No guide is needed.

Americans love to be told what to do. "You are what you eat!" sells innumerable quack diet books, just as "You are what you read!" brought us the Great Books, the Five-Foot Shelf, and now this colossal act of hubris: the mind-shaping favorites of a hundred professors, annotated. See them astride Plato, Darwin and Freud. Read what they read and be what they be.

I have no list to submit. I care not for this cargo cult. Books are cheap and readily available. To read is the thing, voraciously and eclectically. No guide is needed. Was Moby Dick more important to me than the latest Len Deighton thriller, or is browsing through the Oxford English Dictionary even more significant? And who should care?

Scientists are often regarded as illiterate oafs, unable to write and unwilling to read, captives of their narrow expertise, deserving candidates for humanists' contempt. Yet, most of us are well-read and can hold our own with historians, literary critics and whatever. Humanists, on the other hand, are often (though not always) scientifically and mathematically inept and proudly so. Our conversations must turn on matters of their concern, not ours. We are disadvantaged because we are compelled by their ignorance to match wits on their territory.

Membership in the community of educated men and women demands competence in science and awareness of its history. Many would dispute this claim. Here, I say, lies one explanation for the decline of American intellectualism. We have strayed from the path set by Franklin and Jefferson, who both admired and appreciated Lavoisier as much as they did Shakespeare.

- Sheldon Glashow, The Harvard Guide to Influential Books, 1986