Life's Persistent Questions

What to read?

I was browsing a bargain book store the other day, and been the cheapo that I am, spent near an hour deciding on a book for my afternoon coffee shop reading material. Too bad that I didn't see the list complied by Human Events Online, "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries":

1. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
2. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao by Mao Zedong
4. The Kinsey Report by Alfred Kinsey
5. Democracy and Education by John Dewey
6. Das Kapital by Karl Marx
7. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy by Auguste Comte
9. Beyond Good and Evil by Frederich Nietzsche
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keyes

Many bloggers have commented on the transparency of today's social conservatives. People they hate: atheists, feminists and scientists. Ideas they abhor: secularism, communism, and scientific methods. Don't worry, for you Intelligent Design'ers, Darwin's books got (dis)Honorable Mention (along with John Stuart Mills' "On liberty") Don't know what the point of this list is. Surely, their conservative panelists have read most of them. Most "liberals" have too. The list only makes someone who believes in free exchange of ideas and open-mindedness, like me, want to read them. Are they trying to protect the precious children with their "weak and corruptible" minds from these terrible ideas? Surely, no one wants to ban books in America. On wait.

On the flip side, someone pointed out the true nature of this list. For each book on their website, there is a link to Amazon.com. So they think these books are terrible, but not terrible enough to profit from. This is the reason I'm not linking to the humaneventsonline.com page. In the end, just like the VH-1 shows of counting down 100 worst songs ever, these lists are merely tools to generate interest and money. Though unlikely, I would more than happy watch an hour-long show on C-SPAN watching pundits fighting over the merits/dangers of these books.

The point? My nagging problem of find books to read is over.

P.S. the book I did buy was excellent.
War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet by Eric Margolis

posted by hedgehog @ 3:25 PM