Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Books that Make Us Human

Books that make us human? I'm not so sure about that. I have wonder about his oversupply of utopian and dystopian works (I consider them to both be the same thing).

I would probably include Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in a longer list -- or if we weren't including fiction. Quite frankly, some of the books made us less humane, not more. Particularly Marx, who was wrong about just about everything. The list may be those that most influenced the course of events in the 20th century, but that's a different list.

What made us most human? Well, I would include Genesis, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Nicomachean Ethics, The Divine Comedy, Hamlet, Paradise Lost, Faust, The Origin of Species, and Genesis (Frederick Turner, bringing things full circle, title-wise).

Sarah Skwire has a much more thoughtful piece in response over at Modified Rapture.

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