Growing up as a teenager, baseball was my favorite sport, and Bill James appealed to my analytical mind by rationally analyzing baseball. Further, he writes well.
I took economics in college in large part due to Milton Friedman. My first contact with Friedman was reading "Tyranny of the Status Quo," which basically knocks down myths like minimum wage laws helping the poor. Destroying these myths in a very logical matter strongly appealed to me.
Stephen King was a catalyst for me reading an extreme amount of books, simply because his works are enjoyable to read. Thanks to Don for hooking me.
George H. Smith's Atheism: The Case Against God was a huge influence on me. In retrospect, a lot of the ideas in the book are influenced by Ayn Rand. Until Smith came along, I had problems reconciling morality and the absence of religion; Smith via Rand changed that.
Ludwig von Mises' writing I find dry, but his ideas are brilliant.
A student of Mises', Hayek is another giant in political economy. My favorite work is "The Use of Knowledge in Society." A latter work on competing exchange rates, The Denationalization of Money, is also one of my favorites.
