Influential books

 Could you make a distinction between a good book — informative, entertaining, well made or widely revered — and a book, however flawed, that changes your life?

I read two or three “biographies” of Eric Hoffer when I was in college. They weren’t really biographies. They were retellings of Hoffer’s own stories about his life, which were marvelous in spirit though not true in fact. A biography that is not factually accurate fails at the foundations. I’d say it’s not really a biography.

But I came away with this idea: Hoffer earned a living, first as a migrant worker and then as a longshoreman, all the while devoting himself to studying questions that interested him. I was young then, but he seemed to be wealthy in a way I wanted to count wealth.

I was a student, and I knew some graduate assistants who were studying important questions, but they were questions that interested their professors, rather than questions that interested them. I also knew some professors who had interesting questions they wanted to study, but they were mainly grading papers and attending meetings. I didn’t know whether there were any people out there, other than Hoffer, who were studying the questions that interested them. 

I was perhaps easily influenced. But finding a way to study questions that interested me seemed like an important part of a good life.

• Source: I’m not sure this half-baked idea has a source. Many of the notes in this online collection are about influence, including people and books that have influenced me. But I recently picked up Will Schwalbe’s Books for Living; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017, which raises questions about how books influence us.