Saturday, April 23, 2011

The 50 Most Influential Books of the Last 50 Years

As has been commented before on this blog, lists of the "top/most {insert adjective here} books" may often seem arbitrary and objective (and even questionable - e.g. the alleged BBC books list that goes around on Facebook).

The SuperScholar website has released a list of the "50 Most Influential Books of the Last 50 (or so) Years". The list contains the usual suspects, such as Atkins, Spock, Friedan, Dawkins, etc., but also some other more interesting selections - Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, John Gray's Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.

I particularly applaud the inclusion of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life.

As is often the case, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series has been incorporated as one item, coming in at number 35.

Check out the list and let me know what you think. How many have you read and consider to be worthy choices? Is it too limited to restrict the list to 50?

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