For works of non-fiction, the selection criteria are inevitably trickier, inasmuch as I can scarcely be equally expert in every field of study. How then to determine which books are worth reading? here, I will defer to the opinions of a previous generation, and attempt to read only those books which remain among the most seminal in their field despite being a quarter century old or more.
Take Joseph A. Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Weighing in at 425 pp. plus index, this is, by practically any yardstick, an astonishingly dull book. But John Grisham has written relatively few works of economic theory and, before the collapse of Soviet-style communism, this book was highly regarded and much read by the intellectual element of the post-war generation. Mine is a 3rd edition, meaning somebody liked it. My bookmark, stalled hopelessly at page 39, is indicative that Schumpeter's style is--how shall I express it--somewhat lacking in sparkle? But it's published by Harper Torchbooks, an imprimatur which in the 1960's was carried around a lot on campuses from Dartmouth to UVA, and possibly even farther south.
The names in the back of the book are a veritable laundry list of forgotten thinkers once regarded as being of the first water: Jacob Bronowski, Jacques Barzun, Crane Brinton, Arthur O. Lovejoy, C. P. Snow, Alfred North Whitehead, Joseph Campbell, Carl Gustav Jung, Heinrich Zimmer, Karl Barth, Martin Buber, Rudolph Bultmann, Jacob Burckhardt, Frederick Copleston, Johan Huizinga, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Paul Tillich, Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein, Soren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud.
Okay, some big names there.
So that should be the level I strive for. Whether the books are of more recent date, or vintage Victorian scholarship, the determining factor should be this: is this a book which would have been a staple of required reading for coursework at Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, and Harvard, back then even if not necessarily now?
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