Special Requests: 10 Books Edition

A lot of you asked me to participate in the 10 Books meme in last Friday's special requests thread.  I hope you guys won't be annoyed by this answer, which is a bit of a dodge.  I just finished up a piece for The Atlantic arguing that influence isn't just about the books that affected one's reading or thinking.  It starts like this:

When I was 20 years old, I marched off to get arrested in a pair of gray slacks and a gray sweater that didn't match and didn't suit me. I certainly believed in the reasons and 14 of my friends and I were going to walk into the Yale Admissions Office, sit down, refuse to leave, and proceed to sing folk songs as loudly as possible. Reforming the university's financial aid system seemed like a broadly good idea. But when it came to getting an arrest record for the cause, my decision can be laid at the door of Jean Merrill, a then-82-year-old children's book author who'd never met me in her entire life.

As the "ten books" meme has swept the Internet, prompting writers to declare the importance of everything from Peter Singer's Writings on an Ethical Life to J.M. DeMatteis' Kraven's Last Hunt entry in the Spider-Man line in the development of their thinking, I've found my thoughts turning frequently to Merrill's The Pushcart War. It's not that her satiric portrait of urban machine politics and corporate titans—complete with progressive, pretty celebrities, poker-playing politicians, and truck company owners, plus a children's crusade inspired by a jailed peddler—is the best piece of children's literature ever written. But the memory of a fictional flower-seller and the influence of his arrest was one of the things that helped me say yes when my friends needed one more person to make the sit-in successful.The Pushcart War was one of the books that pushed me, a terminal bookworm, out into the world, that made me not just think, but act.

 I hope y'all like it; this was something I'd been working on even since before the request, and that I care about a lot.  I realize it's a dodge.  But it'll get at least some of my influential books out there for you.