Ten influential books

[chickenfeet]

I like this meme. From rahael, my top ten influential books:

Plato - The Republic

This has influenced my thinking on a variety of levels and on a number of issues. The most practical example would lie in using insights from The Cave to understand modes of perception and how people react to information in organizational settings.

Sartre - The Roads to Freedom

First read at age fifteen or so (I think The Age of Reason was a fifth form history prize) and at intervals ever since, it helped form my idea of ‘commitment’ in the political sense. At an early age I identified much more strongly with Brunet than with Matthieu Delarue.

Wilfred Owen - Collected Poems

First read for ‘O’ level, they have been a constant companion ever since. Nothing else expresses so well the triumph of the human soul under appalling conditions.

Hill - The World Turned Upside Down and Thompson - The Making of the English Working Class

I learned so much from these two books. I learned how deep and how continuous the English radical tradition is. I learned that contrary to Tory mythology, socialism is not an alien creed. I also learned to understand that historical processes and events are rooted in the particular history and collective experiences of the people who participate in them. Theory can help illuminate those events but it is not a substitute for seeking to understand the mentalities and motivations of the participants. The English Revolution wasn’t some sort of premature, bastardized version of the French Revolution despite the pulings of wannabee-French pseudo historians like Anderson and Nairn. To be English and a socialist was to be rooted in perhaps the richest of all radical traditions.

Mostow, Sampson, Meyer - Fundamental Structures of Algebra

Pivotal, for me, in making the transition from the pseudo mathematics of school, ‘A’ levels and engineers to the real thing. At some point in my first year at Durham I reached a sufficient level of enlightenment to realize that I was a real mathematician, if not destined to be a great one. The window opened on to a world of beauty that transcended the ‘wrangler’ type skills of earlier studies.

Walter Strachan - The Artist and the Book in France

I knew Strachan when he was very old and I was barely in my teens. His collection of livres d’artiste and his passion for them lay dormant for a couple of decades before finally becoming an obsession for me too. I still have a couple of small prints (Christmas cards actually) that I acquired from him.

Gareth Morgan - Images of Organization

One of the few truly brilliant books on management. It has profoundly influenced my views on organization design and change management and hence my professional practice. Plus, Gareth is a really neat person!

Modris Ecksteins - Rites of Spring

Modernism, Stravinsky, Joyce and WW1. The world changed utterly in the first two decades of the 20th century. Ecksteins, better than anyone, shows how.

Roger Penrose - The Emperor’s New Mind

Quantum mechanics, artificial intelligence and the nature of ‘truth’. This book connects the dots on several of my obsessions; uncertainty, mathematical elegance, artificial intelligence and more.

The one author who should be here but isn’t because I can’t find one single book that captures what he means to me is Marc Bloch. Perhaps Strange Defeat would come closest but it is too untypical to make the top ten.

Comments

[keithlard.livejournal.com]

Quantum mechanics, artificial intelligence and the nature of ‘truth’. This book connects the dots on several of my obsessions

Wrongly, in my view.

But there's a place and a time for my anti-Penrose rant, and this probably isn't it.

[rahael.livejournal.com]

I learned so much from these two books. I learned how deep and how continuous the English radical tradition is. I learned that contrary to Tory mythology, socialism is not an alien creed. I also learned to understand that historical processes and events are rooted in the particular history and collective experiences of the people who participate in them. Theory can help illuminate those events but it is not a substitute for seeking to understand the mentalities and motivations of the participants. The English Revolution wasn’t some sort of premature, bastardized version of the French Revolution despite the pulings of wannabee-French pseudo historians like Anderson and Nairn. To be English and a socialist was to be rooted in perhaps the richest of all radical traditions.

Exactly! this was why the term we spent studying the Interregnum in great detail (almost day by day)was out and out my favourite - both my head and my heart responded to it.

To see this is to understand that there is more than one British identity - that there is more to it than just the one posited by tory mythology. That if there could be so much more to British/English identity, why, perhaps it could encompass me to....

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

To see this is to understand that there is more than one British identity - that there is more to it than just the one posited by tory mythology. That if there could be so much more to British/English identity, why, perhaps it could encompass me to....

Nice to know that someone else gets it. Living overseas as I have for the last twenty years I no longer feel very British at all but I still feel profoundly English. I think the English have lost far more than they realise by being at the centre of empire. 'Englishness' has been subsumed in an artificially created cult of (German) monarchy and empire. The poor old English don't even have a national anthem!

On a different tack, I don't think the idea of 'British' has much difficulty coping with the idea of people from the subcontinent (except among people who can't see past skin colour). Is their anything more 'British' than an Indian Army officers' mess?

Exactly! this was why the term we spent studying the Interregnum in great detail (almost day by day)was out and out my favourite - both my head and my heart responded to it.

Oddly enough, its a period English schools pretty much ignore except for some 'A' level courses. The English generally have a very poor grasp of their own history. For most people its a mish mash of half remembered Shakespeare and mythology about the two world wars and that is about it.

[rahael.livejournal.com]

Not only that, it has become inextricably linked to "whiteness". If say, a group of non white people born or living in England, all with citizenship refer to an "English" person, they are referring to someone who is white. I cannot say exactly why this is so - perhaps because English identity is held thrall to Tory mythology, who can't imagine any other colour of identity for Englishness, and of course the far right, who positively emphasise whiteness as a marker of identity.

Hence the fall back positon of "British". And even that is contested.

I agree with your comments - i think the unease about English identity among the very people who are supposed to be very much "English" is because of the lack of awareness of the real complexity of English historical identity.

The peripheries have emphasised their distinct identities, as opposed to the core as you point out. You might find the two most recent books by Linda Colley of interest: "Britons" and "Captives". Both deal in really interesting way with these issues.

Colley's "Captives", and my recent trip to the fringes of the ex-empire prompted by post on colonialism a couple of weeks back.

[rahael.livejournal.com]

I do wish I could edit these comments: I meant to say, in my last line, "my post on colonialism', not "by post on"

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Not only that, it has become inextricably linked to "whiteness". If say, a group of non white people born or living in England, all with citizenship refer to an "English" person, they are referring to someone who is white. I cannot say exactly why this is so - perhaps because English identity is held thrall to Tory mythology, who can't imagine any other colour of identity for Englishness, and of course the far right, who positively emphasise whiteness as a marker of identity.

I wrestled with this when I was writing an earlier comment. I would even have to admit to feeling it at some level. I have no difficulty at all with the idea of non white Britons but the idea of being non white and English somehow sits differently. Perhaps it is because there is no English citizenship? Perhaps it is because everybody else affects to hate 'the English' so 'becoming English' makes as much or little sense as becoming Jewish?

Thanks for making me think about this.