Despite my interest, professional and personal, in all things digital, I get asked now and then to cite the books that have most influenced me.  The answer to this question is highly personal.  It does not generate a list of the “best” books of all time, the pillars of the “Western Canon” or the “Booker of Bookers.”   In fact, it may not even represent the “best” books I have read, but rather the books which changed me the most or made me more “me” – whatever that means in a deterministic universe. 

 It is in this spirit that I offer an idiosyncratic list of the most important books to me:

Balzac, Pere Goriot

Calabresi, Tragic Choices

Camus, The Plague

Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma

Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Helpern, A Soldier of the Great War

Hofstader, Godel, Escher, Bach

Jenkins, Churchill

Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near

Kennan, Sketches from a Life

Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Lampedusa, The Leopard

Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

Mafouz, The Cairo Trilogy

Mann, Buddenbrooks

Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude

Milosz, Selected Poems

Plato, The Republic

Rawls, A Theory of Justice

Roth, The Human Stain

Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

Sagan, Avec Mon Meilleur Souvenir

Saramago, Blindness

Whitman, Leaves of Grass

I have stopped at 25, but I could easily go on.  I would never recommend that anyone actually read all of these books, which I have read over many years. They are important to me because of a unique interaction between an accomplished author writing something for all time, and the particular place, both geographic and personal, where I was when I read it.  It has always seemed to me that what makes a book or author truly great is not that she tells me something new that I did not know before, but rather that she tells me something I already knew deep inside myself but which I could never express as well.