The books famous people loved in college.

Christopher Hitchens, columnist, Vanity Fair He who hesitates is lost. If I gave myself any time to reflect, I might come up with Peter Sedgwick's edition of Victor Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary. But to answer the question about "most influential" is really to choose the indelible, and the book I most remember reading between 1967 and 1970 is The Mill on the Floss, borrowed well away from Oxford in a "youth" camp in Cuba. Only Shakespeare and Proust are superior to George Eliot in guessing at the real springs of human motive and in describing the mammalian underlay of social forces. At the time, I may have believed that literature was of less importance than politics, but when I shook off this fatuous illusion I went straight to the Eliot shelf and didn't stop until I had read it all, which I suppose will serve as a paltry definition of influence.