Robert McCrum of the Guardian recently blogged about “literary humiliations” – classic books that well-read people have never gotten around to. Despite a Cambridge education and long career as a book editor and critic, he confessed to skipping George Eliot’s Middlemarch. So he’s finally taking it on his August vacation. “It’s long been my ambition to devote a period of sustained reading to this great English novel – and now that moment has come. No turning back.”
McCrum added: “Now I’m inviting readers of this blog to play Humiliation and to confide the books they deeply regret never having read.”
OK, I’ll play. I’ve been focused on the business category for 15 years but still haven’t read some of the most acclaimed and influential business books, the ones we use as benchmarks and role models. My 7 biggest regrets (all sitting on my shelf, taunting me) are…
Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart
In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clay Christensen
Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove
Why We Buy by Paco Underhill
The HP Way by David Packard
Maybe I’ll take one of them on my vacation, too. On the other hand, I’ve never read Middlemarch either.
For a great discussion of what makes a business classic, check out The 100 Best Business Books of All Time by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten.
There are several on my must-read list this year. But my top one is definitely LIAR’S POKER, can’t believe I haven’t gotten around to it yet!
Ditto on all of those. And I feel like I should really read THINK AND GROW RICH–I see that on the subway just about every week.
I echo Maureen’s remark concerning LIAR’S POKER, but I must confess to an even more egregious sin: not reading one of Portfolio’s own benchmarks – THE SMARTEST GUY’S IN THE ROOM.
Jack Covert has been sharing one of his 100 Best Business books each month on Portfolio’s podcast, and each time my reading list gets longer and longer. One recent addition to my list: anything by Po Bronson, thanks to this segment:
http://us.penguingroup.com/static/pages/publishersoffice/radioroom/0110/tbb/bee_school.html#vmix_media_id=12560420
Nick, you’re not the only one. I am equally guilty of not having read THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM. I also haven’t read FREAKONOMICS by Dubner and Leavitt.
That being said, I subscribe to the “better-late-than-never” philosophy of great books. I didn’t read TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD until last summer.
From personal experience, once you go back to them, you are amazed at how good the classics are. To Kill a Mockingbird is even more stunning now. I read it for the first time last year. Business books…Michael Porter comes to mind.
Far too many, but I’ll say PERSONAL HISTORY by Katharine Graham. Mr. Covert knows how to pick a biography, and I know it’s one of his favorites.
It seems to me that the more we read, the more we realize how much we have yet to read. And rather than being able to check a book off “the canon” when we’ve finished it, most books end up leading to other books, expanding that list.
That said… if you would just stop publishing books for a minute, maybe we could all catch up! (Please don’t stop.)
My choice would be Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s Men and Women of the Corporation. I pay a lot of attention to the presence of women authors in the business book genre but have yet to read this significant contribution to the discussion.