re: Name Your Top 10 Most Influential Books

LOTR: A baptism of the imagination where the abstractions of good, evil, courage and cowardice are played out in a fantasy world that is recognizable as very similar to the real one we inhabit.

C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy especially the third volume That Hideous Strength: Another exploration of good and evil and the demonic made plausible. Rereading it recently makes Lewis look like a prophet.

Darkness at Noon: Koestler's stark portrayal of life under totalitarianism through the narrow focus of the Stalin show trials.

The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk: As foundational to my ideas of government and politics as The Bible is to my Faith.

The Road to Serfdom: A close second to The Conservative Mind.

Kirk's The Roots of American Order: A close third to the previous two.

Green Bay Diary: Best sports Bio ever.


Lanterns on the Levee: W.A. Percy's Delta memoirs with some of the finest prose ever put to paper. His contrast of the locomotive with the Riverboat is timeless and bracing.

Shelby Foote's The Civil War. Has no comparison. By far the finest treatment of the central defining event in our history as a nation.

My personal favorite novel is Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins. I laugh at his perceptions of the fallen human condition which, though exaggerated, are embarrassingly familiar.



The Bible: Both covenants. A bunch of books, different types of literature, many authors, one coherent story. Like LOTR but real.