Tyler Cowen writes,

Way back when, I considered the ten books that influenced me most, a list I still stand by. In response, someone asked me to name the books that influenced me, but whose influence I probably was not aware of. Let’s ignore the semi-contradiction in that request and plow straight ahead! Here goes, noting that if memory serves I read most of these between the ages of 10 to 12

Let me play the same game, focusing on what I read around that age. Should I include Baseball Digest and Mad Magazine? I am sure that they had influence. The former led me to Strat-O-Matic baseball, which incented me to work out the probabilities of two dice. Mad was big into exposing hypocrisy–Dave Berg even had a regular feature “When they say ___ what they really mean is _____.”

My chess reading was limited to Fine’s Ideas Behind the Chess Openings. It did not turn me into a chess player. I did not know enough about the midgame to appreciate the opening theory. For the purpose of learning chess, my guess is that it would have been better to start reading about the endgame and work backwards.

Neither did Common Sense at Poker turn me into a poker player. But it was a great book, very well written, with memorable characters: Mouse, the guy who was afraid to bet big. Brill, the sharpster. Guffy, the bluffer who bid up pots. Years later, when I had my Internet business, I thought of VC-backed competitors as Guffy types. They made the pots a lot bigger, and it was expensive to stay in, but our hand was as good as theirs, so it was worth it to call their bluff.

Of the books that Tyler mentions, I read Instant Replay and Guadalcanal Diary. The former was extremely well written, and about ten years ago I ordered a used copy to re-read. The latter I have forgotten, apart from the title. Speaking of sports books, I read Jim Brosnan’s The Long Season, among many others. Percentage Baseball, by Earnshaw Cook, was sabermetrics before Bill James, although Cook could not write anywhere near as well as Bill James. I doubt that I was able to follow Cook’s math, although perhaps the attempt was good for me.

When I was ten, my father was asked to be on a panel judging the best political science books of the year, so we were sent a lot of books by publishers. Two that I remember are The Agony of the GOP, 1964 and a book whose title eludes me that chronicled the run-up to the first world war. We were sub-letting a professor’s house in Princeton, and the professor had really fancy rare edition of The Three Musketeers, which my parents read to me/with me, probably because they were afraid that if I read it myself I would destroy it. I did wreck a lot of other things in the house. Boys do that, you know. They also read with me The Wind in the Willows, which I did not appreciate as much at the time as I have come to appreciate later.

Somewhere around that time I read Churchill’s six-volume history of the Second World War. I probably absorbed the fact that Churchill felt much more relaxed being in charge than trying vainly to convince others in charge of what to do about Hitler before the war started. I also noted his obsession with capital equipment (as I would put it now), such as the rate at which merchant ship tonnage was being sunk by U-boats compared to the rate at which new ships were being built.

I was very loyal to Alexandre Dumas, primarily because I had seen on television the 1939 movie version of The Count of Monte Cristo and been enthralled by the tale of hard-earned revenge. The book, it turns out, ends on a more ambivalent note than the movie, so at that age I did not enjoy the book as much. I wrote a book report on The Scarlet Pimpernel, saying that although I did not like it very much I intended to read other works by Dumas. My English teacher wrote on my book report something to the effect of, “You don’t have to do that, you know.” And so I didn’t. I think that might have been a revelation, that not every book by a given author is equally worth reading.