Book Lists

[drbearjew]

Over the holidays, while playing pool, I was asked a question by a friend that I've never been asked before, and found really difficult to answer:

"What are the three most influential books for you?"

My first thought was "I have more than three", but I think that's part of the challenge - pick just three.

I went with Dubois's Dusk of Dawn, Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge, and Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In hindsight, I wish I had room for Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, but only because it's what I'm currently reading and employing in my work.

What three (and only three!) books have been most influential for you?

[bookworm]

It is tough to limit it to three.

If we are speaking in terms of general intellectual influence I guess for me they would be (in no particular order):

James C Scott 'Seeing like a state'
Foucault 'History of sexuality' (although this could easily be D&P)
Weber 'Economy and Society'

[buks]

(1) Marx - Capital V1
(2) Rawls - A Theory of Justice
(3) Moore - The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

[great question]

Hmm. I had to really think about this, but I'm going to interpret "influential" to mean "which 3 books were most intellectually transformative for you personally."

In which case I would have to say, for me:

Blumer's Symbolic Interactionism
Sheila Jeffrey's Beauty and Misogyny
Jennifer Michael Hecht's Doubt: A History

It is awfully hard to choose just 3.

[aaaa]

Polanyi - The Great Transformation
Mary Douglas - Purity and Danger
Bourdieu - The Logic of Practice