What are the most influential books?

bandcm

Mon, Apr 30 2007, 10:58 pm

brooklyn wrote:

Found this tidbit on the net.

Today is World Book Day, and a poll has been conducted to find the ten books readers can't live without.

1) Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 20%
2) Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein 17%
3) Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 14%
4) Harry Potter books - J K Rowling 12%
5) To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee 9.5%
6) The Bible 9%
7) Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 8.5%
8 ) 1984 - George Orwell 6%
9) His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 6%
10) Great Expectations - Charles Dickens .55

Isn't it interesting that the readers of the world can't live without their novels - essentially just love stories, many of them - the Bible comes in sixth, and all of the great books on philosophy and social conscience are ignored?
I suppose we should be grateful that Grisham, Danielle Steele and company are not up there as well.

miriam

Mon, Apr 30 2007, 11:48 pm

Motek wrote:

7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Covey

I was just about to write this but checked if someone beat me to it. I also have the audiotape. It was very helpful.

bashinda

Tue, May 01 2007, 5:16 am

bandcm wrote:

brooklyn wrote:

Personally I find the most influential books to be extremely subjective and also very dependent on where you're from. It's interesting that on something called World Book Day almost every single author is English. But then they also included Harry Potter which makes it hard to take the list seriously really.

That said, I used to be a literature major and I can tell you that novels are often used for much more than the plot. Jane Austen was writing social criticism as well as a love story. Lord of the Rings was based on AFAIK Mideival times in England. 1984 is still an extremely powerful book and was banned in totalitarian countries. Why would somebody ban a novel?

Of course nowadays books that are most influential for me lehavdil Chumush, Tehillim, Tanya, etc.

Ruchel

Tue, May 01 2007, 12:06 pm

What do number 5 and 9 talk about? I've read the others, but I have never heard of these 2...

bashinda

Tue, May 01 2007, 7:28 pm

To Kill a Mockingbird is about social injustice/racial prejudice pretty much. I had to read it in high school and never read it after that so I'm a little fuzzy. Here's more info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.....gbird

I'd never heard of His Dark Materials. I did a wiki search and it's a fantasy trilogy. I'm sure it's nice but influential? I don't think so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.....rials

Ruchel

Tue, May 01 2007, 7:43 pm

thank you!!

bashinda

Tue, May 01 2007, 9:48 pm

No problem!

chen

Tue, May 01 2007, 10:55 pm

can't believe no one listed Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.

To say nothing of "The Quotations of Chairman Mao".

sarahd

Wed, May 02 2007, 6:40 am

See JRK Mommy's post.

chen

Wed, May 02 2007, 7:21 am

sarahd wrote:

See JRK Mommy's post.

OIC. oops.

Motek

Thu, May 03 2007, 11:50 am

Quote:

Today is World Book Day, and a poll has been conducted to find the ten books readers can't live without.

I don't know what "can't live without" means, in this context. I don't think it has anything to do with "most influential books" which is the thread topic! I mean, can you explain how Jane Eyre has influenced society? For that matter, why can't people live without it?

bashinda

Thu, May 03 2007, 12:23 pm

That's why these lists are almost always meaningless to me.

chen

Thu, May 03 2007, 1:08 pm

The Constitution of the United States of America.

bandcm

Sat, May 05 2007, 11:11 pm

Not a book, Chen

chen

Sun, May 06 2007, 11:38 am

It most certainly is. It's not very long as books go, but it is as much a booy as influential or nearly so. Especially when printed in one volume together with The Citizen and distributed in multiple languages to millions of immigrants during the great wave of immigration in the late 19th and early 2Oth centuries.

Motek

Sun, May 06 2007, 10:58 pm

It's extremely influential but is not a book.

The word constitution means fundamental law. The fact that it has been printed in books, does not make it a book.

chen

Mon, May 07 2007, 7:55 am

Motek wrote:

It's extremely influential but is not a book.

The word constitution means fundamental law. The fact that it has been printed in books, does not make it a book.

well, in that case, the Torah is not a book either.

Motek

Mon, May 07 2007, 10:18 am

It's called a sefer Torah.

Motek

Sun, Aug 17 2008, 12:26 pm

Quote:

As Norman Podhoretz wrote in Commentary magazine in 1985, when Solzhenitsyn's anti-communism was still deeply relevant to contemporary politics, "The Gulag Archipelago is one of the most famous books ever written," but said few had actually read it. He allowed that A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was widely read, but that the readership of Solzhenitsyn's works were, he said, generally "more reviewed than read."

And yet, Solzhenitsyn remains one of the most important persons of the 20th century. His courage ought to inform the behavior of decent persons in the 21st and all those centuries that will follow. His books did as much to bring down the most murderous regime of the modern age as the work of any other person or nation.

The publication of Ivan Denisovich made the suffering of the tens of millions imprisoned in Soviet slave labor camps real for a world that had denied they existed. The Gulag Archipelago documented in his unique style one of the greatest crimes in history and gave a voice to its hitherto silenced victims.

Even more dangerously, it pinned the blame for this evil not just on one man - Josef Stalin - as many liberals and Soviet sympathizers tried to do, but on his predecessor Vladimir Lenin and the entire belief system of socialism.

http://www.aish.com/societyWor.....s.asp