Tuesday, November 25, 2003
(3:05 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Bill Clinton's Greatest Hits
My close personal friend and confidant, CalPundit, has a nice post up with a list of Bill Clinton's favorite books. One of them is his wife's book, but then, the list is twenty-one items long, so we can safely assume that the real point is to list his twenty "sincere" favorite books. As a result, I have decided to list all of my favorite books, and unlike the supposed "Rhodes Scholar" Bill Clinton, I am going to italicize the titles instead of put them in "quotes." Hopefully this will help to reveal how smart I am and how unfair that impeachment debacle was.
Escape from the Cubicle Police by Scott Adams
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis
God Without Being by Jean-Luc Marion
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams
Tarrying with the Negative by Slavoj Zizek
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book by Bill Watterson
Protagoras by Plato
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Repetition by Soren Kierkegaard
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton
The Bible by Moses, et al.
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
I tried not to make this as "calculated" as the president's apparently is, but there are some biases involved. First, my bookshelf with Fr-Z is closer to me, so books whose authors are in that part of the alphabet might be over-represented. Also, I decided not to include representative samples from my fantasy/sci-fi days aside from the Douglas Adams, though I'm sure those books have had a much greater formative influence on me than any philosophy crap.
If my list turned out more pretensious than I think it did, any and all commenters are free to post comments in the form: "You put _________ on there? Come on!"
