Editor’s Note: Below is an expanded version of a piece that appears in the current issue of National Review.

Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist and political thinker, has been writing for about 65 years, and reading for even longer. In 2018, he penned an intellectual autobiography, which came out in English at the beginning of this year: The Call of the Tribe. I wrote about it for National Review. In this book, Vargas Llosa pays tribute to the writers who influenced him, politically.

Others influenced him in a more literary way. Listen to Vargas Llosa, writing about Flaubert a year ago:

At some point in the last century, I arrived in Paris and that very day bought a copy of Madame Bovary in a bookstore called Joie de Vivre in the Latin Quarter. I stayed up nearly all night reading it and by dawn I knew what kind of writer I wanted to be.

But in the political realm? Vargas Llosa has a Big Seven, devoting a chapter to each of them in The Call of the Tribe. He begins with Adam Smith — then jumps to the 20th century, to hail José Ortega y Gasset, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Jean-François Revel. In the course of his book, Vargas Llosa also pays tribute to others, including George Orwell and Milton Friedman.

Long ago, I asked Charles Krauthammer something like, “How did you come to think the way you do?” He said that, in college, he read Berlin’s Four Essays on Liberty. He thought, This is right. This is true. And he never looked back.

In 1997, when Berlin died, Krauthammer wrote a column of appreciation. “The idea of limited government has triumphed,” he said. “But the moment may not last. The pluralism Berlin championed will be challenged again.”

I enjoy asking people about their influences, political and otherwise. Greg Mankiw, the econ prof at Harvard, said that, when he was young, he read Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. It set him on fire. It struck him as true. He assigns it to his students, along with diverse other readings. Students find their own fires.

Online, I asked readers, “What book or books made an impression on you, or set you on fire? What book or books were key in the formation of your politics, or worldview?” They sent me a variety of responses, long and short. Intellectual and personal (intensely personal). Some of the books are familiar, even canonical; others are obscure.

One man sent me simply a picture of a book cover and the words “Changed my life.” That book is Wisdomkeepers: Meetings with Native American Spiritual Elders, published in 1990. My interest is piqued. “Changed my life” is a powerful statement.

Other readers spoke of different chapters — stages of life, when books hit you, at just the right time. A reader writes,

When I was in college, Letters from a Stoic, by Seneca, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius steered my thinking. They are exactly the sort of book that a young man reads and latches on to in quieter moments. Now that I’m in my mid 30s with kids, another sort of book leaves a strong impression on me — e.g., Laughable Loves, by Milan Kundera.

Another reader writes,

The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, inspired me first to take my Christian faith seriously in high school and second to learn German in college. Both have been immensely rewarding, particularly when the latter comes into contact with the former.

Let us return to Charles Krauthammer’s man, and that of many others. A reader writes,

Isaiah Berlin is worth sticking with for the long haul. I discovered his essays at the age of 30 and they crystallized for me the best and happiest way to think about politics and history. His roots in the Russian tradition give his essays the narrative power we find in the varied writings of Tolstoy and Herzen. A fantastic realism pervades Berlin, and I think of him, and his cautions, whenever the latest shiny thing is presented for our inspection.

And Greg Mankiw’s man (and many others’), Milton Friedman? A reader tells me that Free to Choose, which Friedman wrote with his wife, Rose D. Friedman, “spun me on my ideological axis.” He explains,

As a standard-issue adolescent leftist, I staggered out of college in 1980 knowing to a certainty that socialism was not only the wave of the future but the altogether fitting and proper form of social organization. Ronald Reagan made my skin crawl — an old cowboy actor with a belligerent attitude and a black-and-white understanding of freedom.

Someone gave our reader Free to Choose. He let it sit on the shelf for a long time. One day — “I guess I happened to be at loose ends” — he picked it up, as though handling a dirty diaper.

I’m not sure exactly what I expected to find. Perhaps callous disregard for the downtrodden. Maybe an encomium to the robber barons. What I found was the simplest and best argument for unleashing the creative and productive genius inherent in man. I couldn’t put the book down. Milton Friedman helped me to see the world clearly, and for that I will be eternally in his debt.

Readers may be familiar with the long-running BBC radio show Desert Island Discs. Guests, or “castaways,” name eight recordings they would like to take with them to a desert island. They also get a book and a luxury item. When it comes to the book, the BBC gives them the Bible — or other holy book — and the complete works of Shakespeare. Therefore, they are free to name another book.

Well, many of our readers spoke of the Bible and Shakespeare. But we will “take that as read,” as our British friends say — and move on to Frédéric Bastiat, who in 1850 wrote The Law. A reader says,

My parents had a copy and suggested I read it. I think I was 14 or 15. It was one of the first books that made me look deeply at what a government really was and introduced the idea that force is force and should be used sparingly and wisely and is not a fun tool to mold the world to your liking.

This reader also names The Giver, by Lois Lowry, a dystopian novel for young adults, published in 1993. Then he says,

Influencing me politically, but perhaps more personally, was Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. The book made me realize that a person should be careful to ground oneself outside of politics and not be consumed by it and that politics (and politicians) can easily become an idol in the forbidden Old Testament sense. For a political-science major who was interested in law, this was an important concept to grasp.

Speaking of “interested in law,” a reader says,

To Kill a Mockingbird [the classic novel by Harper Lee]. Ask the lawyers of my generation, and you will find that half of us went to law school because we read that book at age twelve and wanted to become Atticus Finch.

Malcolm Muggeridge had a long, restless, super-productive life. But he titled his autobiography “Chronicles of Wasted Time.” A reader writes,

Just as its contents have stuck with me, its title has as well. As I move well into my later years, I wonder about my own “chronicles.” How much of my time on terra firma have I wasted (sadly, a lot) and how much have I put to reasonably good use? Not sure, but worth pondering. Thank you, Malcolm Muggeridge.

George R. Stewart wrote a science-fiction novel — post-apocalyptic — in 1949: Earth Abides. “This book was required reading in my tenth-grade English class,” writes a reader. “Its themes resonate today, and I reread it every three years or so.” That is a high tribute to a book: repeated readings.

This is amusing — and also, I would say, somewhat touching:

I’m going to submit the first five Blackford Oakes books by William F. Buckley Jr. [These are spy novels, and “Blackie” is WFB’s protagonist, his James Bond, if you will.] I am an engineer (Class of ’79, at Cornell) and loved mysteries, thrillers, and the like. WFB made Oakes a suave, sophisticated engineer — something my classmates and I definitely were not — and a fierce defender of American values. Through these books, I was led to more traditional conservative fare and was fortunate to attend a WFB lecture at Cornell in 1981. I still remember his presentation and willingness to take questions from the audience. Brilliant.

You sometimes hear people say, “This is random.” Well, what about this?

A Random Walk Down Wall Street, by Burton G. Malkiel (1973). It taught me the underrated, staid realities and psychology of how markets and investments really work, especially if you don’t want to lose your shirt.

Professor Malkiel, born in 1932, has been on the faculty at Princeton since 1964.

Another reader has this to report:

Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein, and The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (all three volumes). Those books inspired me to join the Army ROTC when I was in college, and then I served 28 years as an officer, active and reserve.

Many readers cited Heinlein. And Solzhenitsyn (particularly One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich). Many cited Dostoevsky and Victor Hugo (Les Misérables). They also cited Buckley — his books of various kinds — and Paul Johnson (same). They cited Friedrich Hayek (The Road to Serfdom, especially). And Czesław Miłosz — his stunning treatise on intellectuals under dictatorship, The Captive Mind.

Captive minds, closed minds? Several readers brought up The Closing of the American Mind, the surprise bestseller (1987) by Allan Bloom. “This was my ground-zero book,” writes a reader. He continues,

I took note of the debate about it and decided to read it. I was shocked and ashamed at how much my mind had turned to mush. Bloom was right, and I began to examine ideas and beliefs that I had accepted, without thinking.

The impact of Thomas Sowell has been great. Many readers mentioned his books, on economics, sociology, politics, etc. I once asked him, “Is there a book that people should read if they want a kind of Sowell 101? The essential Sowell?” He answered, “It depends on what they’re interested in.” One reader tells me,

It wasn’t until I read Black Rednecks and White Liberals that the whole reality of race in America came into focus. The philosophy department where I worked was discarding the book from its library (along with many ancient classics, regrettably), and I grabbed it because I was intrigued by the unusual and provocative title. What a lucky break!

Here is a fascinating note — even profound:

I’m not sure that I’ve ever had a reading experience that told me, “This is what I believe,” but I can identify three books that, for some reason, gave me a sense of the magic of books and in this way informed my “beliefs” (whatever that means).

Two of those books are by Saul Bellow: the novel More Die of Heartbreak and the collection of “three tales,” as he calls them, Something to Remember Me By. The third book combines a short story and a novella: Franny and Zooey, by J. D. Salinger.

One reader was captured by East of Eden, by John Steinbeck — particularly the idea of timshel, “thou mayest”: “Thou mayest triumph over evil.” And I smiled at what a reader said about Atlas Shrugged, the Ayn Rand novel: “I remember thinking, ‘My heart tells me she’s wrong, but my mind tells me, ‘Hold on, there.’”

A different reader says he ought to have a statement by Gibbon, from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, engraved on the inside of his left forearm. Would he have enough room? “A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against enterprises of an aspiring prince.”

Arthur Lovejoy published The Great Chain of Being in 1933. It is “indispensable for understanding the West,” including our “current crisis,” says a reader. He also says that Aurel Kolnai “should be better known in America,” for “he is among the greatest 20th-century moral and political philosophers.” One such philosopher is among us today: Pierre Manent. Our reader recommends “everything” by him.

Someone else begins his letter with The True Believer, the 1951 work by Eric Hoffer. Our reader says,

I came to this book and writer through a Thomas Sowell column. I’m not sure I have ever read any other book so dense with wisdom and insight on every page.

This reader further mentions Innumeracy, by John Allen Paulos (on mathematical and statistical illiteracy), and The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan (on scientific illiteracy and pseudoscience). He tells us,

I read these books early enough in life that they installed in me very sensitive antennae for BS and fallacious thinking. At least I’d like to think so. To this day, I have nothing but contempt for pseudoscience, the culture of insane conspiracy theories, and statistical illiteracy. Martin Gardner’s classic Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science is in the same category.

Our reader goes on to cite “any George F. Will collection” — and ends his letter by saying,

The influence of fiction may be just as strong, but it is harder to quantify. The effect is indirect or silent, at least if the fiction is good and not didactic. I’ll go with only one novel, and I’ll pick one that is unlikely to be mentioned by anyone else: the 1914 Japanese novel Kokoro (“The Heart of Things,” roughly), by Sōseki Natsume. Once, in college, I stayed up all night in a Denny’s reading this, for a class in modern Japanese history. Read it in one sitting.

What a marvelous experience.

Here is a well-known passage from “Self-Reliance” (Ralph Waldo Emerson): “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion . . .” A reader says,

These lines and so many others from Emerson’s genius gave me the intellectual underpinning to have the courage to ignore peer pressure as a teenager. I could not read those words and give up what I knew to be true just because someone else wanted me to or expected me to.

The reader also lists Emily Dickinson — in particular, her poem “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church.” He says,

Picture a poetry-hating boy sitting in a junior-level American-literature class and the teacher assigns the poetry of this crazy recluse from Amherst, Massachusetts. I was that boy, but one poem’s title caught my attention, because I keep the Saturday Sabbath. I read that poem, and it changed me. I suddenly thought maybe there is something to this poetry thing. I have never stopped loving it since then, and it has never stopped changing me.

The reader ends his letter with a tribute to Louis L’Amour, which made me smile, because Ronald Reagan loved this writer and was mocked for it, regularly. “I know many people belittle his work,” says our correspondent,

but I truly owe so much of who I am to Louis. I suppose that is why some small part of my heart still longs to be a cowboy. But far bigger are the things his characters taught me. I learned to crave education, to work hard, to punch hard and first if I have to. But the best gift Louis gave me was the knowledge of the kind of woman I wanted to spend my life with — a smart, strong woman who would walk beside me, not behind me. And I found her — a woman “to ride the river” with. Thank you to Louis L’Amour.

There was one writer whom my readers mentioned more than any other — George Orwell. For his famous novel, 1984, and his famous novella, Animal Farm, yes. But also for his other books, fictional and nonfictional, and for his essays and articles of various kinds. Here is one remark, standing for many: “My debt to Mr. Orwell is one I gratefully acknowledge and can never repay.” I wish he could know it, and that all of these other writers could know of their readers’ gratitude, somehow. Maybe they do.