Books that most influenced me

 

This blog entry at the First Things site prompts me to make this list of books that have most influenced my thinking (if you can call it that):

 

Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

Free to Choose by Milton Friedman

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

With Charity Towards None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy by Florence King

Anything by Thomas Sowell

The Closing of the American Mind by Alan Bloom

Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton

The Dialogue Phaedo by Plato

Witness by Whitaker Chambers

Everything by Evelyn Waugh

Chronicles of Wasted Time by Malcom Muggeridge

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

The Letters of Seneca

The Holy Bible

The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten

On The Road by Jack Kerouac

The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

Civilisation by Kenneth Clark

The Life of Johnson by Boswell

The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb

On a Chinese Screen by WS Maugham

 

A few of these titles, to be honest, not so much changed my mind as convinced me of my being on the right track.  I leave it to you to guess which two titles these are.

This list is by no means complete.