Books that screw up the world?

Peter at NotPC is doing one of those "Top 10 lists" and his particular one is "15 books that will always stick with you". Obviously not library books then , because you have to take those back. For that matter, I'm not sure you can borrow 15 in one go.

Anyway, here's my top 10.

Feel free to make up the other 5:


For pure action, I'd be amazed if the Amazing Spiderman was not on the list. Tough call to limit it to 15 issues though.

In the adventure category, there's the Famous 5, anything where Timmy saves the day really.

Regarding War Time classics, probably Biggles.

Covering the animal kingdom, Finn the Wolfhound is a strong contender as is Watership down.

Reflecting the class struggle, then PG Wodehouse with Bertie Wooster cannot possibly be excluded?

I think in terms of creativity, a little eclectic perhaps, but The Times Cryptic Crossword is always a good read, and you never know how it's going to end.

In terms of extending ones horizons and meeting people, perhaps the white pages, or if one is business minded, the yellow pages edition has a lot going for it.

To cure insomnia, surely Das Kapital, although at a pinch you could just read the John Galt radio monologue (from Atlas Shrugged) backwards. Bloody hell, things that long should have an intermission.

Then there's pure class - the book by that Jane bird. Was it Jane Ayre on the Bronte Burgers? No hang on, I remember now - it's Janes Gun Recognition Guide. Bloody good value, and a real page turner.

And on the very important topic of interplanetary travel, the true stories of John Cater and Deja Thoris living on Barsoom as reported by Edgar Rice Burroughs is useful, especially if you are proficient with a sword and prone to astral travel.

There's 10 essentials just there. Awesome dudes.


I also quite liked Benjamin Wiker's "10 books that screwed up the world, and 5 others that didn't help"


* Why Machiavelli's The Prince was the inspiration for a long list of tyrannies (Stalin had it on his nightstand)
* How Descartes' Discourse on Method "proved" God's existence only by making Him a creation of our own ego
* How Hobbes' Leviathan led to the belief that we have a "right" to whatever we want
* Why Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto could win the award for the most malicious book ever written
* How Darwin's The Descent of Man proves he intended "survival of the fittest" to be applied to human society
* How Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil issued the call for a world ruled solely by the "will to power"
* How Hitler's Mein Kampf was a kind of "spiritualized Darwinism" that accounts for his genocidal anti-Semitism
* How the pansexual paradise described in Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa turned out to be a creation of her own sexual confusions and aspirations
* Why Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was simply autobiography masquerading as science