The Seven Book Challenge is one of those curious “challenges” that has been floating around social media. You know the drill: someone challenges you to post pictures of seven books. I have no idea why it is called a “challenge.”
I have a former student who recently tagged me in this challenge. Since all I do on social media is put up book reviews, just putting up pictures of seven books I enjoy seemed odd. But, I like my former student who issued this challenge, and so I feel duty bound to do something. Here it is.
Seven books. These are not the best seven books ever written. They are also not my favorite seven books. Instead, these are seven books which had a big impact on the way I think about world when I read them. There is no implied recommendation that you should read them, by the way. They are offered up purely for those of you who are interested in how I came to think about the world the way I think about it. These seven books will give you a good roadmap.
1. H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy
I can’t remember how I discovered Mencken. Sometime in undergrad or grad school, I must have started seeing references to him. I don’t remember which Mencken book was the first book I picked up to read. The Chrestomathy is thus a stand-in.
Mencken’s impact on my mindset was huge. I have always been a rather curmudgeonly sort. In fact, the adjective that may best describe my intellectual mindset is “iconoclastic.” Someone says something, and I instantly start taking apart the argument. Mencken is the ultimate curmudgeon. He mocks everything in sight. A master of prose; I love reading him. But, the thing which struck me the most about Mencken was that while he was as curmudgeonly as I was, he was always cheerful about it.
Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United Sates, then why do you live here? A: Why do men go to zoos?
That is a beautiful line and one I think about all the time. It has made me smile in the midst of many a bureaucratic meeting.
When I got to Mount Holyoke, the very first decoration I put up in my office was a picture of Mencken. It is still right over my desk. He always reminds me to be cheerful, no matter how annoying the world gets.
2. P. G. Wodehouse, Leave It To Psmith
This was not the first Wodehouse book I ever read, but it is the one that cemented Wodehouse into my mindset. While Wodehouse is always funny, this is probably his funniest novel. Every Wodehouse book has fundamentally the same plot and the jokes are repeated in book after book. That is the point.
Wodehouse taught me that life is a comedy. Yes, there is a lot of pain and misery in this world. A lot. We can easily spend our lives looking at all that pain and the result will be a fully warranted despair. But, there is another way to look at the same world. It is a comedy, full of joy and happiness, punctuated with tragedy. It is a matter of perceptive. Wodehouse taught me that when you step back from life and look at it, the best reaction is to smile and laugh. The eschatological end to this world is a joyful one. Given that we have to trudge through life, we might as well focus on the joy.
I grew up with a divided mind. On the one side, I went to school and learned a lot of things. On the other side, I went to church and learned a lot of things. But, those two parts of my mind never talked to one another. There was the intellectual part that enjoyed taking ideas apart (remember, I am an iconoclast). There was the spiritual part of my life that knew what I was supposed to believe and how I was supposed to act.
Augustine caused those two parts of my mind to come crashing together. Here was a guy who was obviously brilliant, who enjoyed learning and ideas every bit as much as I do, and who thought about Christianity with exactly the same level of intellectual rigor that he thought about everything else. Reading Confessions was a moment of epiphany.
After Confessions, I could never go back to thinking about my Christian faith as somehow separate from the giant intellectual project of understanding the world. Understanding God is an intellectual project. Theology deserves exactly the same iconoclastic tendencies I brought to every other subject. Why do people believe this is true? Is it really true? I grew up certain that faith and reason belonged in separate playpens. Confessions taught me that faith is strengthened when reason works alongside it.
4. Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America
I stumbled into graduate school. Through my first three years of college, I thought I was going to go to law school. Then, at the start of my senior year, I realized I had no interest in being a lawyer. So, I applied to Ph.D. programs. I wasn’t even entirely sure what one did with a Ph.D.
Eventually I realized being professor was a pretty good job for me. Where else could I spend all my time learning things and talking about what I learned? Knowing I would enjoy being a professor is not the same thing as knowing how to be a good professor. I really had no idea what professors actually did on a day-to-day basis.
Barzun’s book taught me the idea that there is a craft to teaching and that if I was going to do this job, I really needed to perfect that craft. The number one lesson I learned from the book was that being a teacher means the job is not really about me. Teaching is for the students, not the professors. (It is depressing to think about the number of my colleagues who do not understand this.) If I was going to be a good teacher, I had to always remember that I was here to serve my students, to teach them everything I know, to impart knowledge and wisdom. The goal is that when they leave, they will lead richer and fuller lives. Teacher in America taught me to care about the craft of what I do.
Barzun’s book is the reason I always leave my office door open. It is the reason I always drop everything when a student walks into my office. It is the reason I never usher a student out the door, that office hours are whenever I am in my office. It is the reason that conversations wander all over the place. Barzun’s book taught me that being a teacher is a calling.
5. Thomas Mayer, The Structure of Monetarism
Tom Mayer is the reason I am an economist. He was a curious guy; I never really understood him, and I never had the courage to ask him a personal question. I took four undergraduate, two graduate courses, and two undergraduate independent studies with him. I was his teaching assistant 3 or 4 times. I attended a weekly department seminar with him all through graduate school. He was the author of what was at the time the best-selling money and banking textbook in the nation and yet he always found the time to meet with me.
The man was a walking encyclopedia. I remember one time in graduate school, someone asking him a question in class. He replied “I don’t know.” The student re-asked the question two more times; both the student and everyone else in the room assumed the question just wasn’t clear. It never occurred to any of us that Tom actually didn’t know the answer to a question.
The Structure of Monetarism was Tom’s most famous book; I read it in one of those independent studies, but the ideas in the book were in his textbook. What was so important about the book for me personally was that it taught me how to think about economics. I came to economics through politics. I loved political debate and economics is one of those things politicians talk about, so I figured I better learn about it. Without Tom’s influence, I suspect I would have become one of those tired political types who see economics as just another tool in a political debate. Pick your political position and then find the economic arguments to match it.
Tom was not like that. He always went the other way. Monetarism was a monetary theory largely associated with Milton Friedman. Friedman was easily the greatest monetary theorist of the post-war era. He was also a notable conservative. What The Structure of Monetarism demonstrated is that politics and monetary theory are not equivalent. You could be a conservative and reject monetarism or you could be a liberal and accept monetarism. Indeed, monetarism is not even a monolithic idea, but a hodgepodge of a whole bunch of different ideas. You could easily accept some, but not all of the parts of monetarism. (There is even massive complicated diagram showing which parts are related to which other parts.)
What Tom taught me more than anything else was that if you want to be a serious scholar, you have to subordinate politics. First figure out the facts or build the model to explain the facts. Policy conclusions may or may not follow from the model. But if you use politics to help build the model, then you will never build a good model. Ideas are more important than politics.
6. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
In my second year of graduate school, I realized that all I was doing was reading economics. I decided I did not want to be someone who only read economics, and so I made a plan that every day I would read books totally unrelated to economics. It was the most important decision of my intellectual life.
I had no idea how to become a reader, though. I had no guide. So, I just started reading books I heard about. I had heard about Faulkner. What I knew about Faulkner was this: he was really hard to understand. That is quite honestly the only thing I knew about Faulkner.
I remember wondering why, with all the books in the world, anyone would ever bother to read a book that was hard to understand. Surely there were better books, like, for example, ones that you could understand. Then at a library book sale, there was As I Lay Dying and for a quarter I could buy it. I am not sure what possessed me to buy it.
I started reading it. By page 4 or 5, I had no idea what was going on. I reread the first few pages and still had no idea what was going on. Faulkner’s reputation was merited. I almost tossed the book aside. Then, again for a reason I do not recall, I decided to just keep reading. Wow. The book was terribly confusing, but gradually the fog lifted and by the end, everything all made sense. I never had that experience before. I realized then and there that there is something beautiful about reading, that it allows for exactly that experience of just letting the book do the work and going along for the ride and enjoying the process of discovery.
7. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems
I hated poetry ever since my 10th grade English class. Even though I had eventually become a reader, I never read poetry. The memories of that class killed any hope of enjoyment. But, eventually, after I had finished grad school and was teaching at the kind of place where the liberal arts are the thing we espouse, I realized that going through life hating poetry was not what I really wanted to do. I decided I should learn about poetry.
I was in Hailey, Idaho visiting my mom, went to a thrift store, and found a book of poetry that contained the poem I decided I should start reading. T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” All I knew about the poem was that it was important. I settled down one night to read it and I had absolutely no idea what I was reading. None. It was incomprehensible gibberish.
Remembering my experience with Faulkner, I persisted. I read the poem over and over, night after night. Eventually I started noticing things; eventually I started to see a structure. Eventually I realized that poetry could actually do things that prose could not do. Eventually I started reading poetry.
Over the years, I have read Eliot many times. He is the poet to whom I most often turn. His poetry has formed the background music of my life. He is the poet to whom I turned when tragedy hit. Eliot wrestles with exactly the same questions with which I wrestle. Eliot is the one who creates words to capture that which cannot be explained in any other way. If you want to know what it is like to think about the world the way I think about it, read Eliot.
