Pardon my Igerance

Dan Drezner's started an online game of Humiliation, where you have to confess what important books you have never read which are supposed to be related to your areas of expertise. I've read a bit, but I'd have quite a few on my list, including

Most philosophers - Not a word of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, St Augustine, Kant or anybody else, apart from my recent excursion into Foucault; everything else has come through extracts in anthologies or via the work of Leo Straus or Francis Fukuyama.

Marx - not a word, ever, although maybe I should at some point

Angela's Ashes - obviously TB just wasn't rampant enough in the Limerick slums to wipe out Frank McCourt and his brother Malachy whose first book is probably the worst thing I've read in the last decade. Typically of the city on the Shannon, after the book became a bestseller, the city council apparently decided to rebuild the particular slums he described.

The New Testament - I've never read anything apart from the Book of Revelations

Hayek - I tried to read the Road to Serfdom when I was sixteen without success. I'm in no hurry to repeat the experience, although there's now a comic strip version online: Who says you can't be a libertarian if you move your lips while you read?


The World of the Irish Media