Most Influential Books

Thinking about books that have changed me, there are a few that go back to high school:

• Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style", for impressing on me that writing is a craft and a skill
• George Orwell's "1984", for impressing on me the power of words, and the importance of naming things correctly, and also that government can be corrupt
• Shakespeare's "Hamlet", for giving me an appreciation of the soaring heights of the best of the English language, as well as planting the seed that would flower decades later in a life quest to see all of Shakespeare's works, which was itself a pillar in one of the most important friendships in my life
• Plato's "Apology", for impressing on me the value of goodness and truth
• a book that I think was by Evelle J. Younger (Calif Attorney General in the 1970s) called something like "A Student's Guide to Legal Rights", which outlined the rights that students had (e.g., to refrain from pledging allegiance) and the constitutional principles and cases that established them, which gave me a lifelong love and fascination for constitutional law. (I can't remember the exact title or be sure of the author. I only know that I found it in the Petit Park branch of the LA Public Library in the 1970s.)

Books that affected my life from college days:

• Bertrand Russell's "Why I Am Not a Christian". Long before Hitchens or Dawkins had even been born, there was Russell. Not that I was ever a believer, but he was an early hero of the despised minority of atheists, clear in his arguments and forthright in his convictions.
• Jeffrey Stout's "The Flight From Authority", the text for a freshman year class that looked at the intellectual crisis that occurred post Reformation when knowing what was true was no longer a matter of asking the right authorities. It gave me a lifelong appreciation for a particular strand of philosophy that happened to find its home at Princeton in the Religion Department, introduced me to some professors who were profoundly influential to me, and acquainted me with a vital conversation in contemporary philosophy including Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and others.
• Richard Rorty's "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature", a tour-de-force critique of post-Enlightenment philosophy
• the Fannie Farmer cookbook, for giving me the essentials to gain confidence in my own basic cooking skills, providing a foundation for a lifelong love of cooking.

There are also a bunch of books from my coming out days, in which I was avidly devouring gay fiction, hungry to find constructive images of what being a gay man could be like, or at least to learn what it was to be a gay man in the world then. There were many classics here -- Andrew Holleran's "Dancer From the Dance", Edmund White's "Best Little Boy in the World", David Leavitt's "Lost Language of Cranes" -- to name a few. But I think the ones that stuck with me the most were Mary Renault's "The Charioteer" and Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City" series.

In the decades since college, I think a few books have had substantial impact on my life and/or influence on my thinking:

• Andrew Sullivan's "Love Undetectable", for crystalizing the virtues of love and friendship and the value of being gay
• Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom The Bell Tolls", which taught me that a life well lived is not measured by its time span, and that love, even if fleeting, is worth having
• Nina Planck's "Real Food", which, along with Michael Pollan's seminal "Simple Rules" New York Times essay, really set me on the path of more locally grown, farmers market-driven, home-cooked eating.
• Jeffrey Stout's "Democracy and Tradition", which I read in 2008 during the Calif Prop 8 (anti-gay marriage) battle, and which took the philosophical dialogues I'd been following for years and gave them very practical application in how to address my fellow citizens about a vital and controversial issue
• Arnold Kling's "Learning Economics", which taught me not only the basics of economics, but the economic way of thinking (so that I was already predisposed to love Freakonomics when that came out)
• Andrew Sullivan's "The Conservative Soul", for showing me that "conservative" doesn't have to be synonymous with "selfish and judgmental" (and in a way, this book entry really is a proxy for Andrew's blog, which I read religiously for years and was enormously influential on me)
• Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness", for illuminating me about how fallible our cognitive processes are, and that one should plan with humility
• David McCullough's "1776", for giving me a proper sense of awe for how, had slightly different decisions been made at certain points, certain advice ignored or followed, certain unknown things discovered, or even the wind blown differently on a certain day, our fate could have been entirely different, and that the course of history is fragile. (His "John Adams" also gives me comfort, when I am despairing that our political polarization is worse than ever, that no, actually, it's not.)
• Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers", for giving a vivid argument of how much we owe to our circumstances and our forebears
• Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel", for giving a visionary argument for how much we, on a biological and evolutionary scale, owe to our circumstances