Books which have influenced me most

With encouragement from Tyler Cowen, here's my list. "Influential" to me means it has changed the way I understand the world. In some cases, that happened fast. In others, slowly as I reread. In some cases, both.

To elaborate on something Tyler eluded to -- in preparing this list my awareness of how much it was people rather than books that influenced me was heightened.

I'm also grouping a few in one because their length was physically limited by technology in a way that makes the group comparable in length to only a portion of others on the list.

1. Galatians (what does it mean to be free?), 1 John (what is love?), Job (why evil? why not nihilism?), 1 Samuel (for the stories about David).
2. Feynman Lectures, especially the lecture from volume II on principal of least action.
3. Conceptual Physics by Hewitt, which I studied over the summer in seventh grade and credit as much as any book for my interest in physics.
4. Problematics of Jurisprudence by Posner, which I read the summer before law school. Posner sets the bar for intellectual courage.
5. The Common Law by Holmes, which led me to understand law as a complex adaptive system long before I had heard the terms.
6. The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, Zwieg edition, which gave me the theory I needed to understand corporate finance after I had learned how to prepare and read financial statements.
7. Buffett's letters to his shareholders as collected by Cunningham, which together with Charlie Munger's almanack (honorable mention) took my understanding of Graham's theory to a point where I could connect it up with mathematical principles I learned studying physics.
8. Waddell & Bodek on the Rebirth of American Industry, which awakened me to the way in which accounting rules are responsible for commercial culture.
9. The Happiness Hypothesis by Haidt, which gave me a reason to start reading psychology and sociology literature for the first time.
10. Creativity by Csikszentmihalyi, which gave me the last few puzzle pieces I needed to connect up the many domains of knowledge I have studied formally and informally (physics, law, economics, psychology, sociology) into an integrated whole.

Comments

[I]

I read most of these and I would have listed many of tem as my top 10 as well. What caught my eye was #9. I had a identical experience with "Stumbling on Happiness" by Gilbert.