Recommended Reading: Ten Books That Shaped Your World (UPDATED)

8. Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea by Irving Kristol.

9. One Nation, Two Cultures by Gertrude Himmelfarb.

10. Dangerous Nation by Robert Kagan.

11. 1984.

Yes, there are more than 10 books here. And this excludes a lot, including the books that seem important when you are a young teen, like the Tofflers' Creating a New Civilization or Rand's Atlas Shrugged or Limbaugh's The Way Things Ought to Be, but that turn out to be places where you start, not where you end up. It occurs to me that the books you read between the ages of 13 and 21 turn out to be the most important in your life.

In any case, I'm interested in your list. I'm always looking for new ways to spend money on books. I share Erasmus's motto: "When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes."

Update, 4:31 p.m. Literary editor Philip Terzian shares his picks:

The Book of Common Prayer
Piers Plowman (William Langland)
Collected Poems (TS Eliot)
Seven Men (Max Beerbohm)
Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne)
Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Walter Pater)
Chronicles of Wasted Time: Vol. I, The Green Stick (Malcolm Muggeridge)
Babylon Revisited and other stories (F Scott Fitzgerald)
Culture and Anarchy (Matthew Arnold)
Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son (Wm Alexander Percy)
Absalom, Absalom! (William Faulkner)