I've been tagged in the one book meme game.

Here are my picks:

1. One book that has changed your life: Anarchy, State and Utopia, by Robert Nozick. I remember reading this book as a college sophomore with growing excitement: why, the things I felt in my gut actually had intellectual heft and support behind them. People much younger than me will often not realize difficult it was to grow up libertarian in the 1960s and early 1970s.
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No Reason, no Reason Foundation, no Cato Institute, no Free to Choose. Samuelson was the day's economics textbook, and Keynesianism the orthodoxy, in an era when a "conservative" Republican president imposed wage and price controls. Into this came Nozick, handsome, a card-carrying member of the establishment, easy to read, funny, intelligent, blasting statists off the stage. I thought, "Yes. Now I understand."

I wish I could choose more, but it is the one book meme.

2. One Book that You've Read More than Once: Shelby Foote's three volume history, The Civil War: A Narrative. The American Iliad.

3. One Book that You Would Want on a Desert Island: Assuming this means I'll be stuck there for a while, I want something long: "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare."

4. One book that made you laugh: Anything by P.J. O'Rourke. It's hard to pick a favorite, but today, at least, I'll go with Holidays in Hell .

5. One book that made you cry: Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I rarely read fiction, but this is my favorite.

6. One book that you wish had been written: A serious biography of John McCain. All of the biographies so far are fawning hagiographies. McCain is the most fascinating political figure of our time, and deserves a more serious, balanced account.

7. One book that you wish had never been written: Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences. There are so many possibilities, so many books that have been influential, and whose ideas have created misery and destruction when put into practice. Yet one realizes that many really bad books of bad ideas are the product of their times: had they not been written, someone else would probably have come along with a similar book. But I am not sure that anyone else could have equalled Marx, and while I think the Russian revolution would have occured in some form anyway, and probably resulted in some dictatorship anyway, Marx is what made these dictatorships so virulent and enduring and damning. I'll choose the Communist Manifesto over Capital, as it came first.

8. One book you're currently reading: Like many, I tend to have several books going at once. I'll go with Granville, Ohio: A Study in Continuity and Change. What a remarkable little town I live in. The Granville Historical Society had the foresight to commission this work so it would be ready for the town's 200th birthday in 2005.

9. One book you've been meaning to read: About 18 months ago I started Gibbon's classic The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, so I guess this could go in answer to the previous question. But I haven't picked it up in several months and will probably start over when I do. It was great, by the way; what wonderful prose. I just got distracted. As Rufus Fears says, Gibbon never uses one adjective when two will do.

Let's tag David Mayer, Bob Lawson, Frank Stephenson, Professor Bainbridge, and David Frum.