Someone suggested having a work of Adorno: I would nominate Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment above all (Minima Moralia runs a close second). Also, how about Gramsci's Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Siegfried Kracauer's The Salaried Masses and Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction?

That is an interesting project, thanks pim 

A

If we may say so, Mr Grew, it does néanmoins appear de temps en temps that you diverge slightly from your model when it comes to his love of punctuation...

OK, only just noticed this infinitely amusing party game.

For worthy influential works you have to have St Augustine of Hippo's Confessions.  The first work in Western, or indeed any, literature to use individual experience in all its muddle and ambiguity as the starting point for understanding life.

Whenever an agony aunt writes or a therapist asks "And how did that make you feel?"  they are only doing so because Augustine got there first.

No George Eliot?  No Jane Austen?  Jane may be too English for international importance, but I have certainly seen translations in Turkish and Italian bookshops.  I suppose it must be Pride and Prejudice, but I have a sneaking tendency to avoid the best known, so perhaps Emma.

Mary Ann Evans aka George Eliot.  Last time I read Silas Marner I was in continuous tears, but I suppose it had better be Middlemarch.

And pim, I am sorry to say Oliver Twist is Dickens at his melodramatic, soppy worst.  Better have Bleak House, Great Expectations or Little Dorrit.  If you want the popular Dickens, Christmas Carol has a lot going for it: Dickens at this best and his worst.

Interesting there's been no Balzac as yet.

O children's books.  Come on, its got to be Alice.

And two works that once upon a time would have been immediates:

Milton Paradise Lost

Bunyan Pilgrim's Progress.


I suspect they are overlooked nowadays because their appeal was their religious cachet, which if anything puts people off.

Whereas I am put off by them espousing the wrong sort of religion.

But Bunyan was a genuine working class republican who never even had much in the way of secondary education.  If you are at all concerned with culture that is not merely those in power, Pilgrim's Progress is the most important book in English.

The violent Calvinism of Bunyan is appalling, although it makes sense in terms of what some (ie Professor Christopher Hill) would call the class struggle.  Although its  tortured nature is far more admirable than the smug self-righteousness of modern American evangelicalism.

But I can't let you get away with describing his prose as tortuous.  Any other C17 writer maybe (Thomas Browne, Launcelot Andrewes, Milton himself) but not the tinker of Elstow.  As I walk'd though the wilderness of this world, I lighted me on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept I dreamed a Dream.

I am completely out of sympathy with the theology, but it inspired my favourite Vaughan Williams opera.

But to be quite honest, I prefer Love in a Cold Climate and The Code of the Woosters any day.  Neither of which would be in any responsible list of top books of all time.