970. But… er… the paperback edition didn’t emerge until the 1970’s.

If I’m not allowed to cheat:

Williamson Murray, Macgregor Knox and Alvin Bernstein (eds) – “The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States and War”

Colin Gray – “Modern Strategy”

Or possibly:

Martin van Creveld: “Supplying War”

Igoring the primary sources part, (1)Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living, which captures mindfulness, the mind-body problem, non-Western approches to health and managing physical and emotional pain; and
(2)Scientific American’s How Things Work Today–an illustrated encyclopedia of all kinds of technology, from mundane (vacuum cleaners) to smart cards, the human genome project, adn the Hubble Telescope.

Boorstin’s The Searchers, The Discoverers, or The Creators. Good overviews of philosophy, science/technology, and art, respectively.

Pynchon, HST..yep

but has anybody mentioned William Gibson. Or are we really that far inside the box he foretold?

I second Thompson’s “Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas” and Irving’s “World According to Garp,” and Spiegelman’s “Maus” and add the graphic novel series “Barefoot Gen” by Keiji Nakazawa and “Watchmen” by Alan Moore.

Northrop Frye, The Great Code
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Though the best book I’ve read that was written since 1970 is Libra, by Don DeLillo. But I haven’t read White Noise, so I’ll defer to whoever nominated it (also enjoyed Mao II, didn’t care as much for Underworld).

A few years ago New Scientist, I think it was, asked twenty big names in and about science to name the book they would take to a desert island. Only two books appeared more than once on the list, Goedel Escher Bach, and The Eighth Day of Creation. Hofstader was one of the selectors, and his choice had been Eighth Day.. I had never heard about it, but I immediately got it out of the library and read it. And I was blown away. It’s the history of meolecular biology from 1900 to about 1978. All the people, all the lab stories. The project that knocked vitalism on the head. For a bunch of philosophy types who think science is about Prigogine’s speculations, I can’t recommend it too highly. Along with G-E-B, of course.

Good grief, I posted, went to teach, and came back to all this. Yes, I’ll make up some manageable summary when it dies down. Please keep it up — I know people enjoy this, but still its very generous of you to give all this thinking to it.

@#$*!

“needs to widespread” — “needs to _become_ widespread”

Nominating: Larkin, High Windows (1974); Conquest, Stalin: Breaker Of Nations (1991).

Seconding: Tufte, Visual Display; Walzer, Just And Unjust Wars; Hofstadter, GEB; Spiegelman, Maus; Eco, Rose; Solzhenitsyn, Gulag; Calvino, Winter’s Night; Rawls, Theory; Irving, Garp; Marquez, Cholera; Dawkins, Selfish Gene; Sen, Development; Rushdie, Midnight.

Not seconding: Paglia, Personae; Roth, Human Stain (far from his best); Paulos, Innumeracy (a good book but too trivial); Wilbur; Pynchon; DeLillo; other Hofstadter; HST, Fear & Loathing; Ballard; Fukuyama; Gould; Frye.

Ineligible or mostly so: Feynman lectures (first published in 1960s); Hayek (most important work was pre-1970).

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by RP Feynman

Real insight for real people. One of the few science books for the layman that tells it like it is and yet it can be understood by even the most innumerate.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling

From park benches in New York to bootlegs in China, it is everywhere. Study the hand that rocks the cradle.

1. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, by Hernando DeSoto.
2. Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy, by Thomas Sowell.

Not having seen Will Durant’s list recently, I don’t recall if these next two are on the list. If not, they ought to be (though they were obviously published well before the cutoff date).

3. Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville
4. The Federalist Papers, by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison

Strong Second to Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel”

Add:
J.K. Galbraith’s “New Industrial State”

Granted, it was first published in 1962, but I’m surprised no one has mentioned Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Also, no poetry. How about Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck?

Written in english, my only language.
(translations not allowed)
Thomas Pynchon- Gravity’s Rainbow.
James Merrill- The Changing Light at Sandover.
I haven’t read all of it, but it’s the only thing that shook me, in the same way as Pynchon’s book.

Horowitz !!? That’s just bizarre. Being called an asshole by Abiola L. is a plus, but Horowitz is a lost cause.
—
I’d say Pynchon’s a keeper as far as the readers at CT are concerned, but I’d add: probably for the wrong reasons. For all the high conceptual theatrics, the novel is deeply horribly tragic. It’s one long death spiral of predetermination: a cruel commentary on science and technocracy, and deeply anti liberal.. Richard Dawkins as written by Mephistopheles

“probably for the wrong reasons. For all the high conceptual theatrics, the novel is deeply horribly tragic. It’s one long death spiral of predetermination: a cruel commentary on science and technocracy, and deeply anti liberal.. ”

And here I thought it was a light-hearted farce on the end of WWII, an affirmation of American values, a whimsical parody of parapsychology

Golly, ya think I got “JR” all wrong too. Does that have dark undertones I missed while rolling in laughter? Nah couldn’t be

Not sure about my second choice (maybe Atlas Shrugged) but my first choice would be Applied Cryptography.

You know, what is really interesting about things like this to me is people’s near total inability to do as asked- to list _two_ books _published after 1970_. That’s not so hard,is it? I suppose nothing matters here, but it’s an interesting phenomena, and one that repeats itself all the time- the total inability of blog commentors to follow simple directions. Funny.

I wouldn’t recommend Hawking, whose popular works I find overrated and more opaque than necessary. Feynman’s “QED” is a great choice, and I think it’s from the 1980s, but somebody already said that.

So… How about Heinz Pagels’ “The Cosmic Code” and Rudy Rucker’s “Infinity and the Mind”? Both had an immense effect on me.

Perhaps a little college-reading-listy, but I got a lot out of Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

Jonathan Weiner’s “The Beak of the Finch” is extremely engaging and might just make you believe in evolution!

So many books to mention! A tiny proportion of must-reads include for me: Kanan Makiya’s 1992 book, ‘Cruelty and Silence’ (the ultimate answer to anyone who thinks it was best to leave Saddam in place); Christopher Koch’s marvellous, unusual novel of the Vietnam War, ‘Highways to a War’; Piers Brendon’s The Dark Valley(on the 1930’s) and all the Tintin books!

Matt, I’ll have you know that I’m a finalist on Wampumblog for Left Blog Commentator of the Year, and I can tell you that staying on topic and following simple instructions were not among the skills which brought me this great honor.

I keep trying and trying to convince nice left-liberals that the rules in the rulebook are not really important, it’s the rules on the floor that are important.

In my opinion, Herbert Simon is quite underappreciated in spite of his phenomenal contributions spanning several disciplines. His “Sciences of the Artificial” is a masterpiece.

Two works at the crossroads of morality and psychology:

Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy, by Walter Kaufmann (The translator and scholar/commentator on Nietzsche, Hegel, Goethe, etc.)
&
The Doctor and the Soul by Viktor Frankl (Holocaust survivor, and renowned Viennese professor of neurology and psychiatry ).

And another (pre-1970) … The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski – surely one of the most powerful, harrowing novels of all time.

Extremely strong second to Benedict Anderson, about whom I’d forgotten. As a counterpoint, Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism does a nice little dance with Anderson. It also has the benefit of being quite short.

For computer science: The Art of Computer Programming, V.I and V.II. Donald Knuth.

Dear Chun,
I am in truly an unviable situation.
And I’m drunk. My sincere apologies.
(I was sober.)

sigh…

I’d second the Rawls and the Delany, and also share some ambivalence as to whether Morrison lives up to her hype: I think her books are beautiful and intelligent, but I’m not moved or awed enough to put any of them in the top two. Two influential books from my discipline that I haven’t seen mentioned and that I think important to one’s education are Macksey and Donato’s Structuralist Controversy and Millett’s Sexual Politics.

I’ve got a big thing for Howard Zinn’s work, and I think that his autobiography was a brief but wonderfully inspiring work.
1) You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train — Howard Zinn

And maybe this is just a personal bias, but I think that everyone should read Angels in America. (It’s in two pieces, and a play—am I cheating?) Kushner is one of my favorite authors of all time.
2) Angels in America — Tony Kushner

– mahmood mamdani’s citizen and subject

– indrani chatterjee’s gender, slavery and law in colonial india, which i found most interesting for its unpacking of the continuum between family and slavery

Skinny Legs and All- Tom Robbins…

Monkeywrench Gang- Edward Abbey…

(“And now for something completely different!”)

Bauer, Peter. From Subsistence to Exchange.
Diamond, Larry, ed. The Global Resurgence of Democracy.

2 books?
1) How To Read A Book. Although origianlly published around 1940, this book by Van Doren and Adler has had updates and revisions since 1970. The logic of this title should be self-apparent.
2) The Goldbug Variations by Richard Powers, covers vast intellectual terrain (including Science, Music and Computers) in an engaging fiction.

I already posted with my ideas at the very beginning, but I’m going to second some things I’ve read as I just read through all the comments. Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” (can’t believe I forgot that!) and “Beak of the Finch” (by I forget whom, but it’s in the comments elsewhere), which really should make any nonbeliever of evolution into a believer.

Also, I agree with the idea of a cookbook. Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything” doesn’t have excellent recipes, but it does provide a good introduction to cooking and choosing ingredients. It’s rather more basic than anything else we’ve got on this list, though. Perhaps one by Marcella Hazan?

I’m cheating here as I’ve already made two suggestions. So think of these are books that others might endorse ….

Marshall Berman, _All That Is Solid Melts Into Air_ .
Christopher Alexander, _A Pattern Language_ .

Let me reiterate the recommendations for Don DeLillo – White Noise and Arundhati Roy – The God of Small Things: they both say a lot about our modern world without seeming to, and are wonderful to read!

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963, Taylor Branch

Ooohh.

I’d like to replace my Rushdie suggstion with S/Z by Roland Barthes

I agree that Roy’s God of Small Things is quite good, but I don’t think White Noise does anything without seeming to.

Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind” reads like an 80s book, but its main points are still quite relevant.

Maybe noone mentioned it yet because it’s such an obvious choice.

I like this sort of thread. Ask for a recommendation for a book, and you’ll get 37 suggestions apiece from 400 people, half of them scholarly peacocks eager to make a vulgar display of learning, and the other half sadists looking to inflict Pynchon and Habermas on an innocent.

If your friend wants to chat books with another educated adult, he should read _A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius_ and a bunch of Harry Potter. If he wants something a little more substantial, at least than AHWOSG, _The Lovely Bones_ and _The Five People You Meet in Heaven_. If he wants two relatively literary good reads, _Duluth_ by Gore Vidal and _Foucault’s Pendulum_. If he wants knowledge, I believe the A and S volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica are the fattest.

I know I’ve commented already, but as we are ignoring the rules: I’d like to second the recommendation of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, and can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. And how about Seamus Heaney’s recent translation of Beowulf? And I’d like to include something by Margaret Atwood, possibly The Handmaid’s Tale or Alias Grace.

Steven Weinberg’s Dreams of a Final Theory which I easily recommend before anything by Hawking. It’s more than a description of the hunt for a Grand Unified Theory; it’s about what science is, why it matters, how it works. Weinberg isn’t merely one of the greatest scientist of the past half-century, he’s also a very good writer, attentive to both details and the movements of history.

The Selfish Gene. This almost well, duh. Everyone should have read this already. A textbook, a book which changed biology (by pulling diverse elements together into a new synthesis), and a intelligent popular introduction. Again Dawkins is a very clear writer: but the central ideas are so hard to get that they’re misrepresented more often that understood.

Maybe I missed it, but I haven’t seen anyone mention “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” by Robert Caro, yet. An essential.

Following up on someone’s suggestion of books about music and other “right-brain” subjects, how about Harold Solomon’s Mozart biography? I think it’s post-1970.

And one extra (sorry): Roger Penrose, “The Emperor’s New Mind.”

1) The Public Burning, by Robert Coover. Possibly the greatest piece of post-war fiction around.

2) The Final Days by Woodward and Bernstein. Essential history.

I can’t understand this Gravity’s Rainbow obsession that so many people seem to have. A more unreadable piece of dreck I have never encountered. When will people understand that inaccessibility is not the same thing as depth?

I’d go with The Mathematical Experience and something by Kazuo Ishiguro. My favorite is An Artist in the Floating World but Remains of the Day seems more popular.

Whoops, that’s three isn’t it? Forget I mentioned the second Ishiguro book…

Geez, you’d think the request was for the books every educated post-modernist should have read. I wouldn’t suffer anyone to plod through Gravity’s Rainbow unless they had a genuine interest in the arcane or esoteric. And it certainly isn’t for everyone (Do we really need anymore self-righteous hipsters channeling Pynchon in decadent undergrad writing workshops? Isn’t that dangerous?).

And as for all the Rawls? Well, sure, Theory was monumentally important in philosophy. But outside that discipline, who would want to study through all 600 or so pages? The veil of ignorance and maximin, sure, but the intricate details on page 400?

I guess all this is to say, different people will need to read different books. The American historian or the biographer may need to read Robert Caro and the writer might want to bend the 1970 rule and grab 1969’s Portnoy’s Complaint or The Things They Carried (better handbooks for writing than anything Pynchon’s produced). I’d love it if some of our politician’s had read Gordon S. Wood or our Defense Dept. had checked out A Peace to End All Peace. Or maybe The Best and the Brightest. The casual scientist would a be a fool to miss A Brief History of Time. Laurie Garrett has written two great books about global public health, that any public policy type would want to take on.

These are, of course, just the little bits I pick up from my perspective. But it will remain to see what will stand the test of time. Go back to 1950, and then you start to see some real essentials. James Baldwin. Rachel Carson. Vladimir Nabokov.

Since American Pastoral has already been mentioned a couple of times (it seems to me very clearly superior to Sabbath’s Theater) I will mention two I have not seen listed:

Less Than One Joseph Brodsky
The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Three volumes published so far) Robert Caro

Julian Simon: The Ultimate Resource II
Bjørn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist
Anything by Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Helena Cronin, Matt Ridley and Paul Davies.

JR by William Gaddiss
Blood & Guts in High Scholl-Kathy Acker
Frisk-Dennis Cooper
My Life-Lynn Hejinian
Terra Nostra-Carlos Fuentes
Gravity’s Rainbow-Thomas Pynchon
My Cousin My GAstroentroligist-Mark Leyner
American Psycho-Brett Easton Ellis
Crash-JG Ballard
Hour of the Star-Clarice Lispector

not fiction?
Anti-Oedipus-Deleuze and Guattari
Judith Butler-Gender Trouble

I want to agree with the poster who put Mosley’s Hopeful Monsters on the list and state that JR by Gaddis is much much better and relevant than Pynchon (who I love) and Delillo (who i can appreciate but find boring)

Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) by Ken Kesey. (To the caviling pedants it may have been published before 1970, but I didn’t read it until 1982.) One of the greatest American novels of the last 50 years, IMO.

I second Libra and a bunch of others mentioned. And just to be even more off topic I recommend the poetry of James Wright.

underworld-dellilo
something happened-heller

For Philip Roth, I’d pick The Zuckerman Trilogy or The Counterlife over his more recent stuff (good as it is).

I’ll second Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Suttree and raise you a Child of God.

In non-fiction, you can’t beat Walter Karp’s The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic 1890-1920 (Bush’s misadventure in Iraq has some very disturbing predecessors) and Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent (the indispensable guide to how a “free” press gets co-opted and yet its practitioners don’t even know how they’ve been played).

Cookbooks did you say ? Completely frivolous and NOT in the spirit of the original list, BUT:

1) Simple French Food, by Richard Olney (I’d choose Elizabeth David’s books, which have the additional virtue of being recently reissued by Penguin, but the best ones were published prior to 1970).
2) The Curious Cook, by Harold McGee – You won’t learn to cook, but you won’t mind. You can pretty much open this tome to a random page, and be absorbed for a good half-hour.

Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin
Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer

Hearty seconds to “A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” and “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” Both are true page-turners, and I can attest that the former is excellent for reading aloud to one’s mate on a long trip.

The posts here suggest to me that I should read “Gravity’s Rainbow” — even if I won’t like it — so it’s on order from Amazon. I’m hoping it won’t be as awful as “Atlas Shrugged,” the last book I read on this particular principal.

I can’t wait to see the final list. Thanks to everyone for your contributions!

Leviathan and the Air Pump — Stephen Shapin and Simon Shaffer

We have never been Modern — Bruno Latour

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change — Elizabeth L. Eisenstein

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Underworld by Don DeLillo

Charles Taylor – Sources of the Self
Richard Rorty – Contingency, Irony & Solidarity
Bruno Latour – We Have Never Been Modern

“On Equilibrium” – John Ralston Saul.

“Finite and Infinite Games” – James Carse.

“Silverlock” – John Myers Myers.

I agree that Paul Bowles is an extraordinary writer, one of the finest American writers in the 20th century, but isn’t ‘Sheltering Sky’ before 1970. Also I think ‘The Spider’s House’ was an even better work to his debut novel. Definitely read Bowles, and avoid the film.

My picks

Jose Saramago – The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
Don Delillo – Underworld

Wow. Somebody besides me has read The Glass Teat. I am amazed.

MKK

Hah! I’ve read the Glass Teat as well, but then was when I was a teenager, and all I can remember is that he didn’t like Reagan (then Governor of California) or Sprio Agnew (Nixon VP) much.

Jesus’ Son – Denis Johnson

Sympathy for the Devil – Kent Anderson

David Rieff and Joan Didion’s Miami books.

“Kieslowski on Kieslowski”
and
“The Dirt, Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band” by Motley Crue with Neil Strauss

triage – leonard lewin
the forever war – joe haldeman

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

Voltaire’s Bastards by John Ralston Saul

Worth reading and re-reading.

p.s. I like Jane Jacobs’ American Cities but you’d need to go back forty years for it to qualify.

More timely than ever, Being There by Jerzy Kosinski, 1971.

I was a Jerzy Kosinski fan before I read this, and then I was thrilled when Hal Ashby and Peter Sellers made such a great movie.

William Gass, On Being Blue

Gaston Bachelard, La psychanalyse du feu

Robert Bresson, Notes sur le cinématographe

Richard Wright, Black Boy (first published in its entirety in 1991)

Assuming the original rules meant ONLY TWO books which one should be able to assume an educated person has read (as opposed to those you believe crucial to completing their education), SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE by Vonnegut (calm down, he only missed by a year) and BELOVED (whence the Morrison backlash?)

I’d second many of the suggestions (Gaddis, Kundera, Marquez) but I’d like to suggest two writers whose work has been deeply influential on literary writers: the poet Elizabeth Bishop, and the short story writer Alice Munro.

They may not have the overtly intellectual pizzazz of some of the books mentioned here, but I think the depth of their humanity and the mastery of their craft make them two of the greatest, most defining authors,of our time.

“Ted Chiang’s short story collection Stories Of Your Life has philsophy, fiction, science, and excellent writing. What more could you ask for, except more works?”

I will second that.
For Delany I would pick Triton rather than Dahlgren.
For Le Guin I would pick Always Coming Home over The Dispossessed, which is a preachy deeply-flawed book.

No one has mentioned Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean. Amazing book. One of its kind.

Also sui generis works are Little Big by John Crowley and The Unconquered Country by Geoff Ryman. Sort of magic realism but more so.

Until the Sun Falls by Cecelia Holland. Excellent historical fiction.

TWO BOOKS post-1970 Every Educated Reader Should have Read:

1. Law, Legislation and Liberty by Friedrich Hayek

2. From Marx to Mises by David Ramsay Steele.

1) Lucifer Principle – Howard Bloom

2) The Demon-Haunted World – Carl Sagan