So I’ve gotten a couple of challenges or whatever to list the ten books that have most influenced my life. That would require too much thought, including deep thought about the meaning of “influence.” Instead, I’m going to list — in no particular order — authors from whom I regularly and semi-unconsciously “sample.” Sample, we jazz musicians know, doesn’t mean plagiarize. When someone else writes something that’s obviously true or at least rhetorically powerful, and I repeat it, I’m paying homage to the truth about who we are. And I can’t help but think you — if you know what you’re talking about — will immediately pick up on whom and what I’m sampling. I could go and rant about why I hate footnotes and scholarly writing in general.

On the list: It’s all about prose. It’s not that I don’t read (or watch) and enjoy novels, plays, poetry, TV and movies, and so forth, but I don’t absorb their content in the same way. I’m skipping Shakespeare and the Bible, because everyone who thinks and writes in English obviously owes them a lot. And we Catholics know better than to obsess over what the Bible says without some help.

By listing authors and not books, I can spare myself the pain of trying to remember exact titles.

1. Alexis de Tocqueville

2. Pascal

3. Walker Percy

4. Richard Rorty

5. Nietzsche

6. Joseph Ratzinger

7. Aristotle

8. Alexandre Kojeve

9. Leo Strauss

10. George Grant

11. Carey McWilliams

12. John Locke

13. Edmund Burke

14. Solzhenitsyn

15. Havel

16. Hannah Arendt

17. Chantal Delsol

18. Tom Wolfe

19. Roger Scruton

20. Marilynne Robinson

21. Publius

22. John Courtney Murray

23. Orestes Brownson

24. Pierre Manent

25. Mary Nichols

26. James Ceaser

27. Harvey Mansfield

28. Allan Bloom

29. William Alexander Percy

30. Simone Weil

31. Leon Kass

32. Chesterton

33. Delba Winthrop

34. Plato — pretty selectively

35. Aristophanes

36. Tyler Cowen

37. Christopher Lasch

38. Flannery O’Connor

39. James Schall

40. St. Augustine — last but pretty much the opposite of least

Well, I’m going to stop. This list must be criticized for being very white and American and maybe for being insufficiently Founderist. I really do admire African-American writing and am pretty open to what’s true about Buddhism, not to mention American Evangelical Christianity. But I really and truly am trying to tell the truth about what I think I’ve absorbed as debts for telling the truth as I see it.

I don’t agree with either the deep or the ”normative” views of many or most of the above. I’m pretty repulsed by much of what Bloom, Kojeve, Cowen, and Rorty say, for examples. But I have debts nonetheless. To avoid any misunderstanding, let me just conclude by saying that I owe a lot to Strauss and Straussians, while disagreeing radically with what I take to be Strauss’s “bottom line” about who each of us is.

UPDATE: This has excited FACEBOOK and EMAIL chatter. Quickly: I don’t speak Heideggerian or Voegelinese. But I should have included Rousseau, as the brains, after all, behind Kojeve and Bloom, among others. And I believe I said once, and correctly, that Rousseau’s HISTORY is Pascal’s PSYCHOLOGY. 41. Rousseau.