Influential

Dear Reader,

There’s no doubt that books have a huge impact on our lives. They change who we are and how we think. I believe that you are left a different person after reading a great book compared to who you were when you began it. The challenge is then to choose books that help you become the best person you can be.  Below I’ve included 3 different lists compiled by different sources on some of the most influential books of all time. Enjoy!

~Eclectic Emily

25 Books that leave a legacy By USA Today 2007

1Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone By J.K. Rowling (1998) Midnight book parties, all-night readathons, overnight deliveries: A boy wizard named Harry got kids (and adults) thinking that reading was cool. And mega sales of the magical series redefined what it meant to be a best seller. 2The Deep End of the Ocean By Jacquelyn Mitchard (1996) What was America reading? Whatever Oprah Winfrey was reading. The talk-show host became a publishing powerhouse on Sept. 17, 1996, when she made Mitchard’s novel her first book club pick. All 57 selections have been instant smash hits. 3The Da Vinci Code By Dan Brown (2003) The religious thriller about Jesus’s love affair with Mary Magdalene became the fastest-selling adult novel in the history of publishing with 75 million copies in print worldwide. It drew a warning from the Vatican and spawned months of water-cooler debates, a movie, countless Code wannabes and an entire travel industry. 4The 911 Commission Report By the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks (2004) Praised for its riveting depiction of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, this is the only government report ever nominated for the National Book Award. First-day sales pushed the $10 report to the No. 1 spot on USA TODAY’s Best Selling Books list. 5Chicken Soup for the Soul By Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield (1993) Comfort food for readers, the Chicken Soup books, which told short, bright stories about overcoming adversity, quickly became a franchise. The 144 titles now in the series are geared to teens, single parents, even NASCAR fans. 6Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus By John Gray (1992) We always knew men and women were from different planets. Gray explained why (women like to talk, men don’t), and the Mars/Venus image seeped into the lexicon. 7Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution By Robert C. Atkins (1992) Dr. Atkins ignited the low-carb craze, the reigning diet of the ’90s. Bread and pasta were out, and high protein was in. 8And the Band Played On By Randy Shilts (1987) Shilts, a reporter at The San Francisco Chronicle who would die of AIDS in 1994, helped wake up the USA to the emerging AIDS epidemic. His book was the first definitive analysis of the medical, cultural and political! dimensions and was written with the power and sweep of a novel. 9Beloved By Toni Morrison (1987) Morrison’s masterpiece about an escaped slave who kills her baby to save the child from slavery won the Pulitzer and propelled her to the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the last American to win it. In a 2006 poll of writers byThe New York Times Book Review, Beloved was named the best American novel of the past 25 years. 10The Greatest Generation By Tom Brokaw (1998) The former NBC anchor popularized the expression “greatest generation” when he paid tribute to boomers’ parents with stories about men and women who survived the Great Depression and fought in World War II. 11Bridget Jones’s Diary By Helen Fielding (1998) Singletons, smug marrieds, v.v.. funny diary observations: This British import set the stage for a flood of chick-lit novels, from The Nanny Diaries to The Devil Wears Prada. 12Left Behind By Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (1995) The first in the fictional apocalyptic series about the Rapture clicked with evangelicals and then found a wider audience. Fifteen books about the end of the world followed with titles such as Armageddon and Glorious Appearing. The series wrapped up with a bang on April 3 with Kingdom Come. 13The Purpose Driven Life By Rick Warren (2003) Everyone has a purpose in God’s plan, according to this Christian devotional guide. Sales surged in 2005 when an Atlanta woman used the book’s teachings to persuade a murder suspect who took her hostage to turn himself in. 14Fast Food Nation By Eric Schlosser (2001) This exposé of fast-food restaurants and meatpacking plants earned comparisons to Upton Sinclair’s 1906 classic The Jungle. The book helped transform the American diet as we were reminded we are what we eat. 15The Satanic Verses By Salman Rushdie (1989) Riots and political uproar on three continents greeted the publication of the Indian-born writer’s novel of good and evil. Fundamentalist Muslims called it blasphemous, and the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (death sentence) on Rushdie. 16The Closing of the American Mind By Allan Bloom (1987) The conservative scholar’s attack on the shortcomings of colleges and liberal professors provoked an intense debate as well as self-criticism on campuses across the USA. 17The Bonfire of the Vanities By Tom Wolfe (1987) Wolfe’s first novel captured the Wall Street greed of the ’80s better than any non-fiction. It vividly illustrated the growing gap between the haves and have-nots in American cities. 18The Joy Luck Club By Amy Tan (1989) In 1949 San Francisco, four Chinese women gathered to play mahjong and forget the pain of the past. Tan, daughter of Chinese immigrants, created a debut novel out of this fresh material and launched a wave of immigrant literature. 19What To Expect When You’re Expecting By Heidi Murkoff, Arlene Eisenberg and Sandee Hathaway (1984) Boomer parents ditched Dr. Spock in favor of this accessible baby guide. The eight books in the series span toddlers to baby-sitters 20A Brief History of Time By Stephen Hawking (1988) Theoretical physics suddenly was sexy thanks to a wheelchair-bound Cambridge University professor (he has Lou Gehrig’sdisease). Hawking explained black holes and the Big Bang theory for the rest of us. 21Iacocca By Lee Iacocca (1984) The Chrysler chairman’s autobiography rolled off the assembly line and found eager buyers, proving a business memoir could be a hit. 22Waiting to Exhale By Terry McMillan (1992) With her profane, sassy voice, Terry McMillan’s groundbreaking novel about black women looking for satisfying relationships was a wake-up call for the publishing industry. Readers of all races were hungry for entertaining stories about African-Americans. 23Cold Mountain By Charles Frazier (1997) The Civil War saga got millions of readers talking about a literary novel. It was a rarity: a debut novel by an unknown writer that was both a critical and commercial hit. 24Backlash By Susan Faludi (1991) Faludi, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, took on the media, Hollywood and anti-feminist propaganda as she examined the backlash that developed in the 1980s against successful women. 25Final Exit By Derek Humphry (1991) The topic of assisted suicide exploded in controversy in the ’90s, thanks to Michigan pathologist Jack Kevorkian and his suicide machine and this how-to manual by an English journalist who helped his cancer-stricken first wife kill herself.

Library of Congress Top Most Influential Books

The following were listed as the Most Influential Books of the 20th Century in a survey taken in 1991 by the Library of Congress:

1. The Bible**
2. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
3. The Road Less Traveled, by M. Scott Peck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
5. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
6. Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
7. How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
8. The Book of Mormon
9. (Five titles were tied for the next place):
   
   • The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan
   • A Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
   • Man’s Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl
   • Passages, by Gail Sheehy
   • When Bad Things Happen to Good People, by Harold S. Kushner

** A large gap exists between the #1 book and the rest of the list.

100 Most Influential Books Ever Written
by Martin Seymour-Smith

*This list is in Chronological Order. It is taken from a book written in 1998 by Martin Seymour-Smith, a noted critic and poet.

1. The I Ching
2. The Old Testament
3. The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
4. The Upanishads
5. The Way and Its Power, Lao-tzu
6. The Avesta
7. Analects, Confucius
8. History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
9. Works, Hippocrates
10. Works, Aristotle
11. History, Herodotus
12. The Republic, Plato
13. Elements, Euclid
14. The Dhammapada
15. Aeneid, Virgil
16. On the Nature of Reality, Lucretius
17. Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Laws, Philo of Alexandria
18. The New Testament
19. Lives, Plutarch
20. Annals, from the Death of the Divine Augustus, Cornelius Tacitus
21. The Gospel of Truth
22. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
23. Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus
24. Enneads, Plotinus
25. Confessions, Augustine of Hippo
26. The Koran
27. Guide for the Perplexed, Moses Maimonides
28. The Kabbalah
29. Summa Theologicae, Thomas Aquinas
30. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
31. In Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus
32. The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli
33. On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther
34. Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais
35. Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin
36. On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, Nicolaus Copernicus
37. Essays, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
38. Don Quixote, Parts I and II, Miguel de Cervantes
39. The Harmony of the World, Johannes Kepler
40. Novum Organum, Francis Bacon
41. The First Folio [Works], William Shakespeare
42. Dialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems, Galileo Galilei
43. Discourse on Method, René Descartes
44. Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
45. Works, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
46. Pensées, Blaise Pascal
47. Ethics, Baruch de Spinoza
48. Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
49. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton
50. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke
51. The Principles of Human Knowledge, George Berkeley
52. The New Science, Giambattista Vico
53. A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume
54. The Encyclopedia, Denis Diderot, ed.
55. A Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson
56. Candide, François-Marie de Voltaire
57. Common Sense, Thomas Paine
58. An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
59. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
60. Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
61. Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
62. Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke
63. Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft
64. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, William Godwin
65. An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Robert Malthus
66. Phenomenology of Spirit, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
67. The World as Will and Idea, Arthur Schopenhauer
68. Course in the Positivist Philosophy, Auguste Comte
69. On War, Carl Marie von Clausewitz
70. Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard
71. The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
72. “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau
73. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Charles Darwin
74. On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
75. First Principles, Herbert Spencer
76. “Experiments with Plant Hybrids,” Gregor Mendel
77. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
78. Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, James Clerk Maxwell
79. Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
80. The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
81. Pragmatism, William James
82. Relativity, Albert Einstein
83. The Mind and Society, Vilfredo Pareto
84. Psychological Types, Carl Gustav Jung
85. I and Thou, Martin Buber
86. The Trial, Franz Kafka
87. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper
88. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes
89. Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre
90. The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich von Hayek
91. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
92. Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener
93. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
94. Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff
95. Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein
96. Syntactic Structures, Noam Chomsky
97. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, T. S. Kuhn
98. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
99. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung [The Little Red Book], Mao Zedong
100. Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B. F. Skinner