THE BOOK WHICH EVERYONE SHOULD READ??

The Cultural Tutor is am amazing blog with text and music which comes in every Friday. Its latest issue asked a simple question - which book should everyone read?. The obvious answer is The Bible or the Koran - ideally with Christians reading the second book and Muslims the first.

But its not just religion which separates people – it’s also AGE. My younger self had books whose importance I recognised (listed here) - a few of which I find on rereading don’t impress eg Social Science as Sorcery (1972). And my older self lacks the memory to do justice to some of the books from the new millennium, some of which are covered in the above list. I suspect many readers of the Cultural Tutor blog will as a result mention books they have recently read. But first I need to indicate how I make my judgement ie what criteria I use in measuring impact. That’s not actually all that easy to divulge – I suppose it’s some sort of combination of

- perennial wisdom

- causing us to look at the world in a different way

- good writing

- a sense of wry humour

- humility

It’s not surprising that the books I remember are from the early 1960s – for example EH Carr was a favourite, not just his “Twenty Years’ Crisis” (1946) which introduced me to Realism but What is History? EH Carr (1961) which I vividly remember for its story of how you caught fish (facts) depended on the type of reel you used and the spot you chose to fish at. Peter Berger was another writer who made an impact – first for his prescient postmodern analysis in The Socal construction of Reality P Berger and T Luckman (1966) and then Pyramids of Sacrifice – political ethics and social change (1975)

More recently, writers such as Francis Fukuyama, David Graeber, Michael Greer, Roman Krznaric, Kate Rawarth, Wolfgang Streeck and Yanis Varoufakis have also impressed . One book, however, stands out for the variety of explanations it offers for the difficulties we have in agreeing and acting on global warming – viz Why We Disagree about Climate Change by Mike Hulme (2009)

But, at the end of the day, I tend to fall back on Bertrand Russell whose Sceptical essays still delight although published in 1925