A couple of weeks ago, I was drawing up a list of books to assign for the coming semester, and, by chance, I came across an old piece on Slate about the most influential books some folks had read in college. Which book would I offer from my own past? No title seemed to suggest itself in a way that didn’t seem the result of a narrow narrative of literary self-fashioning. The more interesting query was what I could offer my students that would make an unforgettable impression on them. And there too I drew a blank, or, more accurately, was faced with many, ambiguous answers. Why shouldn’t literary love also be about the unplanned, the inexplicable, or at the very least, the accidental? In any case, here’s an excerpt from the Slate piece, this one by Christopher Hitchens whose other statements and fulminations these days make less and less sense:

He who hesitates is lost. If I gave myself any time to reflect, I might come up with Peter Sedgwick’s edition of Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary. But to answer the question about “most influential” is really to choose the indelible, and the book I most remember reading between 1967 and 1970 is The Mill on the Floss, borrowed well away from Oxford in a “youth” camp in Cuba. Only Shakespeare and Proust are superior to George Eliot in guessing at the real springs of human motive and in describing the mammalian underlay of social forces. At the time, I may have believed that literature was of less importance than politics, but when I shook off this fatuous illusion I went straight to the Eliot shelf and didn’t stop until I had read it all, which I suppose will serve as a paltry definition of influence.