Truck and Barter

Note that this does not count electronic books I have on hard drives, of which I have several dozen: Shakespeare plays, etc. Of course, why own electronic books, when Project Gutenberg has 16,000 at your immediate disposal?

The Last Book I Bought: Not by Bread Alone by Vladimir Dudintsev. I paid 50 cents for an excellent first U.S. printing of this wonderful anti-bureaucratic Soviet novel. The skinny: Dmitri Lopatkin, an engineer and inventor, devises a new means of casting pipes, and is stymied at every step by those whose job it is to promote Soviet science and direct industrial production.

Last Book I read Relations by Zsigmond Moricz, in which our protagonist, István Kopjáss, becomes Town Clerk of his small Hungarian Town, through no devices of his own. Hilarity does not ensue -- as his relations swarm in like flies -- and as he moves from a lowly but respectable cultural adviser to a man of great power and influence who runs in an unscrupulous social circle. Here's more:

His criticism of the gentry is, however, merciless in Relatives (1932). Hailed by today’s critics as Móricz’s most important novel, it tells about small-town nepotism and corruption relating to the fate of Kopjáss who, after rising to higher office, becomes innocently involved in illicit transactions, through a web of suddenly emerging uncles, brothers, and cousins, and is driven ultimately to the verge of suicide. Kopjáss is a typical Móricz hero, a crossbreed between Misi Nyilas (innocent) and the Reverend Matolcsy (ambitious idealist), but without their redeeming qualities; although like them he is a victim of circumstance, he is a weak character. It is the grimmest of Móricz’s novels – even the scenery seems to be always grey; there is no laughter, no warmth, no true human relations, but instead scarcely disguised selfish motives, pretensions and ugliness are everywhere.

Five Books that have Meant the Most to Me.

1. The Man Versus the State by Herbert Spencer. His adamant committment to personal liberty, based on economic liberty, leaves little role for the state, and hence is often considered to be a form of "social darwinism" by those who see state action as salvation. I think such labelling of Spencer and his work is just plain wrong and dumb, and this would be harder to do if his critics sat down and actually read his Social Statics, Education, First Principles, and his collected essays.

2. Adam Smith's An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Spurred by a high school economics class, it was the first serious book I ever read on my own. I read huge chunks in high school, and that left a lasting impression. Of prime importance was the notion that it was not in the national self interest of the British to maintain and protect the American colonies. Somehow, I managed to make it through high school without anybody ever once mentioning that mercantilism was an idiotic and flawed way of creating national wealth.

3. Buchanan and Tullock's The Calculus of Consent for its use of simple visualizations in explanations of logical ideas about voting, and for demonstrating to me clearly that the standard 50%+1 rule for the legitimacy of democratic decisions rests on a tremendous base of fundamentals which ought to reexamined very closely.

4. I, The Jury by Mickey Spillane for an excellent example of simple and entertaining writing, and for presenting an fantasy world so radically different from the silly dorm-room culture that surrounded me as I read them at night.

5. The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. That's right, a childrens' book! Why, you ask? Because the most important things to me aren't necessarily intellectual. Every early morning for months, my son has walked to his bookshelf and taken Caterpillar out. He has then demanded to sit on my lap, wanting me to read it to him over and over again. Given that, the nature of the story, which is cute and fun, is irrelevant.

Runners up include Mises' Human Action, Tukey's Exploratory Data Analysis, and Feller's An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications, Volume 1 (I don't like volume 2). And so many, many others...