Thursday, January 01, 2026

The Most Influential Books

The Economist magazine, supposedly the most intellectual news magazine, has announced The most influential books of all time:
00:50 - Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
02:54 - A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Wolf
07:00 - Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austin
08:42 - Harry Potter, by JK Rowling
All four written by women.

For comparison, I asked Grok:

The Bible
The Quran
The Republic by Plato
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
1984 by George Orwell
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
I am stunned by the inclusion of silly children's books, and women's books.

I would have included Euclid's Elements, Ptolemy's Almagest, Newton's Principia, Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, Von Neumann's Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, and Bourbaki's Elements of Mathematics.