Open Thread: Books that Define Your Worldview?
If You Had to Select Just 4, What Would They Be?
I’ve recently seen several Notes in which folks share the four books that represent their worldview. It’s a fascinating question: Can you define or describe your personal philosophy using just four books? Not really, but it offers a fun exercise in trying.
I answered:
Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop
- ’s The Future and Its Enemies
Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica’s Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives
Why these four? I deeply resonate with Douglass’s yearning for liberty and opposition to injustice, to be a self-possessed man. I also find the dual portrayal of work and contemplation depicted in Death Comes for the Archbishop deeply resonant as well—ora, after all, et labora.
Postrel’s work undergirds my own optimism about leaving people free to innovate and develop bottom-up solutions to human problems; beyond that, her title calls back to Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, which represents my views as well.
Finally, that Serbian monk: Elder Thaddeus’s book has done more to shape my spiritual and communitarian outlook than almost any other book. I find his wisdom and gentleness truly inspiring. Whatever maturity I possess—attribute it to my meditating on that book for the last fifteen, or so, years. Also note I still have a long way to go.
But now, for you: If you had to select just four books to represent how you see and engage the world—any genre, any time period—what would they be? Share your four below.
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I haven't made a "Worldview in Four Books" note because I know I would keep editing and swapping out the four. Four authors? That sounds slightly more attainable: Jane Austen, C.S. Lewis, Tolstoy, and George Eliot. Now I don't have to distinguish between Mere Christianity or Perelandra or Narnia as being most formative. A biography of George Muller taught me to pray, and since this is worldview focused, I should fit in Chambers and Spurgeon. Gosh how can I leave off Tolkien or Shakespeare? John Donne or Malcolm Guite? I think about Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Sabina Wurmbrand weekly as a corrective to modern sensibilities of hardship. The color of my imagination was probably shaped by L.M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott more than anyone else. Do you ever graduate from the authors who taught you to notice and feel beauty? Nope, I am terrible at these sorts of arbitrations. Hats off to everyone who manages it.
I'll take the question to mean the four books that have shaped my thinking from childhood:
1. The Bible (of course, I'm a pastor)
2. J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium (once upon a time, I knew it better than the Bible; but if I have to pick just one of his works, it would be "The Lord of the Rings")
3. Will Cuppy's "The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody" (underlying both my sense of humor and my view of history)
4. Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr's "Cheaper by the Dozen" (especially his description of his father, the efficiency expert. That stuck with me so that I'm always trying to figure out how to do things more efficiently.)
I'll probably want to emend this list tomorrow and every day thereafter, but they are definitely works that had a heavy early influence.