Antique Way

Books Read in College That Made a Difference

What's the most influential book you read in college? What made you slam down your caf谷 au lait and set out to conquer the world?

Judd Apatow, writer-director, The 40-Year-Old Virgin

Having only gone to college for a year and a half, I didn't read enough books to remember an impactful one. The books I read while I was a dropout that inspired me are A Death in the Family by James Agee and A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley.

David Brooks, columnist, The New York Times

This is going to sound awfully pompous (but, hey, I went to the University of Chicago), but the two most important books I read in college were Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and Hobbes' Leviathan. I loathed both books at first reading, but they both explained how little we can rationally know about the world around us and how much we have to rely on habits, traditions and intuition. I've been exemplifying our ignorance on a daily basis ever since.

Gish Jen, author, The Love Wife

Robert Fitzgerald's translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey changed my life 每 as did, I should say, Fitzgerald himself, my favorite professor. Could translation really make that much difference? And did Homer really come to us through normal humans who played tennis and cracked jokes and wore berets? Suddenly literature was much less remote; suddenly it was something that involved, in one way or another, writers. What an idea!

Chris Matthews, host, Hardball

A Thousand Days by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Kennedy was assassinated in November of my freshman year at Holy Cross. I watched Walter Cronkite declare him dead on a dormitory television. I rarely read a book in those years that I didn't have to. I studied most of the time. I would read the Schlesinger book at evening's end. He is a beautiful, sweeping and grand writer of the William Manchester sort.

Peter Mehlman, writer, Seinfeld

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong blew me away. Yes, it was well-written, funny and very instructive about the lives of wealthy people. But the observations on sex kept me from reading the books I was assigned. With absolutely no attribution to Ms. Jong, I quoted lines to girls and sounded so evolved. .

Daphne Merkin, author, Enchantment

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. It remains for me an unutterably prescient book about so many things: the impact of celebrity on earthlings; the yearning for some kind of transcendental meaning in the midst of a secularly ordained universe; the possibility of romantic love even for the inveterately cynical; the limitations of romantic love, even for the nuttily hopeful; the temptations and arrogance of outsiderism; the pathos of emotional illness and physical illness.

Sam Tanenhaus, editor, New York Times Book Review

When I was a sophomore in college I decided to read Bellow. I had dragged myself through Seize the Day, an assignment in high school AP English, but hadn't liked it much. The story was so dreary, and the hero so pathetic and doomed. But all the culture signals were beaming Bellow, Bellow, so I tried again. I started with Herzog, which, frankly, I didn't get. To paraphrase Dylan, I knew something was happening, but I didn't know what it was. Then I read Mr. Sammler's Planet and was simply overwhelmed 每 the philosophical depth and brilliance on every page, the way the streets and living rooms of New York were so pulsatingly alive. I liked a lot of contemporary fiction 每 Mailer, Roth, Updike, in particular 每 but Bellow was the first contemporary who made me realize the age I was living in could be evoked with the same rich dense saturation of Balzac's Paris, Tolstoy's St. Petersburg, or Joyce's Dublin. At any rate, I was blown away and reported all this in babbling ecstasy to my English professors, who plainly thought I was out of my mind. To them, I think, Bellow was a kind of freak 每 not a literary writer at all.

Ricky Van Veen, editor, collegehumor.com

High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess by Charles Fleming. This glimpse into the ridiculous world of Hollywood pushed me in the "entertainment-career-after-college" direction more than any guidance counselor ever could. I'd find myself stopping every few pages and reading passages aloud to my roommate. "Wait, he paid a hooker just to watch TV with him?" "Yeah, dude."