Ask HN: What book changed your life?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30734709

by tomrod • 4 years ago

393 518 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What book (or books) changed your life? I'm looking for inspiration and would love to hear what and how you were impacted.

przeor• 4 years ago

How Life Imitates Chess Book by Garry Kasparov

This book explained me concepts of - material - time - and quality

in chess and business life.

labarilem• 4 years ago

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

Introduced me to the beauty of logic and its limits. Also gave me solid mathematical thinking foundations.

Pro tip: Try listening to Bach while you read about Bach.

throwaway17772• 4 years ago

Honestly don’t get the hype about this one.

analog31• 4 years ago

As a high school student, I had all sorts of interests: Math, science, electronics, music, computers. GEB reinforced my interest in math as being more than just useful (for physics and electronics), and led me to choose math as my college major. Not surprisingly, getting interested in math as an end unto itself was what got me good enough at it, to actually make it useful for those other things, and I ended up doing my graduate work in physics.

Micoloth• 4 years ago

+1, Same here. Like, I'm not even happy about it, I could have done something very different if i didn't read that book. "It blew my mind at an impressionable age" is a comment I read online about this book, very accurate!

AlphaGeekZulu• 4 years ago

Yes, the same for me - this book was the most influential in my life!

I spent three years of my life reading this book from cover to back three times and it was a different experience every time.

That was in 1985 and in Germany, during my education as a typesetter. I was 20, into computers (ZX81, C64), the Internet was still years away and this book just mesmerized my brain.

The German version of GEB is also a typographical marvel (printed by Klett-Cotta, fonts Syntax and Weidemann) - much nicer than the US version.

rg1118• 4 years ago

Same goes for me. Changed my outlook towards any intellectual matter or pursuit.

aaronharnly• 4 years ago

+1. After reading this is ninth grade, my lifelong trajectory of interest in computers, neuroscience, and the philosophy of mind was set.

vesche2• 4 years ago

I came here to post this, and look it's rightfully already present here. This book completely changed how I think about consciousness and existence.

mmazing• 4 years ago

I picked out GEB randomly at a bookstore like 20 years ago. The cover grabbed my attention and I started flipping through it and was instantly curious. My mom ended up buying it for me, on Valentine's Day I believe, ha.

Read the whole thing pretty quickly after that, I couldn't put it down.

I quite like your description of what you got out of it, it's been a pretty fuzzy concept to me for a long time but "the beauty of logic and its limits" is a great way to put it. :)

I need to re-read it.

hnfong• 4 years ago

This. This book is so much more than math. It's about using multidisciplinary approach to tackle a series of deep philosophical problems. The math-inclined crowd here unsurprisingly sees inspiration from the math perspective (which is a perfectly fine and valid view), but there's also a lot of ideas from art (Escher), music (Bach), and classic philosophy (both from Western and Eastern traditions!), not to mention as a book written in the 1970s, it is (AFAICT) well-informed in the a state of art theory of computation and bioinformatics.

The sheer breadth and depth of understanding from the author blew my mind away. I suspect my attitude towards cross-disciplinary learning was probably reinforced by reading the book.

sesteel• 4 years ago

I think what you get out of this book really depends on where you are intellectually when you approach it. I read this book decades ago while in college and it helped me conceptualize a recursive universe; thus, how complexity comes from simplicity. It was a mind blowing experience where I wasn't able to sleep for days as my mind raced to make sense of it all.

Ultimately, the ideas I formulated while reading this book set the foundation for my understanding of the universe in general. It gave me a mental model that has served me well for over 20 years and freed my mind to wonder about other things.

ralphc• 4 years ago

Yes, this is the book that got me interested in computer science.

jesuslop3• 4 years ago

+1 for influenced. A charismatic high school philosophy teacher recommended it to us and it prompted me to read G's collected works they had in my uni library. Came up liking more the set theoretic bit than the incompleteness conundrum.

captn3m0• 4 years ago

Previous threads:

- 2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2147034

- 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6975638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6413600

- 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10914079

- 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17168136

- 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22011867

- 2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24361132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356908

izzygonzalez• 4 years ago

Thank you!

tootie• 4 years ago

Kurt Vonnegut probably had the biggest impact on me. Mother Night and Timequake in particular. Two quotes I use all the time:

"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."

And

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

JKCalhoun• 4 years ago

"Mother Night" is excellent. I have not read the other, thanks, will do.

yesenadam• 4 years ago

His Sirens of Titan had a huge impact on me as a teen, the first novel I really loved. Then Breakfast of Champions. I'll try those two, thanks.

Gualdrapo• 4 years ago

One of the recommended lectures on a logic class I had at my school, which was run by missionary nuns from Minnessota (and the teacher himself was catholic), was Carl Sagan's The demon-haunted world. It turned me into an atheist.

foogazi3• 4 years ago

me too - but it also turned me toward a love of science and inquiry that I had missed out on

jhbadger2• 4 years ago

Yes, In a lot of ways Sagan was a forerunner of the "New Atheists" like Dawkins and Dennet, but I think The Demon-Haunted World was more effective because it didn't go the confrontational "religion is evil" route rather than just gently point out the flaws in the religious world view and so could actually convince some people who weren't already atheists.

neilpanchal• 4 years ago

Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

And not a book, but a documentary – The War by Ken Burns.

BoumTAC• 4 years ago

Basic Economics from Thomas Sowell.

It show me there is another world if you go outside socialism and that socialism has a lot of bad consequence that are never talked about

profunctor3• 4 years ago

What bad consequences of socialism are never talked about?

tomrod20• 4 years ago

I'm assuming the grandparent commentor is confusing communism with democratic socialist states? The Scandinavian states look pretty nice overall.

throwaway17772• 4 years ago

Must depend where you live. In the US there is almost no one who believes in socialism outside of California and DC.

lovingCranberry• 4 years ago

A classic: How to Win Friends & Influence People - D Carnegie

Markoff• 4 years ago

this should be top comment

though honestly I was more influenced by movies than books, I guess strongest influence on hour I vote the world around me had Fight Club, Falling Down and American Beauty plus the car speech in Se7en and Collateral as well, Taxi Driver as well

myegorov2• 4 years ago

Painting and Experience in 15th Century Italy by Michael Baxandall

profunctor3• 4 years ago

This is unusual in these types of threads. Could you expand on this answer? Why and how did it change your life?

myegorov2• 4 years ago

I can trace some drastic changes in my own life's trajectory to this book. Baxandall treats a familiar subject in starkly unfamiliar terms. Putting it in context but not making it any more relatable as it would be in a work of fiction or scholarly microhistory. Rather he works out some fundamental relations, social networks, kin structures, schooling and tribal knowledge, higher cortical functions etc. from the basic principles. The canonical works of art (lesser known but no less striking when presented through this lens in his Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany) served me as a vehicle to self discovery.

s0teri0s2• 4 years ago

Steven Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" and the sequel "Enlightenment Now" briefly helped to restore my faith that humanity is not entirely an evil virus best gone the way of the dinosaurs. Don't get me wrong though, these books are not easy reads. In the first one Pinker does spend an inordinate amount of time cataloging humanity's centuries of evils against itself before he can make the case that we're doing better now, so don't consider these to be light reads.

starkd• 4 years ago

Pinker is still an excellent writer. One of those writers its a pleasure to read. But I have not read that particular book.

crashingintoyou• 4 years ago

Going to assume that your use of "briefly" there is preceding your attempt at a short synopsis, rather than that your views have shifted again.

Personally I'm depressingly cynical when it comes to Pinker's views, looking at, e.g., https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1496685550241292293 and then thinking about how now, given modern weaponry one man's decision could basically destroy all life on earth. A few billion dead in a single conflict would be all it'd take to really mess up Pinker's trend line.

s0teri0s2• 4 years ago

Sorry, I meant to indicate that my views have shifted again. I am not particularly sanguine about our collective future.

jhbadger2• 4 years ago

I have sympathy for what he is trying to do (actually put data on what people traditionally just use "gut feeling" for) but yes, it is the sort of thing that might sound sadly misguided depending on how things turn out, much as how late 19th century writers like Spencer suggested that the trend of the 19th century suggested that things like war and famine were fading away not predicting the world wars or the famines of Stalin and Mao in the 20th.

SantalBlush2• 4 years ago

Please tell me the chart in that twitter thread adjusts for deaths per capita. It looks like it doesn't.

beezle• 4 years ago

The Compass of Zen by Seung Sahn. I was a much angrier and stressed person prior to reading it.

Not perfect today by any means but far, far better. And no, I'm not a "practicing" zen buddhist or anything close - the book just sort of reset my mind and outlook on life and dealings with others.

profunctor3• 4 years ago

Exterminate all the brutes by Sven Lindquist

It got me into reading about history and taught me to be more critical of media.

franze• 4 years ago

Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows

shantnutiwari• 4 years ago

The Gita-- Eknath Easwaran's translation is the best

Gilgamesh--Stephen Mitchell's translation

Dear Author, you need to quit by Becca Syme-- a book for fiction writers, it opened my eyes to the fact that I dont need to follow the advice of "experts", thats its okay to write what I love and keep my writing a fun hobby. I only recently read this, and it allowed me to restart writing after a 2-3 year gap.

rg1118• 4 years ago

Easwaran's translation is the best

If you want a balanced, philosophical, explanatory, and a direct version, go with the translation by Servapalli Radhakrishnan. SR was an educator, philosopher, and the first Vice President of free India. He later became the President of India.

As far as I know Hacker News and the people that dwell on it, this translation [0] will be an ideal fit.

[0] https://harpercollins.co.in/product/the-bhagavad-gita/

foogazi3• 4 years ago

Peak by Erickson and Pool

There is no innate talent - it takes practice and repetition to build those capabilities

Scary

cinntaile2• 4 years ago

It's better to believe this because it motivates to practice but it's definitely more nuanced than claiming there is no innate talent.

foogazi3• 4 years ago

Any sources to explore the nuances ?

rg1118• 4 years ago

I am vert certain that,

    talent == nature + nurture

And in my opinion and understanding, talent is at least 51% nurture. But, this is what I think.

dxbydt• 4 years ago

Martin Gardner’s “The Whys of a philosophical scrivener” influenced my 20s & 30s. Looking back, should have been exposed to it much earlier, perhaps in my early teens.

oxff• 4 years ago

Blood Meridian.

wj• 4 years ago

I think it is a combination of the book and where you were in your life when you read it. For me:

Cosmos was such a departure from anything else I read for school or for pleasure. It transformed my love of reading into a love of learning.

On the Road gave me wanderlust and made me want to move beyond my bubble and see the world.

coding-saints• 4 years ago

My book is in context of changing career over to software engineer... "SOFT SKILLS" by John Somnez. Not sure if there's any alternative today for self taught people, but this book released right when I had started obtaining real work. Obviously just my personal experience.

kradeelav• 4 years ago

"The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching" - Thich Nhat Hanh

It's not overly spiritual, but there's a relaxing, reassuring, thoughtful, and un-judging sense of peace that permeates this books. Brought me out of a really dark place when I was looking for reasons to keep existing.

rg1118• 4 years ago

"What the Buddha Taught" by Walpola Rahula is an extremely good book.

It limits itself only to direct teachings of Buddha, and it explains the core concepts and teachings of Buddhism by explaining everything simply.

The author is a revered scholar and his style of writing is excellent.

dinom• 4 years ago

https://mises.org/library/anatomy-state

DonHopkins4• 4 years ago

I'm sorry to hear that book changed your life. My sincere condolences to your family and friends.

cagey• 4 years ago

downloaded, thanks!

oriettaxx2• 4 years ago

Rothbard regards the state as a predatory entity. It does not produce anything but rather steals resources from those engaged in production.

wow!!

downloaded, thank!

oriettaxx2• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard

wrycoder• 4 years ago

Try Bastiat, The Law.

About 75 pp. ca. 1850.

thebillywayne• 4 years ago

Aion - Carl Jung

lbotos• 4 years ago

It's trite but Crucial Conversations.

I think the key is that you have to read it when you are trying to collaborate with someone and you can't seem to communicate. In that moment, the guidance is a serious level up. If read outside of that context you'll say "well, yeah, sure, duh." In situ, it will help you better communicate (speaking and listening).

tomrod20• 4 years ago

I'll check it out!

karmelapple2• 4 years ago

Might be trite, but it’s a book I’ve been meaning to read for awhile - thanks for the reminder to get a copy, which I just did!

cyode• 4 years ago

It's been a few years since I read this (when I briefly considered switching from software engineering to management) and the one thing that stuck is the advice to "start with heart" during your crucial conversations.

Trite indeed, but it's not a bad phrase to have bouncing around in your head before you have to deliver critical feedback or resolve an interpersonal conflict. Never forget you're talking to a fellow human.

ArthurDevNL• 4 years ago

Maybe a bit more niche, but these two have been real eye openers. The Book of Why - Judea Pearl. A very down to earth book about causality and related concepts. How Emotions are Made - Lisa Feldman Barrett. Emotions make a lot more sense after reading her book.

tomrod20• 4 years ago

Book of Why was a solid recent catalyst for me. Along with Cunningham's Causal Infefence: the Mixtape

kentf• 4 years ago

Age of Spiritual Machines. Made me want to be a software engineer.

ericfrazier3• 4 years ago

Isaac Asimov's Guide To The Bible. An agnostic atheist historian analyzes the history of every line of every book in the bible. Asimov is a good writer and he makes the bible a fun read.

OnlyMortal• 4 years ago

He was a fantastic writer.

code_runner• 4 years ago

This sounds super interesting. Did it have any impact on your own beliefs?

ericfrazier3• 4 years ago

Like Asimov I am an agnostic atheist and was so when I read this work. The interesting thing about his Guide To The Bible is there is no snarkiness. He examines it from a historical perspective giving the factual historical accuracy of each line based on what the historical records actually show from the time. Plus, he was a language expert and the background information he provides in his book on how some of the words were translated from Hebrew to Latin and then to English, etc., is stunning. If anything, this book furthered my agnostic atheism.

yucky• 4 years ago

agnostic atheist

I don't think I've seen these words used together. I've always understood the difference to be that an atheist is as sure in his beliefs as the religious zealot, each with the same amount of proof backing their opinions up. An agnostic realizing this lack of proof simply says "I don't know".

issa3• 4 years ago

I've always thought the words were essentially identical. An atheist or an agnostic can be sure that the God of Abraham doesn't exist and also be sure that the world doesn't ride on the back of a turtle. But both agnostic and atheist would be open to changing their minds if there was new evidence of either.

sn93• 4 years ago

Gnosticism and theism are orthogonal and can be mixed and matched.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_atheism

parksy2• 4 years ago

Atheism is a rejection, non-acceptance, or indifference to theism, which boiled down to its essence is just a non-acceptance of deities being the creator or essence of reality. One can be atheist and hold hard-line rationalist views about the nature of reality, but one can also have spiritual beliefs and be atheist.

Agnostics believe that in some way, metaphysical intelligences are involved in the creation or fabric of the universe, but the very nature and depth of this involvement is in varying degrees indecipherable, unknown, and not-yet-known. Agnosticism doesn't require either the acceptance or rejection of theism.

Put together it technically means the person doesn't believe in a theistic god but holds agnostic views about broader metaphysical concepts.

More colloquially I've noticed a lot of people use the atheist agnostic / agnostic label interchangeably to indicate they haven't made their mind up one way or the other, but it's possible to be either atheist agnostic or theist agnostic.

ericfrazier3• 4 years ago

Agnostic atheist: Someone who lacks belief in a specific religion or god but doesn't rule out the possibility of those religions or gods being true and real. They don't personally believe but aren't egotistical enough to speak in absolutes regarding the unknown.

miguelrochefort• 4 years ago

Getting Things Done - David Allen

injb• 4 years ago

Them: Adventures With Extremists by Jon Ronson.

skilled• 4 years ago

I think the only book I can recall having a direct impact on my conscious awareness was The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle[0].

The book is very easy to read and quite enjoyable with everything that it includes. I definitely recommend to check it out.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Power-Now-Guide-Spiritual-Enlightenme...

ChrisClark4• 4 years ago

I was very skeptical about this book, and even while reading along I'd get the feeling of "uh, this is way out there wacko", but I decided to just take it at it's word and follow along.

And now I am able to briefly enter a state of complete acceptance and feel pure love flowing through me, like the perfect hug from a perfect being that understands me in every way. The first time I actually teared up a bit, the feeling of being accepted the way I was with no judgement.

It could be God, it could be "collective consciousness", it could be me just tricking my brain into releasing endorphins (and I'm leaning towards that explanation). But the result is amazing, it has seriously helped me with anxiety, fear, self hatred, etc.

tomrod20• 4 years ago

This state of being is a focus of Sam Harris' Waking Up book, and one he discusses in some of his initial podcast episodes. The beatific state achievable by meditation, deep prayer, or psychedelics sounds very therapeutic.

Note I'm not a Sam Harris acolyte, but I do appreciate his logic-first approach to understanding the world, the mind, current events, and life generally.

systemsignal• 4 years ago

Did you have to practice to achieve this or just from reading the book?

pksebben• 4 years ago

It's the God-focus that immediately turned me off to Eckhart. I've had plenty of people recommend him, and own a copy of the power of now, but I can't get past the feeling that there's a hidden agenda. I'm all about being present and experiencing the world through different lenses - I like new ideas and I'm open to thinking differently, but that higher power thing just puts every synapse I have on high alert.

walkhour• 4 years ago

Thank you for sharing!

trts• 4 years ago

I can remember having a similar experience the first time I read it. Although I saw value in it, it seemed weird. I later recommended it to people who found it just too bizarre or radical to get through.

Coincidentally I just finished the audiobook again today. I couldn't count how many times that makes. With all other things that seemed significant to me, they mostly fell by the wayside of my changing experiences or perspectives. The Power of Now is the only book that has seemed _more true_ every time I've read it, and at every stage of my life.

It's lucky that Eckhart is alive to narrate the audiobooks, as his voice almost in and of itself conveys the meaning of his writing.

I am glad it helped you. Truly it is the most life-changing book I've read.

septerr• 4 years ago

Same. And I recommend the audio book over the print. The format of presentation in the audio book and hearing Eckhart himself talk makes a big difference.

carabiner• 4 years ago

I liked PON but it did seem to fall under the "thanks I'm cured" or "happiness is a choice" school of personal development. It works for some people, maybe those who sometimes fall under a bad mood once in a while, but doesn't do much for real mental illness. It's like telling a lifelong alcoholic that drinking is a choice or an overweight person that eating is just a choice. How do you stay on that horse if you fall off it nearly every waking hour?

StopDarkPattern• 4 years ago

How to tell someone is trying to trash something. Unnecessary abbreviations. Its literally everywhere. The Power of Now is a transformational book and is extremely enlightening. Everyone should read it.

jayavanth• 4 years ago

Same! As you mentioned: "What is my next thought going to be?" was my trigger as well.

If this book seems too woo-woo for some, or the term God triggers you, you should check out a book called Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Here are other meditations that leads me into the present moment:

   - Am I alive?

   - Do nothing for 30-60 mins

   - Who am I?

   - What do I know for certain?

leobg5• 4 years ago

Same here. First time I tried to read it, I literally smashed it angrily in the floor. But I came back to it a while later. And then it clicked. I read many more books by “E.T.” after that, and also loved his audio lectures (audiobooks, YouTube, Eckhart Tolle TV). That was a while back, though. Ten years or so.

Those who enjoy Eckhart will probably also enjoy Osho. His talks had a similar effect on me. With Osho, it is helpful that he is no longer around. So it’s easier to look past the cultish aspects of his person.

throwaway743• 4 years ago

Manufacturing Consent and Notes From The Underground

johngo54• 4 years ago

Not so much a life changer but certainly reshaping the way I look at things, the way I judge things, and the way I let things ruin my day:

'The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck' by Mark Manson

The book is full of examples and while reading, you go "hey, that's a bit like my friend X", or "hey, that sounds like my Uncle Y". And then, when Mark describes certain personality traits, you think, "hole smoke, that's ME!"

nicbou5• 4 years ago

I couldn’t get far because I don’t like how he writes.

I found The Subtle Magic of Not Giving a Fuck to be a lot better. The sample is enough to get the point: you can apply Marie Kondo’s method to obligations that don’t spark joy.

mcrittenden• 4 years ago

Can you provide a link or author name? I can’t seem to find that.

fhkatari• 4 years ago

Factfulness by Hans Rosling

hflier• 4 years ago

You might never find a shorter book that will turn your worldview upside down. Even if not, the first hand stories of Hans Rosenberg are a great read.

tomrod20• 4 years ago

Interesting! I'll be looking at this one soon.

RubyRidgeRandy• 4 years ago

Surprised not to see Man's search for meaning on here. It's a great book about life from a holocaust survivor. It's one of those books that definitely stays with you for a while. I like to reread it every few years.

DonHopkins4• 4 years ago

Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling

Published April 1987 by MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262200608.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cellular-automata-machines

http://books.google.com/books?id=HBlJzrBKUTEC&printsec=front...

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/44522568_Cellular_au...

https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM...

joeman1000• 4 years ago

On this tangent, I want to recommend the Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker. Rucker did a lot of work on cellular automata in his day.

DonHopkins4• 4 years ago

I mentioned and quoted Rudy's wonderful work with the CAM6, which also inspired me a lot, in this discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14468834

Rudy Rucker writes about his CAM-6 in the CelLab manual:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/chap5.html

Computer science is still so new that many of the people at the cutting edge have come from other fields. Though Toffoli holds degrees in physics and computer science, Bennett's Ph.D. is in physical chemistry. And twenty-nine year old Margolus is still a graduate student in physics, his dissertation delayed by the work of inventing, with Toffoli, the CAM-6 Cellular Automaton Machine.

After watching the CAM in operation at Margolus's office, I am sure the thing will be a hit. Just as the Moog synthesizer changed the sound of music, cellular automata will change the look of video.

I tell this to Toffoli and Margolus, and they look unconcerned. What they care most deeply about is science, about Edward Fredkin's vision of explaining the world in terms of cellular automata and information mechanics. Margolus talks about computer hackers, and how a successful program is called “a good hack.” As the unbelievably bizarre cellular automata images flash by on his screen, Margolus leans back in his chair and smiles slyly. And then he tells me his conception of the world we live in.

“The universe is a good hack.”

[...]

Margolus and Toffoli's CAM-6 board was finally coming into production around then, and I got the Department to order one. The company making the boards was Systems Concepts of San Francisco; I think they cost $1500. We put our order in, and I started phoning Systems Concepts up and asking them when I was going to get my board. By then I'd gotten a copy of Margolus and Toffoli's book, Cellular Automata Machines, and I was itching to start playing with the board. And still it didn't come. Finally I told System Concepts that SJSU was going to have to cancel the purchase order. The next week they sent the board. By now it was August, 1987.

The packaging of the board was kind of incredible. It came naked, all by itself, in a plastic bag in a small box of styrofoam peanuts. No cables, no software, no documentation. Just a three inch by twelve inch rectangle of plastic—actually two rectangles one on top of the other—completely covered with computer chips. There were two sockets at one end. I called Systems Concepts again, and they sent me a few pages of documentation. You were supposed to put a cable running your graphics card's output into the CAM-6 board, and then plug your monitor cable into the CAM-6's other socket. No, Systems Concepts didn't have any cables, they were waiting for a special kind of cable from Asia. So Steve Ware, one of the SJSU Math&CS Department techs, made me a cable. All I needed then was the software to drive the board, and as soon as I phoned Toffoli he sent me a copy.

Starting to write programs for the CAM-6 took a little bit of time because the language it uses is Forth. This is an offbeat computer language that uses reverse Polish notation. Once you get used to it, Forth is very clean and nice, but it makes you worry about things you shouldn't really have to worry about. But, hey, if I needed to know Forth to see cellular automata, then by God I'd know Forth. I picked it up fast and spent the next four or five months hacking the CAM-6.

The big turning point came in October, when I was invited to Hackers 3.0, the 1987 edition of the great annual Hackers' conference held at a camp near Saratoga, CA. I got invited thanks to James Blinn, a graphics wizard who also happens to be a fan of my science fiction books. As a relative novice to computing, I felt a little diffident showing up at Hackers, but everyone there was really nice. It was like, “Come on in! The more the merrier! We're having fun, yeeeeee-haw!”

I brought my AT along with the CAM-6 in it, and did demos all night long. People were blown away by the images, though not too many of them sounded like they were ready to a) cough up $1500, b) beg Systems Concepts for delivery, and c) learn Forth in order to use a CAM-6 themselves. A bunch of the hackers made me take the board out of my computer and let them look at it. Not knowing too much about hardware, I'd imagined all along that the CAM-6 had some special processors on it. But the hackers informed me that all it really had was a few latches and a lot of fast RAM memory chips.

themodelplumber• 4 years ago

I'm curious, how did the book change your life? What kind of problems did the authors model using their approach? I'm new to the topic, thanks for any input.

DonHopkins4• 4 years ago

It really helped me get my head around how to understand and program cellular automata rules, which is a kind of massively parallel distributed "Think Globally, Act Locally" approach that also applies to so many other aspects of life.

But by "life" I don't mean just the cellular automata rule "life"! Not to be all depressing like Marvin the Paranoid Android, but I happen to think "life" is overrated. ;) There are so many billions of other extremely interesting cellular automata rules besides "life" too, so don't stop once you get bored with life! ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAA67a2-Klk

For example, it's kind of like how the world wide web works: "Link Globally, Interact Locally":

https://donhopkins.medium.com/scriptx-and-the-world-wide-web...

It's also very useful for understanding other massively distributed locally interacting parallel systems, epidemiology, economics, morphogenesis (reaction-diffusion systems, like how a fertilized egg divides and specializes into an organism), GPU programming and optimization, neural networks and machine learning, information and chaos theory, and physics itself.

I've discussed the book and the code I wrote based on it with Norm Margolus, one of the authors, and he mentioned that he really likes rules that are based on simulating physics, and also thinks reversible cellular automata rules are extremely important (and energy efficient in a big way, in how they relate to physics and thermodynamics).

The book has interesting sections about physical simulations like spin glasses (Ising Spin model of the magnetic state of atoms of solid matter), and reversible billiard ball simulations (like deterministic reversible "smoke and mirrors" with clouds of moving particles bouncing off of pinball bumpers and each other).

Spin Glass:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_glass

In condensed matter physics, a spin glass is a magnetic state characterized by randomness, besides cooperative behavior in freezing of spins at a temperature called 'freezing temperature' Tf. Magnetic spins are, roughly speaking, the orientation of the north and south magnetic poles in three-dimensional space. In ferromagnetic solids, component atoms' magnetic spins all align in the same direction. Spin glass when contrasted with a ferromagnet is defined as "disordered" magnetic state in which spins are aligned randomly or not with a regular pattern and the couplings too are random.

Billiard Ball Computer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard-ball_computer

A billiard-ball computer, a type of conservative logic circuit, is an idealized model of a reversible mechanical computer based on Newtonian dynamics, proposed in 1982 by Edward Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli. Instead of using electronic signals like a conventional computer, it relies on the motion of spherical billiard balls in a friction-free environment made of buffers against which the balls bounce perfectly. It was devised to investigate the relation between computation and reversible processes in physics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_cellular_automaton

A reversible cellular automaton is a cellular automaton in which every configuration has a unique predecessor. That is, it is a regular grid of cells, each containing a state drawn from a finite set of states, with a rule for updating all cells simultaneously based on the states of their neighbors, such that the previous state of any cell before an update can be determined uniquely from the updated states of all the cells. The time-reversed dynamics of a reversible cellular automaton can always be described by another cellular automaton rule, possibly on a much larger neighborhood.
[...] Reversible cellular automata form a natural model of reversible computing, a technology that could lead to ultra-low-power computing devices. Quantum cellular automata, one way of performing computations using the principles of quantum mechanics, are often required to be reversible. Additionally, many problems in physical modeling, such as the motion of particles in an ideal gas or the Ising model of alignment of magnetic charges, are naturally reversible and can be simulated by reversible cellular automata.

Also I've frequently written on HN about Dave Ackley's great work on Robust-First Computing and the Moveable Feast Machine, which I think is brilliant, and quite important in the extremely long term (which is coming sooner than we think).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304110

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22300376

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22303313

zorr• 4 years ago

How to win friends and influence people - Carnegie

Think and grow rich - Napoleon Hill

That last one made something click in my head but I find it hard to describe what it is exactly. The key concepts that I learned from this book are in my thoughts and actions every single day.

reayn• 4 years ago

Think and Grow Rich has been absolutely phenomenal in spearheading the mindset shift I've had over the past couple years, and I could not recommend it any more to anyone who wishes to have financial success in life.

Some may consider the book and its ideologies excessively materialistic, but I personally find that outlook refreshing especially considering the subject matter: making money; furthermore I think that take is a little baseless as the viewpoint on willpower etc. that Napoleon Hill provides can apply to far more than just accumulating wealth if utilized correctly.

All in all though, it was easily one of the most life-changing books I've ever read and I'm glad to see it's affected others positively too, cheers!

eps• 4 years ago

+100 for Carnegie.

The simple lesson of trying to look at things from other people's perspective is absolutely invaluable.

Also, Cryptonomicon was an unexpected eye-opener on how every privacy-oriented tech will be instantly abused by people you'd never want to have it in the first place. Cypherpunk has a flip side and it's pretty damn dark.

cko• 4 years ago

https://gizmodo.com/the-untold-story-of-napoleon-hill-the-gr...

Apparently he was a bit of a fraud. Or generously put... a fake it till you make it guy. I don't think this is an ad hominem attack, as credibility matters in this case.

redthrow• 4 years ago

I remember Coffeezilla did a video about that article

The Untold Truth of Napoleon Hill - History's Most Beloved Con-Man

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iEDzb9ZplX0

thenerdhead• 4 years ago

Cliché, but "Awaken the Giant Within" by Tony Robbins.

It wasn't the book itself that changed my life, it was the exposure to all of the underlying ideas & philosophies that then significantly changed my life. I know many people can't stand the guy, but his book was really powerful for me at one point in my life. I got my shit together and started to understand the origins of many of the messages he promotes.

I like to think that there's a paradox of book reading in general in that you never remember what you read, but you change because of it.

FinanceAnon• 4 years ago

"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”

tomrod20• 4 years ago

I'll check it out!

fmitchell0• 4 years ago

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking when Stakes are High by Kerry Patterson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucial_Conversations%3A_Tools...

LVB• 4 years ago

“The Effective Executive” by Peter Drucker.

I’ve never even been an “executive” but have found that nuggets from this book have helped me navigate the working world for 25 years.

tomrod20• 4 years ago

Thanks! I like Drucker's communication style. I'll check it out. Amazon delivers it tomorrow!

shafoshaf• 4 years ago

Getting Things Done By David Allen. I feel like everything I do is a decision and not a reaction now.

nathanasmith2• 4 years ago

I was going to post this. The act of breaking down an overwhelming abstract goal into simple actionable steps and getting everything out of your head into a trusted system has helped me achieve a mental peace unlike anything else I've tried.

kungito• 4 years ago

The Hithchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Catch 22. They helped me work through my teenage existential crisis.

azangru2• 4 years ago

Catch 22 has reaffirmed in me Yossarian's mindset that I didn't know I had; about how the world is mad and is out to get me over its crazy shit; and about how the received official mythologized narrative is different from the day-to-day survival concerns of an ordinary person. Thinking back, it probably was the most influential book for me.

cfcosta3• 4 years ago

The Salmon of Doubt was the one from Douglas Adams for me. I loved hitchhiker's, but there's something so earnest in that book. Like a late goodbye from someone you would've loved to be friends with.

Made me go on a life-long quest to understand what I am leaving, and how I want to be remembered after I'm gone. I've never met him and read his books after he passed away, but he still makes his presence aware through his words.

TillE• 4 years ago

As a young teenager, Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World. A brilliant series of essays about critical thinking.

More recently - I hesitate to recommend it because the trilogy is unfinished, but still - Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicle books have redefined what is possible with fantasy fiction, with incredible depth and subtlety and literary flourishes. It has flaws for sure, but I can't think of anything that remotely compares to it, and I've read an enormous pile of genre fiction. A real eye opener if you're doing any kind of creative writing.

tomrod20• 4 years ago

Sagan's work is one of my favorites thus far.

I'll check out Kingkiller chronicles.

screye2• 4 years ago

Kingkiller moves the fantasy fiction genre past its LOTR-esque roots.

Every word is a joy to read. I haven't read anything else that brings as big a smile on my face. Kingkiller's literary qualities are head and shoulders above anything in fantasy fiction. Every word, every metaphor and every description is chosen with care, so as to convey the exact emotion that the author wants you to feel. I hope the final book comes out soon.

Kingkiller is eternally compared to Sanderson's books. But, to me they are completely different writers. Sanderson's books are written competently, but the fun is in the story and interweaving pieces. Sanderson embodies the ultimate refinement of fantasy fiction tropes to produce something that's faultless, yet traditional.

On the other hand, Rothfuss is crafting something that does not lend itself well to comparison. It is perfect, because it is what it is meant to be. In some ways, Kingkiller feels closer to Shakespeare than any contemporary fantasy fiction work.

I am inclined to refer to Rothfuss as the Einstein to Sanderson's Von Neumann. A more-apt but weeb-esque comparison would be Rothfuss's Berserk to Sanderson's FMAB.

armitron2• 4 years ago

I found Rothfuss comically bad as a writer and Kingkiller #1 nothing more than superficial wish fulfillment aimed at teens that were bullied at school.

Not that Sanderson is much better.

ISL2• 4 years ago

The Tao Te Ching has given me more contemplative moments per page than anything else I've read.

aradox662• 4 years ago

Which translation?

ISL2• 4 years ago

Feng and English rides around with me in a messenger bag, but I derive joy from reading other translations, too. It feels like kind of a living document, with everyone viewing the underlying ideas from their own perspectives.

roeles• 4 years ago

Yes, very much this. I listened to the Stephen Mitchell audiobook during a week of patiently sanding something down.

That was the seed for a slow but radical change of perspective on life.

starrygordon• 4 years ago

The Book of Changes (also known as the I Ching or Yi Jing, depending on your favorite Romanization). Explaining what it is would be too lengthy here; it is better to start with a précis like the Wikipedia article, and then (I would say) to the introduction to the Wilhelm-Baynes translation by C.G. Jung. One can actually employ the divination rituals, which often yield "answers" which are often strangely relevant and sometimes shocking. I came to the Book of Changes via another book, _Psyche and Symbol_, by Jung, which I found very difficult. At the time I was 17 or 18 (so, late 1950s) and "we" were all going through an End-of-History moment when all relevant, important facts were supposed to be known and everyone was supposed to be well-balanced and rational. (This is so remote from contemporary cultures that I guess you had to be there to understand it.) It was "the old folks' home in the college" as the prophet Zimmerman put it, dry and asphyxiating. I wanted to break out of that. Jung's preface to the Book of Changes was included in _Psyche and Symbol_ and instead of being confused with his rather dense mythographies elsewhere, the part about the Book of Changes was very clear and included a description of the material practice. So I ordered the book (actually, in those days, two volumes from the Bollingen Foundation and far from a mass-media or hip item) and started using it immediately. Its style was not at all like the Bible, the Qur'an, or most of the other spiritual works of fame; I suppose some of it resembles the Daode Jing (Tao Te Ching) but since one works actively with it -- it requires interpretation -- the experience of using it is unlike that of any other books I know. It certainly changed by life by changing the perspectives from which I looked upon things. I had sort of escaped into a wider and stranger world. (Curiously, I later became a computer programmer, using from time to time the binary arithmetic supposedly invented by Leibniz under the inspiration of the Book of Changes, although this may be in the area of legend.) There are quite a few editions of the book online, some of them bilingual in case you can read ancient Chinese or you like the décor; but an investigation of the characters and their etymology may also be relevant.

jrib• 4 years ago

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by Irvine

Gave me a new perspective.

mmazurki• 4 years ago

Heal your wounds & find your true self by Lise Bourbeau Being Geek by Michael Loop

Very good at putting into words my introspection efforts and try to devise action plans for both personal and professional growth.

williadc• 4 years ago

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair was the first thing I read which challenged my teenaged conservative viewpoint.

funstuff0072• 4 years ago

I know it's trite to say it, but in my early 20s reading Atlas Shrugged helped me regain my bearings. And, no, it did not turn me into Peter Thiel.

535188B17C937433• 4 years ago

Never read Atlas Shrugged, but I had to read The Fountainhead for English in high school and it was really transformative. It helped me suss out flawed philosophy and gave me a sense of skepticism when being told what to think by authority (my English teacher at the time thought Ayn Rand was the second coming of Christ). I remember offering different perspectives when discussing the themes of the novel and basically being berated and told that I was wrong (about an opinion). Wild.

funstuff0072• 4 years ago

That's an unbelievably long book to assign at the secondary or even undergrad level.

tomrod20• 4 years ago

I've read these. My first Rand exposure was Anthem, which I thought was interesting if a bit contrived (I read it as the same age as The Giver, felt The Giver was more relatable).

listenallyall• 4 years ago

This is a paradoxical comment that makes it nearly impossible to believe you read the book. The entire theme of The Fountainhead is the rejection of conformity and collectivism. If you didn't like "being told what to think" then you felt what Howard Roark felt. If you were "berated and told I was wrong" for "offering different perspectives" then you experienced what Howard Roark experienced. Are you claiming to be a skeptic or independent thinker and also agreeing with Toohey and admiring Keating?

The Fountainhead is far from a perfect novel and certainly the "great man" theory is flawed. But the exposition of the inherent failure of collectivism to improve society is probably its greatest strength, and rings more true today than ever.

azangru2• 4 years ago

There are parts of Atlas Shrugged that I loved, mostly about the insights into the psychology of communism and of ideologues that Ayn Rand must have had first-hand experience with. But the love story that she weaves around it is just too poorly written.

colechristensen• 4 years ago

There are set of popular books that turn people ready for it into assholes. They also have value if they don’t do that to you and you apply a certain skepticism to them, but still often a risk.

itronitron2• 4 years ago

Glad I found your comment. I was going to say Atlas Shrugged as well because I stopped reading it half-way through when I finally realized that the author was full of shit.

It's a great realization for a young person to have, that something can be published and also be total garbage and a complete waste of time.

rg1118• 4 years ago

[...] realized that the author was full of shit.

Not only are her writings this way, she was nearly a wacko.

I will recommend to you a documentary where you can get to know the person better. The documentary is very nice, though.

The docu is "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace".

teekert2• 4 years ago

It also helped me a lot. It taught me the ethics of rational self interest. It helps me to this day when I discuss my salary for example. Also, relationships work better when you know what you want, you have to give your partner the chance to do something for you every now and then, that works best when you have personality. I struggled with this. To be able to say I love you one must first be able to say I. For me the best parts are those about personal freedom.

I read most things Ayn Rand wrote and I really enjoyed it. Somehow, HN does not like Ayn Rand. I don't understand it really. I also read Rutger Bregman's Human kind, some people say it is the opposite of Atlas Shrugged, but I disagree strongly. I like both books and I think they can be part of unifying philosophy. Perhaps Paul Graham's "What you can't say" [0] is an explanation. I believe Ayn says some things that you can't really say anymore, but perhaps they are true.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

rammy12342• 4 years ago

Personally for me Fountainhead by Ayn Rand was transformative. Creators need to be respected and identified. Great Leaders often have this knack of reading people and using them appropriately.

leobg5• 4 years ago

There is a great lecture on The Fountainhead on YouTube by Dr. Andrew Bernstein. Really, really good.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2fue-FqIIP-C26vR2uAxV-J0...

CobaltFire3• 4 years ago

As someone who struggles with Anxiety, Depression, and PTSD “Meditations” by Julius Caesar has been a life changer.

thedogeye• 4 years ago

Meditations by Marcus Aerelius

CobaltFire3• 4 years ago

Sorry, absolutely correct and I plead exhaustion after running a race this AM!

cfcosta3• 4 years ago

If you haven't gone too far into the stoicism rabbit hole yet, I really recommend "Life of the Stoics", by Ryan Holiday. It's a compilation of the history (and probably myths from their time) of all of the biggest minds of stoicism.

Shows that they weren't always perfect, some of them were assholes, but others (notably Marcus Aurelius and Catho) lived the live they preached, and fought many battles (including literal ones) in ways that were different from their time.

CobaltFire3• 4 years ago

I'm by no means down the rabbit hole if by that you mean a blind adherent. I find the philosophy interesting in and of itself but the people aren't any more than people being people, for better or worse.

shisisms• 4 years ago

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel is a truly exceptional and balanced view on life/money and the emotional challenge of making and keeping money.

It’s surprisingly insightful/original/authentic.

thatjoeoverthr• 4 years ago

Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf

Before this book I generally did not read, unless it was a Star Trek branded airport novel. I had just got an iPad and was rummaging around the Project Gutenberg texts they’d dumped into iBooks. I chose it impulsively.

This book set my brain and heart on fire and opened the world of literature for me. It’s very specific, though, and I can’t -recommend- it to anyone.

There is little spackle in this book, as if every sentence and scene is cropped a bit beyond the point of readability. But reading aloud it flows well. There is effectively no plot and a great deal of its merit is at the sentence level. Furthermore, this book in particular resonated with me emotionally.

I was thirsty for more and read other classics. My favorites; To the Lighthouse, Picture of Dorian Grey and Thus Spake Zarathustra (the translation they have on Gutenberg).

This hobby dominated my attention for years. What displaced it was I had to learn Polish. At first I tried to combine these; I read Charlotte’s Web, the Little Prince and Pulp (bukowski) in Polish. But it really wasn’t an effective way to continue and Polish was the priority. All other hobbies had to go.

tomrod20• 4 years ago

I'll have to give Jacob's Room a read -- thanks!

ericra• 4 years ago

This one is available on Standard Ebooks[1]. It's fairly common knowledge, but I would highly suggest this site as the definitive source for high-quality copies of public domain works. I've contributed to their project before, and their editorial work is top notch.

[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/virginia-woolf/jacobs-room

zwieback2• 4 years ago

+1 on To The Lighthouse - phenom!

keane• 4 years ago

A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume (especially Book 3, Part 1)

https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/authors/hume

kkoncevicius2• 4 years ago

"I am that"

You can listen to some quotes from the book here: https://web.archive.org/web/2oe_/http://wayback-fakeurl.arch...

tomrod20• 4 years ago

What do you like about it?

kkoncevicius2• 4 years ago

Well, it is a hard read, but in short - it offers a curious interpretation of your personal experience of the world, suggesting that you are the only being, reality is manufactured by you (or in other words, you and reality are the same thing), that mind is something external to you, that you were not born but rather you were and the idea of you being born was a construct that you conjured later. Also, the living state you take for granted is only maintained and recreated every moment by memory and is compared to a dream and you are encouraged to "wake up" a second time.

You should listen to the linked video for a better introduction.

sillyinseattle• 4 years ago

Zed Shaw's "Learn C the hard way". Had years of scientific programming before that (R, Matlab). But I used to be afraid of working with "real" code bases. This book (which still has an unfinished feel to it) helped me understand how computers work and how to write programs with that understanding - at a high level. Learning about "Object-oriented programming" with plain C was super fun. Not the most illuminating book I've read (e.g. The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee), but the others did not change my life.

tomrod20• 4 years ago

I think this is a fantastic recommendation! Having come to coding from the same background (++Python), I feel the need to tighten up my understanding a bit.

tbran• 4 years ago

Thank you! I've been contemplating what I should learn next. I read your comment, bought the course, and have already started the exercises. Excellent recommendation!

aradox662• 4 years ago

Stepping out of self deception by Rodney Smith. A Buddhist book by someone who has really internalized the dharma and uses his own words rather than reiterating the same jargon as everyone else.

As someone who got caught up in a lot of "spiritual materialism" in dharma practice, over-fixation on techniques and theory, this book reached me in a way that nothing else did.

udia• 4 years ago

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life - Marshall B. Rosenberg

simonw• 4 years ago

"Finding Flow" convinced me to quit job once, because I was frustrated that I wasn't achieving "flow state" often enough. I was young and foolish then so looking back that probably wasn't the right reason, even though the decision was a good one!

throwawaygo• 4 years ago

Coders at Work

DougN7• 4 years ago

The Book of Mormon. It gives me hope despite some things looking increasingly dark in the world.

tomrod20• 4 years ago

As a former Mormon myself, I appreciate where you are coming from.

I plan to read the recommendations folks made here, but due to the proselyting culture and the mystical emphasis Brighamite Mormonism puts on the Book of Mormon I want to offer a more substantial and impactful recommendation. In its place, I recommend Sagan's Demon-Haunted World.

tmin• 4 years ago

'Patterns in Prehistory' class where we learned about pre-history civilizations. Saw that there is a book, 'Patterns in Prehistory: Humankind's First Three Million Years', which covers the topics were covered in that class. Initially, I was like 'why should I learn pre-history?' and I postponed it until the last semester of my undergrad. Learning different civilizations and their religious beliefs made me start questioning my religious belief.

And an NPR podcast, "Is Believing In God Evolutionarily Advantageous?", which explains why human are religious.

Those two changed my religious belief, so I can say that they changed my life.

johnobrien1010• 4 years ago

Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall

m-alsuwaidi• 4 years ago

Open society by Karl Popper. No doubt the number 1 book I recommend anybody to read. Completely changes your perspective on all your preconceived notions of politics, economics and sociology.

tomrod20• 4 years ago

Interesting! I'll check it out.

rtourn• 4 years ago

- The Unbearable Lightness of Being, fiction, how the “crazy” actions of people in relationships makes sense in the context of their individual history.

There’s one chapter about misunderstood words. The word “mother” was highly regarded by one character. They loved their mother, so to call someone a mother was a deep and powerful complement. The other character hated their mother, the word had a hypocritical meaning to her.

So when the first character complemented the second with the deepest most heart felt honor they could muster, the second character left them without a word.

deathgripsss• 4 years ago

I have just finished reading this book (English translation) and was blown away by how relatable a lot of the characters and the flaws in their relationships are. At some parts it was like looking in a mirror and not in a good way.

ftrobro• 4 years ago

This book gave me a lot to think about 25 years ago. Made me aware of limitations of my own consciosness. Has perhaps been superseded by some other book since then, I'd love to hear recommendations.

"The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size" by Tor Norretranders

yashg3• 4 years ago

Atomic habits. Last year I had just came back from 3 days in Hospital for extremely high blood pressure. I took up walking as a daily workout and listened to Atomic Habits audiobook. It provided me enough motivation to continue and build a new habit which has not become a part of my daily routine. I am healthier and in a much better space mentally as well.

vibrio3• 4 years ago

I’ve not read Atomic habits, but keep hearing it recommended. If it is appropriate for me to ask, how do you distinguish the motivation derived from the book and that from 3 days in hospital with extremely high blood pressure? I live with a fear of hypertension because of genetics. My diet and exercise (what I can control) is at front of mind and so far so good, but my high level of motivation is driven by knowing where the disease road can lead. Not intending to diminish the book but just curious about how you balance the contribution of those two in your mind.

GGfpc• 4 years ago

The book isn't about motivation, it's about steps that you can take that make creating new habits easier. In fact, the book tells you that motivation wanes quickly and we need to force ourselves to create determination instead

yashg3• 4 years ago

It's a combination of both. The book alone wouldn't have made me motivated to workout. The catalyst was obviously the health scare, but what the book did was to help me get regular and build upon my habit. The book essentially tells you that a small step is all that is required and not to give up in case you miss one or two days. Making something a habit takes time. I started small. 15 mins a day. Gradually it increased. Would I have continued working out even without having read the book? Yes. Did the book help? Yes.

nathan_f77• 4 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation. I've just used one of my Audible credits on this and will give it a go.

uwagar2• 4 years ago

what was your bp readings if i may ask?

yashg3• 4 years ago

260/160. Yes, that high. I had a retinal bleed which blurred the vision in one eye. Over subsequent days they got my brain, kidneys and all vital organs scanned for damage. Luckily no long lasting damage to anything.

burlzad123• 4 years ago

I struggled to get in to this book. I think the main reason was the author described that in his first year in college, he was so committed to forming his habits he abstained from drinking and partying! That's not a reasonable ask for people and kind of turned me off from continuing...

FlyingSnake• 4 years ago

I read the magnum opus of Marathi literature ’Mrityunjay’ as a teenager and it really helped me understand the world view.

Mrityunjay is a story of a great warrior who by sheer chance of luck ends up being a lower-caste charioteer.

The book showed me that life is not black and white, talent is not all that’s needed to succeed and how luck and pragmatism plays a huge part in your life. It also helped me understand what Krishna stands for and what Dharma is. Fascinating theme that is still relevant today.

eyelidlessness• 4 years ago

Widening Circles, memoir by Joanna Macy.

I picked it up as I was becoming interested in Buddhism and felt it would give me insight into from a “western convert” perspective (it did).

But it also opened my mind to environmentalism—not that I had been closed to it as such, just less interested.

More unexpectedly, it opened my mind to unconventional romantic relationships. I remain, in principle if not actively in practice, polyamorous to this day. Even since, I’ve realized that I’m demisexual (which is on the asexuality spectrum), and the same part of the book which helped me embrace poly also helped me embrace demi and reconcile the two.

vecter• 4 years ago

How to be a 3% Man by Corey Wayne [0]. Really helped me understand women, dating, and relationships in way that's so simple and clear. It has profoundly made my relationships with women better in every way.

[0] https://www.scribd.com/doc/33421576/How-To-Be-A-3-Man

bloopernova2• 4 years ago

Dune. Specifically the parts about how a human can choose their reaction to an external event. And the ability to overcome fear.

Man's Search For Meaning. Again, overcoming the worst situations and finding joy anywhere.

How to Practice. Understanding what you are feeling and why you are feeling it.

Emotional Intelligence. How the amygdala sends signals to the brain, why it does that, and how to recognize your negative reactions.

And all the Discworld books, to find joy and humour in everything. GNU Terry Pratchett.

stuxnet79• 4 years ago

How to Practice and Emotional Intelligence are rather generic book titles. Do you mind providing the author names as well?

rkk3• 4 years ago

Not the OP but presumably the 'Emotional Intelligence' book by Daniel Goleman

dole• 4 years ago

How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life - the Dalai Lama, translated by Jeffery Hopkins

bloopernova2• 4 years ago

My apologies, I knocked that comment out super quick between chores and forgot about it.

How to Practice is by the Dalai Lama: https://smile.amazon.com/How-Practise-Way-Meaningful-Life-dp...

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman: https://smile.amazon.com/Emotional-Intelligence-Matter-More-...

grecy• 4 years ago

I've always wanted to read the Dune books, but have no idea where to start. It seems like there are so many, and so many prequels and so many optional side stories.

Is there an agreed on book to start with and an order to follow?

ng12• 4 years ago

Yes -- Dune. It is the starting point and best book in the series. The next three books in the series are also very, very good.

sn93• 4 years ago

Frank Herbert only wrote six books. You only have to read them in order of publication.

His son's books aren't as good and in the opinion of many aren't worth the trouble of reading.

nathanasmith2• 4 years ago

I'll echo the others' sentiments. Only bother with the Dune books authored by Frank Herbert starting with the first published Dune itself. The "Dune" books written by his son are bad fan-fiction.

jamiek882• 4 years ago

Read Dune and it’s three sequels. The rest ranges from decent fan fic to drivel.

Devoured it all though!

kcartlidge6• 4 years ago

Is there an agreed on book to start with and an order to follow?

No, so I'll get shot for this but ... read the first (Dune) then stop.

jwood27• 4 years ago

The following have all had a significant effect on my worldview. You can find more information at [1].

- The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

- Thinking, Fast and Slow

- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

- Crime and Punishment

- The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

- Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

- The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

- Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

- Franny and Zooey

- Master of the Senate

- Atlas Shrugged

- Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

- Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

- The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

- The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't

- Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

- Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

- Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

- Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

- Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

- Ethics in the Real World: 86 Brief Essays on Things that Matter

- A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

- Humankind: A Hopeful History

- The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

[1] https://jacobw.xyz/books/

tomrod20• 4 years ago

Thank you for the great recommendations!

geocrasher8• 4 years ago

First and foremost: The Bible. Not the watered down "everybody goes to heaven" theology that most people subscribe to, but rather an evidence based approach that uses the Bible to interpret itself as it was designed to do.

Secondarily, this book saved my life in the sense that it helped me understand my depression, a clinical depression so deep that my psychologist had never seen such a thing previously:

Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy - Stephen C. Hayes https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0054M063A/

Its scientific approach to understanding our own thought patterns gave me control- coping mechanisms- for dealing with my own feelings instead of ignoring ("Burying") them and letting them slowly destroy me from the inside out.

tomrod20• 4 years ago

evidence based approach that uses the Bible to interpret itself as it was designed to do

I don't understand what that means. But I do think Misquoting Jesus is one of the better biblical criticism books I've read, and can recommend it for interested folks. Your recommendation reminded me of that.

geocrasher8• 4 years ago

It means not taking individual verses out of context and using only the rest of the Bible to provide that context such as who the Bible writer was writing to, in what circumstance, even in what time of year if it was a farming analogy, or what other Bible writers say on the same subject. That's only scratching the surface, but hopefully gives you an idea what I meant.

voisin• 4 years ago

but rather an evidence based approach that uses the Bible to interpret itself as it was designed to do.

Can you expand? Did you create this approach yourself or just read the Bible directly?

geocrasher8• 4 years ago

No, I did not create this approach at all. It is the approach taken by Jehovah's Witnesses who started out by questioning beliefs and looking directly at the Bible to figure out whether a belief was Biblical or not. That's how they came to the conclusion that hellfire is a lie and many other things that the Christendom accepts aren't actually Biblical. It's a very balanced approach. It also avoids all the "God hates $group" garbage and gives solid reasons for what's going on in the world. If you want to learn about that method of Bible study, check out jw.org.

no-dr-onboard2• 4 years ago

Another, non JW or LDS answer is the historical grammatical hermeneutic. One tenant of this method is that the grammar and history of scripture will always confirm what it says in other areas. Scripture supports scripture

azth2• 4 years ago

This has always been a key approach to Quranic exegesis. I wouldn't be surprised if they were influenced by Islam when it comes to this topic. Of course, Islam also has very rich bodies of information such as Hadith, and authentic quotes by the Companions and the Righteous Followers, all of which are used.

prometheus763• 4 years ago

I would recommend getting the Ancient Faith Study Bible, which uses a very readable translation, and has extensive footnotes that consist of commentary on the Bible from the Early Church Fathers.

kk6mrp3• 4 years ago

From my understanding, this is the oldest approach to understanding scripture. To keep from deviating from the truth you must examine the text in light of what has been written before. Acts 17:11 bears this out, "Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so."

p0d3• 4 years ago

I agree. I would also add continues to change my life. I read the Bible every day and am constantly amazed how relevant ancient wisdom is today.

In recent years teaching from Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament taught me how to understand my work. There is such a lot of nonsense on HN and the net about success. So many are pursuing a pipe dream. Below helped me to work hard, enjoy what I have, and not be concerned about what others have. See below, written in Ecclesiastes 5, thousands of years ago.

10 Those who love money will never have enough. How meaningless to think that wealth brings true happiness! 11 The more you have, the more people come to help you spend it. So what good is wealth—except perhaps to watch it slip through your fingers!

12 People who work hard sleep well, whether they eat little or much. But the rich seldom get a good night’s sleep.

13 There is another serious problem I have seen under the sun. Hoarding riches harms the saver. 14 Money is put into risky investments that turn sour, and everything is lost. In the end, there is nothing left to pass on to one’s children. 15 We all come to the end of our lives as naked and empty-handed as on the day we were born. We can’t take our riches with us.

16 And this, too, is a very serious problem. People leave this world no better off than when they came. All their hard work is for nothing—like working for the wind. 17 Throughout their lives, they live under a cloud—frustrated, discouraged, and angry.

18 Even so, I have noticed one thing, at least, that is good. It is good for people to eat, drink, and enjoy their work under the sun during the short life God has given them, and to accept their lot in life. 19 And it is a good thing to receive wealth from God and the good health to enjoy it. To enjoy your work and accept your lot in life—this is indeed a gift from God. 20 God keeps such people so busy enjoying life that they take no time to brood over the past.

geocrasher8• 4 years ago

Solomon knew what he was talking about!

agumonkey2• 4 years ago

Man, I tried reading the bible, maybe some pages are to be skipped, I couldn't keep after 5 ... too many "don't have sex with your cousin's wife unless her father owned a goat" logic.

no-dr-onboard2• 4 years ago

I’m so excited by this comment.

1) As gp said, the historical grammatical hermeneutic is the way to go for interpretation.

And

2) the book of Ecclesiastes is definitely a beautiful way to stay grounded. Just the mere fact that Solomon, the author, had access to everything his age could offer and still ended up writing Ecclesiastes Ch 11 is mind blowing. Everything passes away. This world, your legacy, your wealth, memories of you, things you care for, everything. The only thing that doesn’t is God, his word, and your spirit. It puts this world and it’s fleeting pleasures in perspective.

Of course, the natural reaction to this is “so what? Nihilism then?”. The Bible unabashedly says “yes, if you don’t have God”

People search for the meaning of life in a variety of ways. The Bible answers this clearly:

“To love God and worship him forever.”

What do Christian’s do in this world? Ecclesiastes would say “to enjoy your lot with the one you love, to worship God and to accept what comes your way.”

cjameskeller2• 4 years ago

If you enjoy that, while they are considered "deuterocanonical", you may also enjoy Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon. Especially having only read them as an adult, I keep finding more good advice each time I peruse them.

seminarianhere• 4 years ago

Seminarian here. One word of caution here, is plenty of people think they discover something new by reading some authors. Whatever the view is, a lot of them aren't new, and there exists notable scholars (from the early church fathers to modern theologians) that can disagree and agree with it.

When people think they knew. They actually don't know. Not even close.

eigenheart• 4 years ago

Love there's a passionate discussion/touch point about the Bible on this site. For anyone interested, biblehub.com is a tremendous resource to help deep-dive themes, passages, words, etc...

swat535• 4 years ago

I actually highly recommend The Word on Fire series by Bishop Barron, it's not a full Bible yet but the two books are out (Gospels and Act) I believe.

They have great commentary, beautiful artwork and are high quality overall. Leaving the link here for anyone interested: https://www.wordonfire.org/bible/#volumeii

Word of caution: if you are an Atheist, please remember that the Bible is a religious text, many verses are in parables and should not be taken literally. It is not a scientific textbook or a historical one either. It is also a _collection_ of books called the Canon. You must read it with an open heart and mind to get the most out of it!

rramadass2• 4 years ago

The "only thing" worth reading from the The Bible are the "Wisdom Books". Robert Alter's translation The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation with Commentary is pretty good.

CitrusFruits• 4 years ago

I mean if you like those you'd probably like Jesus's sermon on the mount.

kcartlidge6• 4 years ago

The "only thing" worth reading from the The Bible are the "Wisdom Books"

From the perspective of Wisdom you're probably right.

From the perspective of the modern Christian Faith I'd include the complete New Testament. From the perspective of historical reference (I know archaeological opinions vary) include the Old Testament too.

Revisional_Sin3• 4 years ago

Do you also read about the history of the Bible? For example, scholars consider the book of exodus to be highly inaccurate/mythologised.

chevill3• 4 years ago

but rather an evidence based approach that uses the Bible to interpret itself as it was designed to do.

Can you elaborate on this? I'd be interested to hear more about your approach.

Maursault• 4 years ago

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. Changed my life by opening my imagination and getting me off of Judy Blume.

tomrod20• 4 years ago

Wonderful book!

zhenyakovalyov• 4 years ago

history of western philosophy by bertrand russell

sys_64738• 4 years ago

K&R

tomrod20• 4 years ago

Yes!

zwieback2• 4 years ago

Don't you just wish you could have hung out with K&R at the time it was written?

WallyFunk• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Mind%2C_Beginner's_Mind

weldedtogether• 4 years ago

Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. Helped me out of my sort of self-inflicted isolation and to heal . I also love Siddhartha by the same author, they both helped me look at myself and life in a completely different and more positive way.

nazgulnarsil2• 4 years ago

Highly recommend The Glass Bead Game. Less well known than his others but very good.

nazgulnarsil2• 4 years ago

Cutting through spiritual materialism

Opening the Heart of Compassion

Both very high in the calling me out on my bullshit metric

kseistrup• 4 years ago

Mind Magic by Bill Harvey: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3573948-mind-magic

kaycebasques• 4 years ago

Gonna have to go with Dune. So much wisdom presented in such an engaging way.

Ecology? Check.

Emotional intelligence? Check.

Logical intelligence? Check.

Leadership? Check.

Power? Check.

Family? Check.

Love? Check.

Politics? Check.

Badass desert world and technology? Check.

... there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

bjoli• 4 years ago

Practical ethics by Peter Singer. It made me question a lot of my truths and habits and, in the end, made me more happy about how I live my life.

icc97• 4 years ago

I read the following 3 in this order and it definitely co-incided with a change in my life for the better:

* A confession and other religious stories by Leo Tolstoy * Happiness by Matthieu Ricard (a counter argument against French philosophers who believe happiness doesn't exist) * The Diary of Anne Frank * A Life Interrupted by Etty Hillesum (the most beautiful book I will ever read)

providedotemacs• 4 years ago

"The Kingdom of God Is Within You" by Tolstoy is definitely a top book for me. I find that I understand it in a slightly different way each time I read it.

escapegoat• 4 years ago

_The Mind Illuminated_ Hasn't changed my life yet but it might (found it three days ago out on hoopla.com). I say this as someone who has given meditation practice a good college try (more than a year at a time of daily practice) on a couple of occasions. Most books say just keep going and you will eventually fart pixie dust. This book says you can reach advanced practice in under a year BUT requires a consistent one hour a day which might be a deal breaker. This book gets very specific about technique, achievements and expectations which is unique in my experience. And the author is not saying you need to find a "mentor/guide". If you have seen a better book I would love to hear about it.

rg1118• 4 years ago

It has changed my life to some degree- very clearly and significantly.

Yet, I read only one chapter and following the advice and instruction to the letter for almost a month.

I am feeling the deep joy from meditating just ten minutes. I know I am not supposed to get attached to this deep bliss feeling, but it validates my efforts.

I read the first chapter a few months back, but did not really start following it until I started reading W. Rahula's What the Buddha Taught and Bhante Gunaratana's Mindfulness in Plain English.

I am deeply attracted to the Theravada Buddhism philosophy. And there is no place of blind faith in it.

So, my serious attempt to meditation started after I learned more about Buddha and his way. I had to try it.

I much more calm and composed. With better concentration and more self-control. Procrastination has left me. And I have insights much easier than before. I am an overally better thinker, now. And I give the credit to meditation.

sk1pper• 4 years ago

A great counterpart to this book might be Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck. The Mind Illuminated is a technical manual for meditation practice; Everyday Zen is more about how to think of the rest of your life while you’re not meditating as practice. (It’s not much about Zen specifically either; it’s author just happened to be a practitioner of Zen.)

nprateem3• 4 years ago

Check out Goenka's lectures on YouTube - search "Goenka 10 day". Blew my mind. So much clearer than TMI

emptysongglass2• 4 years ago

I would say TMI is much more technical because it's written for the "Hardcore Dharma" community which is far more technique-oriented than Goenka. Goenka doesn't approach the stages of insight adaptively, which can easily frustrate practitioners of mindfulness whose first intro to meditation is body-scanning. I would rank body-scanning as one of the least efficacious techniques with very poor results when applied to the physical pain that often results from long sits.

Good meditation teaching is equipping the practitioner with a toolset with the right tool applied for the appropriate stage of practice.

TMI and Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha are necessarily complex because they are treating the entire path toward nibbana as a segmented map of attainment. I can think of virtually no technique which can be applied from the beginning to the end except for very difficult-to-approach techniques such as shikantaza ("just sitting") or the ekayana ("one vehicle") techniques of the Quanzhen ("complete reality") Chinese Buddhism schools. If you think TMI is obtuse try and approach the Shurangama Sutra which is really a mindfuck. But here's the thing: unconditioned existence is a mindfuck so we often need "lesser" graduated techniques to approach the paradoxical nature of reality.

ralmidani• 4 years ago

1. The Quran. I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety - reading The Quran is always soothing and sometimes cathartic. One of the common themes is how insignificant this life is compared to eternity; e.g. Putin and Assad destroyed my country, Syria (and they’re now doing the same in Ukraine). I hope I see them brought to justice in this world, but if they’re not, I can live with that.

2. The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. Written by someone who might an atheist, but it also demonstrates both theoretically and empirically how humble we and our planet are. He uses genius analogies to simplify complex concepts. Reading the book is very mind-expanding.

nanomonkey2• 4 years ago

The Listening Society by Hanzi Freinacht. It taught me that there is indeed a direction for society to go beyond PostModernism, that is constructive and nuanced. Also explained why it is so rare for people to move into such a stage of development.

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Showed all of the archaeological evidence for vast time periods where alternate governance models were put into practice, and how the history of progress that we are given is not the whole story. Useful for seeing that we are in a local minim, and can evolve into something better.

Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe. Goes through the diaries and historical evidence of the early interactions with Australia's Aboriginals. Shows how over time their agricultural practices, towns and living environments were destroyed and replaced with a narrative that they were backwards and not using the land. Good example of how sustainable practices can look like unused natural spaces, and thus dismissed as poor uses of space.

specialist• 4 years ago

Ditto The Dawn of Everything. I binged on everything Graeber thru the apocalypse. Debt: the First 5000 Years rewired my brain. FWIW, I enjoyed everything Jill Lepore the same way; they're good compliments.

Will give The Listening Society a try, thanks.

nanomonkey2• 4 years ago

The Listening Society starts off strangely, and doesn't really explain it's thesis directly. The author even says they won't do so in the first chapter which fired off a bunch of warning bells for me, as it seemed like a filtering function for the gullible.

All for not, the author really is going somewhere. And it felt worth it to me.

songzme• 4 years ago

thanks these books look interesting to me added them to my kindle!

Eddy_Viscosity2• 4 years ago

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

I read this as part of course but it really stuck with me.

deepspace• 4 years ago

I really liked ZAMM the first few times I read it, when I was very young, and for a while thought it was the greatest book ever. With age and experience comes wisdom, though, and over the years I recognized that there is a lot of pretentious pseudo-scientific crap in there.

The part about "Gumption Traps" is very true and valid, however, and following Pirsig's advice on that front has saved me countless hours of fruitless troubleshooting.

kettunen• 4 years ago

While being definitely more on the hippy-dippy side for some, for me the book that affected me the most was Ram Dass' Be Here Now.

azth2• 4 years ago

The Quran

Mildlypolite• 4 years ago

Dostoevsky 's crime and punishment has taught me a lot about the human spirit.

I've nothing practical to say that the book taught me but the consequences in real life of what dostoevsky has taught me are innumerable and at the same time too subtle to talk about them. I learnt the meaning of love (a romantic and deep one) but also the meaning of hate, self destruction. What nihilism is and what are its consequences. Human spirit is complex and I feel that today's society tend to simplify it in a very rough way.

garyrob• 4 years ago

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunru Suzuki. I first encountered it when I was around 19, and came back to it at various points. At around age 55 I finally started a serious Zen practice which involves an hour a day of meditation, working on koans with a Zen teacher, and more. I've been doing that for around 10 years. It has truly been life-altering in the deepest possible way. I've read other Zen books but that one by Suzuki is the one that started everything and it still holds a unique and very valuable place.

AlecSchueler• 4 years ago

Bessel Van Der Kolk's _The Body Keeps The Score_.

I had an extremely abusive childhood environment and mostly blocked it out through my adult years but had many obvious self-descructive, anti-social, self-sabotaging and socially untenable behaviour patterns that I couldn't understand or shake.

That book gave me the understanding of my own development and, furthermore, an idea of the tools that I could use to finally stand tall as a member of the human race.

drakonka• 4 years ago

Maybe not a very useful answer, but for me it was the Narnia books when I was around 6. I already liked reading before then, but that was mostly simpler booms. Narnia really opened my eyes to a whole new level of wonder with reading and solidified my love of fantasy and science fiction forever.

mylonov• 4 years ago

"Easy way to stop smoking" by far.

abhiyerra• 4 years ago

Used that book to quit myself

shmde• 4 years ago

Charlie and the great glass elevator. Changed my life in a way where I actually started reading not just for education but for fun. The book which kindled my love for reading. That books don't need to be academic or a hill to be climbed.

openfuture• 4 years ago

Impro by Keith Johnstone, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Momo by Michael Ende...

marginalia_nu• 4 years ago

Early works by Plato pretty much reframed my relationship with knowledge. I went from thinking I knew most things, to questioning whether what I even mean when I say I know something.

tjansen• 4 years ago

Robert X Cringely - Accidental Empires. After reading this I knew what I want, and actually joined a startup a few years later (only to see it fail in the 2000 dotcom crash).

iancmceachern• 4 years ago

The book of joy by the Dhali Llama and Desmond Tutu

themadturk• 4 years ago

A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeleine L'Engle

I probably read it in fourth or fifth grade, not too many years after it was published. It was definitely the first science fiction novel I ever read. It wasn't until many years later that I saw how foundational to my worldview it was that my first SF book had a female protagonist.

I was going to give a few other examples of truly life-changing works (LOTR, Dune, Neuromancer), but I'm not sure how I would have found them if A Wrinkle In Time hadn't opened by pre-adolescent eyes.

mooreds• 4 years ago

For me it was "The Demon Lord of Karanda" by David Eddings. Picked it out randomly from the "Bookmobile" (a mobile library I had access to in my younger years).

Introduced me to the world of fantasy and science fiction, which has been a source of enjoyment since then. I don't know if it pushed me towards my current occupation as a SWE, but it sure didn't hurt.

hulitu• 4 years ago

1984 and Animal farm - George Orwell. Dune - Frank Herbert. Antimemoire - André Malraux

achenet• 4 years ago

The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron.

Helped me reduce bad habits, get useful things done, and have more fun.

shaggie76• 4 years ago

The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff is a delightful introduction into Taoism that opened my mind to eastern philosophy as a young adult.

bhrgunatha• 4 years ago

I directly attribute daily meditation to reading The Tao of Pooh. It was a parting gift as I left to go travelling.

Although I didn't settle on Taoism, like you, it introduced and opened my mind to what I saw as an alternatives to religion.

ya1sec• 4 years ago

Three Novels - Samuel Beckett

The Upanishads - Eknath Easwaran translation

Season in Hell - Arthur Rimbaud

Modern Man in Search of a Soul - Carl Jung

Abandoned Fragments - Franz Kafka

Philosophical Grammar - Ludwig Wittgenstein

The Gay Science - Friedrich Nietzsche

Hapworth 16, 1924 - JD Salinger

The Dream Machine - M. Mitchell Waldrop

leobg5• 4 years ago

+1 for The Gay Science.

And I would add Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Witosso• 4 years ago

“Orthodoxy” G.K Chesterton

throwawaybbq1• 4 years ago

"Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" - sort of like an autobiography of Richard Feynman but from recordings of some conversations. I'm a scientist and this resonated with me a lot.

"The Game" - very immature and sophomoric book. I was given this book by an acquaintance who was also geeky like me. I was painfully shy of girls until grad school, and this book gave me much needed confidence to talk to the opposite gender. A lot of the content is garbage but this book was definitely a life changer.

"Hobbit" - Great story that got me into the LOTR. Shorter than LOTR and hence why I put that on this list. Also about being brave I suppose. I'm seeing a pattern here.

"Good Omens" - Not sure why but when I read this book, I was convinced it was the best book ever written (and I used to read a lot of books in youth). Just witty writing and the occult I suppose.

BSOhealth• 4 years ago

"Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" is so good. I read it, or listen to the audio book through my library via Libby, at least once a year. It portrays Feynman as so “normal” relative to his achievements and then makes his ideas much more accessible, such as the Feynman lectures. Sort of the sense of, if he can do it so can I.

nicbou5• 4 years ago

My main takeaway from Feynman’s book was that it’s probably good to be more adventurous. He wasn’t just committed to a specific thing. He just generally followed his curiosity and great things came out of it.

vidarh• 4 years ago

"The Game" is certainly juvenile, but it's also a funny look at a very odd world at a point in time that also changed the industry it described massively by making people aware of the tactics and forcing the companies involved to massively reinvent themselves. It seems half of them doubled down on getting worse and creepier, and the other half tried - with varying success - to move to more mainstream self-help.

jokethrowaway• 4 years ago

Glad to see "the game" in here.

Not the most profound but definitely one of the most empowering for young men. In a society that constantly weakens men, receiving the message you can go out there and get what you want is powerful.

kingcharles• 4 years ago

The Game is a fantastic book, and Neil is a real stand-up guy. He's responsible for my first marriage.

rg1118• 4 years ago

There has only been three books so far that have changed my life-

1. "Sei Somoy" (Those Times) by Sunil Ganguly. It is a novel about the past of Bengalis. The Bengali Reneissance, its central characters, progress, the conflict- all are beautifully depicted. I had no collective identity as a person before. And disliked whatever I had. This book made me feel really good about my identity. Suddenly, I was more confident in a conscious way, and did things better.

2. "Maitreya Jatak" by Bani Basu. Buddha is a human character in this novel. And so is the time and place of India. The pre-big-Empire India is beautifully depicted. I got deeply interested in Buddha and that opened a new path of life for me, which transformed my life.

3. "Godel, Escher, Bach"- learned deeply about logic and its limitations. How human constructs such as mathematical symbols and human languages- all are so limited. Completely changed me as a person and gave me a new outlook.

There are other books that did not change my life completely, but added layers to my perception and thinking.

1. "The Black Swan" by N. Nicholas Taleb. It has added a filter to my entire thought process. I call it the Nicholas filter.

2. "Innovators" by Walter Isaacson. Learned about computer history, collaboration. The idea of " collaboration through time" got really etched into me.

3. "The Little Schemer", 4e and Graham Hutton's Haskell book made me a better programmer in ways I did not expect.

4. Strangly, Neal Stephenson's " Cryptonomicon" has taught me to never waste my time on entertainment or learning that is not fully ideal. The idea that something so profoundly good can exist for people like us, convinced me to read only very high quality literature of all kinds and sci-fi of only the highest kind. Also made me give up watching TV/web series to a large degree. I don’t compromise with the quality of entertainment that I consume anymore. I consume only the best and most desired things.

5. "Mastery" by Leonard Gordon has, above all, taught me that a boring life should be desired where the brain's desire for novelty is not awarded, and instead, time is spent on honing much fewer number of skills.

6. "Deep Work" by Cal Newport has really helped me with my productivity and happiness, and made me give up social media. Same goes for "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning" by Andy Hunt.

7. "Atomic Habits" by James Clear has been effective in many ways of my life.

8. "Mindfulness in Plain English", "The Mind Illuminated", and " What the Buddha Taught" have made me a better human- in all aspects. As if my character's level has been upped in the video game of the world.

9. "Fundamentals of Physics" by Halliday, Resnick, and Walker and my whole familiarity with Feynman through Feynman Lactures and recorded lectures made me intolerant towards dry learning materials. Now, I use learning material that are not marely useful, but also overly entertaining.

rmnull3• 4 years ago

Strangly, Neal Stephenson's " Cryptonomicon" ... The idea that something so profoundly good can exist for people like us, convinced me to read only very high quality literature of all kinds and sci-fi of only the highest kind. Also made me give up watching TV/web series to a large degree. I don’t compromise with the quality of entertainment that I consume anymore. I consume only the best and most desired things.

I have a hard time with this. Earlier i used stuff like imdb and goodreads to determine and then i realized i don't like more than half of what i consume. Later i started asking what my friends liked, and consumed as per their recommendations, had a similar experience but this time around whenever i didn't like something, i complained to my friend and we had long discussions about it sometimes spanning multiple days. i found this approach better even if it sometimes meant consuming the trend of the week. After doing that for an year or two i started doing to consume/save-for-later anything that remotely looked interesting. These days I'm still following that approach. i still come across a lot of cheap makes but i think these help me to judge what's good and what's not. I mostly bring up this argument as i strongly believe "best" is subjective And going by all time classics or other people's recommendations you may miss out a chance to discover for yourself what is truly best for you. This was a straw man argument. Ignore it if it doesn't apply to you. But i'm curious on how you determine what makes "highest kind" and "best" before consuming it.

"Mastery" by Leonard Gordon

I couldn't find this book.

rg1118• 4 years ago

Sorry, the author is George Leonard. My bad.

"Best", and "most desired" mean- I am not going to compromise with my choices for what is considered by others as worthy.

I will only consume what I want- what things best fit me- choice wise, genre wise, level wise, and so on.

lubien• 4 years ago

I read the whole bible as a kid then realized I wasn't a Christian.

If you're gonna ask what's my current religion well I've been asking myself that ever since.

arisAlexis2• 4 years ago

You don't need to have or find one

mpkc• 4 years ago

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936

The Economic History of the Jewish People

NateEag2• 4 years ago

Non-violent Communication, by Marshall Rosenberg. It taught me so much about how to empathize with someone and genuinely listen to what they're saying.

It's a bunch of very straightforward advice that I would never have gotten to on my own and which is _really_ hard to put into practice, but so worth it when you do.

canadaduane• 4 years ago

This one changed my life also. The diverse personalities and foreign cultures we all experience as "other" can be confusing--and for me, seemed to have no core theory that could broadly guide my interactions with people.

Non-violent Communication helped me to understand there is a shared underpinning to the experience of being human--that emotions are fundamental, and that there are some universal human needs. From that foundation, I could see how important it is to observe the context of any conversation with someone, and to react based on an empathic curiosity of their feelings & needs. This freed me from a more narrow reaction space that was based on my interpretation/story of the content of their communication.

Someone can be screaming "I hate you!" and be feeling hurt, alone, and scared. I think we recognize this most in connection with people we are close to and love, but don't know how for people we don't know or don't yet "love." Reacting to the content of someone's words vs. attempting to understand the contextual emotion & human needs almost always diverges into vastly different potential outcomes.

NateEag2• 4 years ago

Very well put. Thanks for sharing your experience!

asdfqwertzxcv• 4 years ago

Awareness by Anthony De Mello

I've been a follower of Eastern Philosophy for 20+ years and have also read most major religious and philosophical works, but during my reading of this book I experienced Satori, Englightenment, Awakening, Nirvana, 'Receiving The Gospel', whatever you want to call it.

Oddly enough, it happened to a friend after their reading it, too.

I haven't been the same, in the best way possible, ever since.

Anthony was well-read and traveled and his background as an Indian, Jesuit Priest and practicing psychologist put him at the perfect intersection of experience to deliver such a life-changing work that encompasses religion, science, relationships, your psyche, career, money, philosophy, spirituality, etc.

It's telling and (to me) validating of his mastery of life that, after his death, he was excommunicated from the church due to his 'blasphemous' works.

The ebook and audiobook are available for free here: https://archive.org/details/Awareness-AnthonyDeMello

Temporarily212• 4 years ago

I started reading it and already have finished 20 or so chapters. I started because I want to get to that place, I know I won’t in the near future and have stopped trying to get there but reading your comment made me curious “maybe there is some angle in the book that will shift something in me and I will be there, awoke”

rmnull3• 4 years ago

* Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

Among lot of books i've read this was the one that pushed me towards questioning my beliefs. Although i can't say this book made me irreligious it certainly was a gateway to a whole new world.

* Calvin and Hobbes.

this is one of those things that completely changed my perspective on creativity, oh and not to mention all the things about life and philosophy in there, its in good spirit.

* Animal Farm

This is arguably the best piece of satire I've read that is also fun and easy on the brain. It flows like water.

* The Little Schemer.

I hold this book dear. I've tried reading SICP twice and given up. And thought LISP was not for me. The environment was horrible, all those parens it was just confusing. This book changed that, what it encouraged me to do is grab a pen and paper and try to work everything out myself[1]. It was such a fun read and i owe most of my understanding of functional programming to this book. Few days after finishing this book, i introduced this book to my friend and we spent all our days discussing life listening to sufjan stevens and working through this book, it was a sweet time.

====

[1] I wrote my actual scheme programs on computer long after i had worked through the book(i don't recall exactly but it was after 5th or 6th chapter). An online friend of mine recommended that i try DrRacket as i could execute scheme there. It was a much friendlier environment.

coverclock• 4 years ago

"Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations" by Robert Austin [Dorset House, 1996].

Austin, who at the time he wrote this was an executive with Ford Motors Europe, was working on his Ph.D. in Organizational Research at (I dimly recall) Carnegie Mellon. He writes about "measurement dysfunction", when human resources etc. policies drive organizations sideways, based on his application of Agency Theory (an offshoot of Game Theory) to incentive programs. This book is based on his dissertation. Very short. Extremely readable. Completely changed my worldview.

arisAlexis2• 4 years ago

The unbearable lightness of being - Milan Kundera.

Found it in an airbnb I rented during a lockdown and made me buy a kindle and restart reading books.

bbrbb11• 4 years ago

Toxic parents, Susan Forward. Opened my eyes on issues with my parents and highlighted that it's not me being broken. First step to overcome my issues.

theowenyoung• 4 years ago

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again, by Johann Hari

Time and time again I made up my mind to focus, but it wasn't until I read this book that I actually did it.

lurker137• 4 years ago

The War of Art, Steven Pressfield

It's written in the same concise format as The Art of War by Sun Tzu, and it's just as dense with insights. I would encourage anyone to spend just 5 min reading the first few pages of Book Two here: https://aimeeknight.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/the-war-of-a...

ChrisMarshallNY• 4 years ago

The Design of Everyday Things[0], by Don Norman (I think that it's at its 3rd edition, but I preferred the second).

Once I read that book, I could never look at a door the same way. Just this morning, I encountered a "Norman Door."

[0] https://jnd.org/the-design-of-everyday-things-revised-and-ex...

maxharris• 4 years ago

https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Whitley%20Strieber%20-%20Th...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb

If you have questions, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (@maxharris9).

tagawa• 4 years ago

How to win friends and influence people.

tyroh• 4 years ago

The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey: Made me realize that trust is essential in human interactions. Helped me through my businesses, career, and community building.

Atomic Habits by James Clear: Read a lot about habits before but this really kickstarted my focus on living healthy and staying consistent.

rotanibmocy2• 4 years ago

Brave new world

mike128• 4 years ago

No more mr nice guy.

The power of your subconscious mind.

hypertexthero• 4 years ago

The First and Last Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti, with a forward by Aldous Huxley.

I read it while living in California, during a trying time after deciding to move far away from my parents, and it helped me see all of life in a calm new light.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_and_Last_Freedom

damontal• 4 years ago

I can never seem to get to the heart of what Krishnamurthi is trying to say. I just find myself getting lost in his words. I can’t tell if there’s no there there or if I’m just not understanding his angle.

wnolens• 4 years ago

I don't get that much out of him. He starts off sounding very profound, but then makes a statement that doesn't compute. And then his arrogance makes him unable to explain himself further (see youtube clips).

ghoomketu• 4 years ago

I really like his audiobooks and it does make a lot of sense when listening to him but I have never been able to apply much of it in my real life.

While I certainly agree that there is no place in the world for calling yourself a Hindu, muslim, christian etc, it's hard to isolate yourself from your nation and say we're all humans and I'm not a ukranian or russian or indian.

Same for stuff like 'I don't mind what happens.' Little stuff bothers me (like my tenant not paying rent, or say hacker news banning my account, and stuff which may not be of any significance on the cosmic scale). To say it doesn't bother me makes me even more anxious and feel like an impostor instead.

breckenedge• 4 years ago

Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August about the first month of WWI. Got me interested in reading more history, and I think history has so much to teach us, but my quest really started with her and has branched out from there.

Tuchman often points out the critical mistake or mistakes that lead to the collapse of a crucial offensive that basically ends a country’s ability to succeed at war.

jdougan• 4 years ago

I'd have to spend a lot more time for a comprehensive list, but I can easily throw out a couple:

"Computer Lib/Dream Machines" Theodor Nelson - a vision of a better computing future that sticks with me.

"Courtship Rite", "The Moon Goddess and the Son", "Psychohistorical Crisis" Donald Kingsbury - sociologicaly based SF that forced me to think way outside of my cultural assumptions. TMGATS is particularly relevant given the events in Ukraine.

kaladin-jasnah6• 4 years ago

The Stormlight Archive (series) by Brandon Sanderson has probably changed my life the most. I don't think I've enjoyed a book as much or have had one mean as much to me as I've have with this series.

The series is incredibly inspirational since despite being a high fantasy novel. In fear of spoiling the plot, I'm being vague: it tracks the stories of (multiple) people who go through difficult life situations and learn to heal from depressive moments while having incredibly, intricate worldbuilding (which is excellent for taking your mind off of reality) and a twisty plot. If you go on the subreddit for this series, r/stormlight_archive, you'll see people talking about how this book (literally) saved their lives. I can tell you that in the most off-putting moments of life reading inspirational scenes from the Stormlight Archive has helped me stand up again. The messages and themes about life are simple, but also on-point. Overall, an excellent series. I recommend it.

vesche2• 4 years ago

Thanks for being vague, I just started The Way of Kings last week. I've read Elantris and the first Mistborn trilogy from Sanderson. I'm roughly half way into this first book of The Stormlight Archive and I've already come to the conclusion that this likely is my favorite of his work.

I very much agree with your thoughtful sentiment. I've been wondering if the story of Joseph from the Bible had influence on Kaladin's character (Sanderson is a Christian). And Dalinar's character has me thinking about re-reading texts such as Meditations by Marcus Aurelius & Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo. These early assessments might be very wrong as I'm still early in the series, but the book definitely has me feeling inspired and motivated thus far.

kaladin-jasnah6• 4 years ago

I've also read nearly every other Sanderson book after Stormlight. While they're still quite good, none of them quite compare to the depth or significance of the Stormlight Archive.

I'm not Christian and as such am not familiar with Biblical stores, but I would be inclined to agree that the messages Sanderson conveys in Stormlight could perhaps be derived from those stories. However, something that strikes me is that Sanderson mentions faith and religious conflict in all his novels, but seems to transcend a singular true faith (eg. in portraying Jasnah's atheism, I've seen people mention her reasons for rejecting God are surprisingly accurate to what real people believe, and Sanderson attributed that to spending time on atheist forums to understand their beliefs better).

the book definitely has me feeling inspired and motivated thus far.

I found Rhythm of War to be the most (read: exceptionally) inspirational and motivational of the four novels (followed by Words of Radiance) , so I would wager that there will be much more in terms of inspiration in the following novels. And good luck with your reading journey! The Stormlight Archive was truly a wonderful experience to read (and I've re-read it since then) and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

"Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination."

barry-cotter• 4 years ago

Sanderson is a Christian

To be more specific and accurate he’s a Mormon. I’m told that the Cosmere owes a lot to Mormon theology, like the henotheism, embodiment of God and non-trinitarianism.

derangedHorse• 4 years ago

I think I read the first 3 books of this series (didn't finish the 3rd book), and if you liked it I would also recommend his Mistborn book and the A Song of Ice and Fire (the books behind Game of Thrones). I actually drifted towards Sanderson after looking for more fantasy books like Game of Thrones. The Arcane Ascension series by Andrew Rowe is also top-tier.

kaladin-jasnah6• 4 years ago

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll definitely look into them (especially A Song of Ice and Fire since I've received many suggestions for it from people who've seen me reading the Stormlight Archive). Never heard of the Arcane Ascension, but I'll look into it.

While not completed, I've also read the Gentleman Bastard series and the Kingkiller Chronicle which were also suggested to me since I read Stormlight and I really enjoyed them as well (although, well, not as much as the Stormlight Archive).

kirso2• 4 years ago

I have heard so much about Sanderson but never read anything. Where should I start?

kaladin-jasnah6• 4 years ago

I recommend starting with Stormlight, but if you want to fully understand it, you should probably read the first Mistborn book before Rhythm of War and Warbreaker before Oathbringer (Warbreaker is probably my second-favourite Sanderson book, due to its "wholesomeness"). You should also read the novellas as you get through Stormlight, but I believe Dawnshard has far more more plot significance than Edgedancer. Mistborn is pretty good, but it's not as meaningful or deep as Stormlight.

Bhilai2• 4 years ago

I would highly recommend it. If you wanna go systemically, look up guides on how to go about Cosmere. Or you could start anywhere. Stromlight is definitely,imo,his best work.

JonathanBuchh• 4 years ago

There is a page titled "Where do I start?" on Brandon Sanderson's website: https://www.brandonsanderson.com/where-do-i-start/

Bhilai2• 4 years ago

+1 I loved Stormlight Archive so much that I read it twice and I would probably read some chapters over and over. The struggles of various characters with past failures and the way they overcome it gives me hope for myself. Not only the mental health angle is really meaningful, the whole storyline is super interesting. Anyway, I can keep going on and on about these books. You have to read them at least twice to appreciate the intricacies and subplots.

kaladin-jasnah6• 4 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree and I read it twice as well. It's also the only book or series I've ever had the heart to read twice. It was just that good, and every time you read it, you pick up on new details and it's just as refreshing and beautiful as the first time.

jowday• 4 years ago

Gravity’s Rainbow

nprateem3• 4 years ago

The Red Queen - cleared up dating once and for all

woodruffw• 4 years ago

I list mine here: https://yossarian.net/junk/bookrecs

azhenley• 4 years ago

The Design of Everyday Things.

PopAlongKid• 4 years ago

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth - R. Buckminster Fuller

earthboundkid• 4 years ago

The Essential Haiku by Robert Hass.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

Walden - Thoreau

Meditations - Aurelius

Simply existing can be exhilarating.

leobg5• 4 years ago

“Becoming Animal” might be over you might enjoy as well.

every• 4 years ago

Dandelion Wine - Ray Bradbury

Murder in the Cathedral - T. S. Eliot

Our Town - Thornton Wilder

exdsq• 4 years ago

Terry Pratchetts Disc World novels. Endless quotes and jokes that I think about on a weekly basis if not more.

ZeroClickOk• 4 years ago

Holy Bible

User232• 4 years ago

The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Going into detail would get too personal, but reading that book as a young man changed my understanding of our experience of being and my life took paths it otherwise never would have.

HeyLaughingBoy• 4 years ago

Alistair McLean's HMS Ulysses was probably the main reason I ended up in nautical school and getting an engineering degree while being trained to be a merchant ship's navigation officer. Although it was a WWII story, his description of life on ships crossing the North Sea in winter for some insane reason made me want to do it. The people I met, the places I went and the things I did during that period set the stage for the rest of my life in ways I really can't explain.

alasdairking• 4 years ago

Amazing book. The guy with the hatch. Understated heroism. Amazing.

rubyfan• 4 years ago

Bhagavad Gita

I read it in my mid 20s and it helped me stop worrying.

dhosek• 4 years ago

The dictionary. Specifically, a large one on a pedestal stand in the children's section of my local library.

I looked up my name, as one is wont to do as a child, and saw next to “Don,” an entry which read “Don Quixote, see Quixote, Don.” Wow! There was something with my name in it and it had a Q and an X! I, of course, turned to the Qs, read the entry, not only for “Quixote, Don” but also for “quixotic” and “quixotism” and thought, “I like the idea of being quixotic.”

I then, read the bowdlerized children's version of Don Quixote that they had in the children's section and returned to the book many times over the years that followed.

One day in high school, a friend who had graduated came by to visit the band teacher and had a book in his hand that he was reading, Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene. He described it as “Don Quixote is a Catholic priest and Sancho Panza is the communist ex-mayor of El Toboso.” I went to the library the next day and checked out their copy of the book and loved it. I proceeded to read every book that the library had by Graham Greene and became imbued with his world view (it probably helped that I was inclined in that direction already) and it gradually led to my becoming Catholic 7 years later. My love of Greene also influenced me in becoming a writer (something to which I was already inclined) and he and J. D. Salinger are the two most obvious influences in my writing to this day.

cutler3• 4 years ago

"Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey Friedl. While reading Dreamweaver 3 Bible I became intrigued by the Find And Replace options which included regular expressions. At the end of the chapter was a reference to Friel's classic and I found a copy in a local London library. That led me to "Programming Perl" by Larry Wall and the beginning of my career as a developer. The O'Reilly Perl collection is unsurpassed to this day.

nnadams• 4 years ago

I came here to post that same book!

When I was a kid I wanted to make an IRC chatbot. I didn't know much, but I read online you could use regular expressions to match text commands. I felt like I needed a book, saved up money, and got my mom to drive me to the next town. Our little library didn't have any computer books. I remember her paging through and asking if I really wanted this "technical manual".

Mastering Regular Expressions was the start to my programming career as well. Having references to a bunch of other languages spurred my curiosity to learn them. I eventually bought some of the O'Reilly Perl books as well.

cutler3• 4 years ago

When you say "kid" do you mean teenage or younger? I was 39 when I started-out with Perl and server-side programming.

haroldp• 4 years ago

This was my first real "programming" book, and my first O'Reilly animal book and it changed the course of my life in a real and tangible sense. I read it cover to cover and did all off the exercises, and then moved right on to Learning Perl. To this day, I watch people struggle with regexes or dismiss them, but I'm done finding what they were looking for before they can finish complaining.

cutler3• 4 years ago

The appeal of Perl when I chose my first "real" programming language, after using Javascript for browser compatibility hacks, was that it was designed by a linguist with regular expressions built into the language as first class citizens. My flatmate at the time, who worked for a bank, was trying to persuade me that Java was the future but I took one look at Java's regex implementation, where you have to escape regex metacharacters, and nearly threw up. Java 17 still hasn't fixed this even after adding raw string literals.

koboll• 4 years ago

She Comes First.

Pretty much the sole reason I've been told over and over again for the past decade that ours was "the best sex [they've] ever had".

If you have sex with women, you need to read it.

charlieyu12• 4 years ago

I like “Sex God method” when it comes to bedtime. Contrary to its name, it just tells you to do whatever you want when you are doing it

shaunxcode• 4 years ago

The dispossessed

issa3• 4 years ago

Difficult to pick just one, but I will go with The Stainless Steel Rat. It was a great introduction to the idea that society's rules don't always make sense. I haven't read it since I was in grade school, so I don't know if anyone older would enjoy it. But it definitely planted the seeds of anarchism, hacking, punk, and not taking rules too seriously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stainless_Steel_Rat

jackthetab• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stainless_Steel_Rat

Yes, us olds would, and did, enjoy it. I Was in my early 30's when I read them.

Now I'm getting nostalgic and need to go back and read them. Tsundoku is such a bad/good/fun addiction...

issa3• 4 years ago

I think I'm going to dig out my copies too. Enjoy!

charlieyu12• 4 years ago

Book on Pook on dating. Rich Dad Poor Dad on finance in general

joddystreet• 4 years ago

Behave - Robert Sapolsky https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31170723-behave

nnx• 4 years ago

The Fabric of The Cosmos by Brian Greene

Mind-bending explanations of modern physics and how our Newtonian intuition is far from reality.

BeFlatXIII• 4 years ago

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It re-inspired my desire to read fiction. It's an internet rabbit hole crystallized into paper.

wildrhythms• 4 years ago

The Color Purple - Even on re-reading I get emotional because the story is so powerful and impactful to me.

ebb_earl_co• 4 years ago

Sam Harris' Waking Up. My time on Earth is best partitioned into before and after I started the project of spirituality without religion (the book's subtitle).

Rylex• 4 years ago

- Most books by Roger Zelazny. The guy code write with a few words, he could paint an amazing picture. Chronicles of Amber, Lord of Light, Isle of the Dead, etc... - And a trashy Candyman , https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2020/05/10/book-review..., not the one everyone is used to, this was so mind boggling to a 13 year old....

karmelapple2• 4 years ago

How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships by Leil Lowndes

This book helped me handle introductions, small talk, and getting to know people better at a deeper level with so much less anxiety than I ever had before.

The biggest lesson I learned was to try and give the “spotlight” of who’s talking and what the subject is back to others frequently. It’s a simple concept, but the book is helpful in clarifying why it’s important and how to do it.

da39a3ee• 4 years ago

The Selfish Gene.

It made me want to become a biologist, and a computer programmer, and it confirmed childhood suspicions about religious belief.

clivestaples• 4 years ago

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Specifically the chapter called Nice People or New Men.

tzs• 4 years ago

Asimov’s collections of his science columns from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I bought several of these collections starting maybe a couple years before high school through when I left for college, and I’m reasonably sure they were an important factor in my developing a serious STEM interest.

Existenceblinks4• 4 years ago

None, seriously. Sorry for not giving any inspiration. I have only read technical books like Static/Dynamics mechanics, TCP/IP, Material Science, mostly engineering stuff etc. Because I wouldn't want much reading about someone else's opinion or view of truth. People may find they are useful for learning broad spectrum of perspective, but I find that they all fall into limited set of views that I never be surprised to know, actually almost anything is not new to me (i am yet too old though).

Update more info:

I'm a really fun at party guy and used to read adventurous fictions (text and audio), lots of entertaining, individual-help, business-help kind of books, they are all just opinions, not even statistical useful because you manually collect just one data point per book. Use science based knowledge and can get stuff done and be able to make money, that will make much more impact to life and family!

Existenceblinks4• 4 years ago

Downvote? For science based books and non fictions? OP asks for what books changed your life, not books you like. You could say every single book changed your life, but that is as useful as my answer that said none.

jesuslop3• 4 years ago

I upvoted, audience should not confuse disagreement with inapropriateness. If you disagree, explain in a reply why.

Existenceblinks4• 4 years ago

Just finished taking a shower, I came up with a book that made significant impact on my life. When I was in high school, I saw my close friend carrying a robotic book around since he was into robotic competition, it woke me up from just singing some rap songs. I was like .. I had to get into something cool in sci-math field, then that day I was in computer class that taught Microsoft Office stuff and save work in floppy disk. At that time I just know programming exists but had no idea how it actually works. I reached out teacher and asked "please teach me programming", he said like .. nah getting good at Office stuff I taught you first. That's fair but I wanted to be as cool as my (robotic) friend. I went to a book shop, picked up a "Programming C" book and also bought "Turbo C++" CD. That is the moment I know what major I was going to get into at university.

So the book that actually probably changed life quite significantly is my friend's robotic book that I didn't read.

mywaifuismeta• 4 years ago

How old are you? I used to be like you, but ever since I've hit mid-30s I started to find more fulfillment in books that are not engineering and science focused. Unless it's something directly relevant to what I'm currently working on, I would end up never using concepts from scientific books in real life and forget them after a couple of years. And if I really need to learn something relevant to my current work, I can do it "on-demand" anytime, without needing to be proactive about it.

On the other hand, books that change the way to think about life can have a more profound long lasting impact, even if they are just opinions.

Existenceblinks4• 4 years ago

I am a couple years younger than you. For non-technical stuff, I'm more comfortable with video format, and there's going to be several videos on the same topic, better than getting narrow story from single book. Podcast is kinda ok too. Knowledge these days need competitions, you likely to just buy single book for a set of topic based on reviews. But for video or audio content, there are plenty!

nsantos2• 4 years ago

- The Dune books. The depth of everything in it awes me. Every time I re-read them, I find some nuance I missed from the last reading. The way it portrays politics, religion, and basically the entangled web of life in general blew my mind when I first read it, and still does.

- Bio of a Space Tyrant series by Piers Anthony. I'm not sure I can put into words how it has impacted me, though, but it has. I guess it's more of a visceral reaction? I can't honestly say I can relate to the protagonist, since I've never been in his shoes (and I hope to never be; having every one in your family---save for one of your sisters---murdered, raped, or raped-then-murdered by pirates isn't exactly something to ascribe to). I love how Hope (the protagonist) can empathize with pretty much anyone, though---at least eventually; and I guess I relate to how deeply he feels things.

- Pretty much everything by Heinlein. It has once again become fashionable (I think it goes on in cycles) to shit on Heinlein's works, and I get where naysayers are coming from. Heinlein himself always maintained he wrote primarily to entertain, even though he can get kind of preachy at times.

The very first Heinlein I got my hands on was The Number of the Beast--, while I was a teenager. Flying cars, non-benevolent Other Beings, multiverses possibly made manifest through the sheer act of imagining it... For a kid who dreamt of one day becoming a nuclear physicist after having watched ST:TOS (Scotty is mah boy), that book was revelatory. Every Heinlein I've read after that has just gone on and contributed to who I am as person today: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land (both editions), To Sail Beyond the Sunset, et al.

It's almost literally impossible for me to overstate how much Heinlein's works has shaped who I am as a person, regardless of whatever flaws others might ascribe to his work.

thorin• 4 years ago

I loved Heinlein, but he's not very PC/Woke and it's probably quite dated now. Also very few people in the UK were into it, compared to America. My friends dad introduced both of us, he had stacks of sci fi from second hand shops. He was also the first person I knew who had an IBM compatible PC, as he wanted to "be an author".

nsantos2• 4 years ago

Definitely not PC/woke by today's standards. But by the standards of the time, his writing was routinely considered to be scandalous, especially his latter works. It helps, as with everything, to put things into context.

Although, even I, fanatic that I am, would have a really hard time trying to explain his Sixth Column.

But I'd like to imagine that he would have continued to become more socially progressive over the years, and would probably be loudly advocating for even more progressive ideals today, if he were alive today.

DoreenMichele• 4 years ago

Diet for a small planet and the followup book by I believe her sister called Recipes for a small planet for which she wrote the intro.

The first half of the first book is about the political causes of hunger in the world and advocates for vegetarianism as an antidote to such. The intro to the followup book states that protein complementarity is easier than she made it out to be and she regretted making it sound harder than it is.

It's one of the reasons I eat a semi vegetarian diet. Changing my diet has had a big impact on my health and feeling like how I live makes a difference helps protect me from the sense of doom about climate change and what not that many people seem to have.

It also made me feel like there is no need for this to be such a polarizing us-vs-them topic. She talks about how "eating one less (grain fed) hamburger " makes a difference , so we can change the world with relatively small changes to our own behavior. It doesn't require extremist positions.

AngeloAnolin• 4 years ago

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

While technically many people will consider this as a child's book, the lessons and teachings on this book will be timeless and be relevant in whatever stage you are in your life. This has profoundly impacted my life in more ways than I can imagine and I am going to pass this book to my kids as they up.

jkingsbery• 4 years ago

Besides ones already mentioned, a suggestion I'd like to throw out is the writings of GK Chesterton. I've heard many engineers cite "Chesterton's fence," the idea that you shouldn't get rid of something until you understand why it's there in the first place (which, naturally comes up a lot in software engineering). I haven't come across many engineers though that have actually read one of his books.

His non-fiction books are easy to read and full of lots of wonderful turns-of-phrase. A lot of what he wrote back in the day sounds like it could be written today. There is a fair amount of his books that was very of-the-moment, making references to people from the time that I suppose were well known then that you need to read around.

I've only read two of his fiction books (Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man who was Thursday), both of which are really funny.

lostcolony• 4 years ago

Would recommend Manalive amongst his fiction works. Better if you go into it blind than if you read a synopsis.

VohuMana• 4 years ago

For me The Nordic Theory of Everything by Anu Partanen really upended my thoughts and opinions on systems in the United States.

MaceOutWindu• 4 years ago

Was forced to read All Quiet on the Western Front a while back in my high school english class.

All Quiet really shows the suffering of war.

elevaet• 4 years ago

Lord of the Rings captured my imagination so profoundly as a kid there's no way it didn't change my life.

philliphaydon• 4 years ago

I wouldn’t say life changing but the book. The Inmates Are Running The Asylum. It really made me think differently about software design and how users interact with it. I think a lot of “ux” people would benefit from reading it because many “ux” experts seem to get so much wrong.

robg• 4 years ago

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankyl

jonah• 4 years ago

Finite and Infinite Games Paperback – by James Carse

"Play" with the purpose of continuing play rather than ending by winning.

The Design of Everyday Things – by Don Norman

See the details of the ways we interact with the world around.

CraftingLinks• 4 years ago

Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett, when I was 15, 25 years ago. I was already less than sympathetic to the whole God idea, but that book was the revelation that made it all click. I still remember the moment, p.53 or so, when he explained how a simple algo and a few billion years could explain all biology we see around us. As a kid, i was simply stunned,i immediately embraced the idea and it's consequences and never looked back.

codazoda• 4 years ago

Handbook of BASIC, Third Edition by David I. Schneider published in 1988

This book probably launched my career in programming. When the book wore out, I carefully cut off the spine, hole punched it, and moved it into a 3-ring binder. I still have it.

It’s a complete reference to the language I cut my teeth on as a teenager. The appendix was particularly useful.

sebmellen• 4 years ago

Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, undoubtedly.

vishnugupta• 4 years ago

Debt: The First 5000 Years

It’s difficult for me to put in words the influence the book had and continues to have on me.

QED by Richard Feynman is a close second. It pulled a veil off from my eyes, made me really understand what science is all about.

systemvoltage• 4 years ago

QED +1. Legendary book, changed the way I look at the world forever.

peterfield• 4 years ago

Life 3.0 Max Tegmark Elevation series David Brin

marius-nicoara• 4 years ago

Galileo's Defence, by Octavian Paler

Imagines Galileo Galilei dealing with the fact that he recanted his theory that the Earth moved around the Sun.

A wonderful meditation on truth and love.

https://www.amazon.com/Galileos-Defence-Octavian-Paler/dp/97...

vincentmarle• 4 years ago

Nassim Taleb’s books made me throw out everything I learned during my 4 college years in economics: in particular Fooled by Randomness and Antifragile.

sleightofmind• 4 years ago

I'll get to Taleb, really. I can't say that any book changed my life. The Christian Bible shaped it, as I was forced live with it as a child and young adult (although the thought that I was "forced" did not occur to me til much later in life). I'm no longer religious, but neither do I share the sciento-athiest's belief in something from nothing, or accidental "is". To me they (sciento-athiests and religious teachers) are just warring priesthoods, the ancient and the modern, both pretending to knowledge they do not possess and can never rationally hope to possess. Please do not conflate my coinage of sciento-athiest with scientist -- overlap is possible, but that's not the fault of the honest scientist.

But Taleb, despite what at times seems to me nearly unbearable self-serving pomposity, gets at some real truths in both of the books mentioned. Oddly they are the only two Taleb books I've read. Of the two, I found Antifragile the better. I read it fairly carefully despite my inclination to skim at times. I'm glad I did. A careful reading makes it clear that he carefully qualifies the limits of antifragile strategies. And it took some repeated explication from Taleb to see that the idea he was poking at was subtle, important, and nowhere near as obvious as my initial reaction would have indicated.

pkdpic• 4 years ago

Remembrance of Earths Past Trilogy, Ministry for the Future, Wild Sheep Chase

leobg5• 4 years ago

How I love and hate these threats. I know I will read them. And I also know that afterwards, my Voice Dream Reader library is going to be filled with weeks worth of new books. Weeks worth in the sense that I would need weeks to read everything if I did nothing else and never slept and could digest 24/7. Oh that dread!

Anyway, my top candidate. Surely has been mentioned already:

- Peter Thiel, Zero to One. Has been worth literally millions to me. I wish I had read it sooner. Then again, “The student is ready, the teacher appears”. When you read something might be just as important as what you read.

Thanks for the thread.

cnorthwood• 4 years ago

Utopia for Realists, by Rutger Bregman

sixstringtheory• 4 years ago

So many great books I’ve enjoyed are mentioned here. And it’s hard to pick just one that’s changed my life, many have.

But in the interest of variety in this thread, I’ll throw out Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. It inspired me to go deeper in my beloved cooking practice towards growing food and hunting, and through all that I’ve found much gratitude for and understanding of life and what humanity has gone through to get us to this point.

Over a decade later and I’m still working towards a simpler and more fulfilling lifestyle.

nicbou5• 4 years ago

If you want to further develop that gratitude, you might like At Home by Bill Bryson (and everything else he wrote, really)

readonthegoapp• 4 years ago

Deterring Democracy by Noam Chomskyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterring_Democracy

more devastating than inspirational.

at least, at first.

atlgator• 4 years ago

Rich Dad Poor Dad

jl6• 4 years ago

I don’t think any book has caused the direction of my life to suddenly turn on a heel. I have found the influence of reading to be slow and incremental.

The most pivotal that springs to mind is The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, read as an early teen. I think this is what fully opened my eyes to the world of nerdishness out of which I have built a career and which has shaped my interests.

ilovwindows• 4 years ago

I wish I had read following books when I was a teenager or my parents had read them. Never too late though. These books changed my life.

1. The power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

Helped me stay present. Helped me overcome past regrets and future stresses

2. Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David D. Burns

Helped me understand how my thought process was impacting my mood and fueling anxiety

3. Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High

Saved my failing relationship

4. The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Helped me overcome some of my compulsive behaviors

throwaway20011• 4 years ago

Pretty much anything I could find by Isaac Asimov.

rebhan• 4 years ago

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4069.Man_s_Search_for_Me...

from Victor Frankl, Auschwitz survivor and founder of Logotherapy.

cookiengineer• 4 years ago

I'm was a network engineer and I have to admit I wouldn't be on the peer-to-peer path I took if I wouldn't have read the book "Honeybee Democracy".

It's an amazing non programming related book that teaches a working concept of swarm intelligence and their communication algorithms and behaviours. In the networked computers world this has so many potential applications, especially when you have to think outside the box to be able to scale and analyze network traffic patterns.

nicbou5• 4 years ago

How to win friends and influence people, at an early age. It’s a manual for being pleasant to work with and seeking mutual benefit. Despite the title, it describes a very genuine way to act.

Surely you’re joking Mr Feynman. It inspired me to be curious for the sake of curiosity, and not just in my field. It made me a little more adventurous. What gripped me wasn’t the science, it was the ants and the bongos.

Grapes of wrath. It’s poverty explained to those who never experienced it. This book just sticks with me. I can see why they make students read it. It’s also a damn good book.

No more Mr Nice Guy. Plot twist: you’re not nice, you’re insincere and manipulative. Don’t shame people into giving back. If you want your needs met, ask for things. Be nice when you mean it, not as a tool to earn approval.

Wages of Destruction. This book doesn’t explain what happened from 1933 to 1945, but why. It added contextual clarity to a topic I’ve been reading about for years. It changed how I perceive other historical events too. It’s not a casual read though.

rendx• 4 years ago

Louise Hay: You Can Heal Your Life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can_Heal_Your_Life

"by 2008, over 35 million copies worldwide had been sold in over 30 languages, becoming the best-selling non-fiction book of all time"

itsmejeff• 4 years ago

W1nning - Tim Grover

Never Split the Difference - Chriss Voss

Three Laws of Performance - Steve Zaffron

Peak - Anders Ericsson

All of these books fall into the category of rounding out my world view. I’m an engineer, and spent nearly 100% of 10-12 years of my life (school plus early career) focused solely on engineering topics. These books have made me drastically more effective at achieving personal and professional goals, especially ones that require cooperation of other people.

theodric• 4 years ago

Thoreau, Walden - simplicity, rejection of societal expectations. The chapter on economy is delightfully technical.

Toffler, Future Shock - the danger to societal cohesion and human wellness caused by constant, rapid, paradigm-breaking change.

Kaczynski, Industrial Society and its Future - like the two above, but more modern, frighteningly prescient, and with some unfortunate baggage attached. Still, it's short, and worth a read.

While not originally books, solar.lowtechmagazine.com now offers POD versions of their essays. They routinely introduce dead-end technologies to the reader that are often simpler and easier for a person to create and maintain at home, and which often confer a greater degree of independence than their mass-market analogues.

I don't necessarily recommend wading through countless pages of psuedomythical waffling, but Crowley's Thelemic concept of True Will - that is, the real goal you want to achieve, rather than whatever pure hedonism happens to have caught your brain-corvid's attention at the moment - is a useful framework for prioritizing. Does it further the goal directly, or indirectly, or does it hinder the goal? In this way, you can avoid wasting time and effort.

I found good stuff in Heidegger, but I don't think it's worth your time to grind through it. Just look up the Cliff's Notes for 'Sein und Zeit.'

So what did I get out of all that?

-I started to question what it was I really wanted to get out of life.

-I decided I wanted more independence and liberty.

-I decided I didn't like the direction tech was going, and wanted out.

-I stopped being quite as materialistic. I'm still extremely materialistic, but I'm working on it.

-I refocused my effort on amassing something like "F-U money" (for about ten years).

-I spent a lot of time flailing for what to do next, but eventually became obsessed with small-scale, high-intensity regenerative agriculture, and decided that was it.

-I spent a bunch of the saved money to buy myself a farm in Ireland, and will eventually pivot to full-time farming and part-time anti-materialism-- and away from tech. (At the moment, I'm still milking my Swiss job to fund startup costs and avoid the need to bootstrap or raid my nest egg, but the pivot day is in sight.)

-I have something to look forward to that isn't just constant obsolecence of skills and an ever-accelerating race to the bottom.

noema• 4 years ago

In Search of Lost Time (Proust) -- the definitive portrait of life, memory and experience

Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty) -- groundbreaking analysis of "the thickness of things" implicit within perception

Labyrinths (Borges) -- masterful explorations of time, thought, infinity... certain passages of this collection surface in my mind on a weekly basis

Civilization and Capitalism (Braudel) -- telescopes seamlessly from the microscale to the macroscale, granting a synoptic view of the modern world

irchans• 4 years ago

Personal Power - Robbins, How to win friends and influence people - Carnegie, Feeling Good - Burns, Godel Esher Bach - Hofstadter, Fundamentals of Physics - Halliday and Resnick, Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Bach, The Commodore 64 User Manual, "Stocks for the Long Run", The Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide - Gygax, Dune - Herbert

alcal74• 4 years ago

I read Fooled By Randomness while in business school and it completely changed the way I think about economic systems.

meristohm• 4 years ago

The Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler [0], because it helped change and focus my values around extending the story of life on earth in an unbroken way thousands of years into the future, so that people can look back on history with greater understanding. I grew to accept my own death more fully, and to live it like a book rather than an endless MMORPG.

[0] https://www.worldcat.org/title/parable-of-the-sower/oclc/125...

kcartlidge6• 4 years ago

- Total Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Initially this came across as shallow truths masquerading as profundity, especially with his unwillingness/inability to explain himself during discussions. Finally I read enough that some things just 'clicked' into place and my perspectives shifted along with my outlook on life.

- Letters from the Desert by Carlo Carretto (first half).

I was brought up a protestant so was never really exposed to catholic thought in my formative years. When I finally started exploring the classics for myself I found them often overly wordy and mystical, so I moved on to more modern (relatively speaking) works like this and the Way of the Pilgrim too. The simplicity of the writing and the clarity of the thoughts in the first few chapters of Letters from the Desert hit me hard.

- The Quran

A wonderfully phrased book that captures its times very well. Ideally to be read alongside something like Islam: A Short History or Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, both by Karen Armstrong, to provide the context.

As an aside the Qu'ran is available for free online in audio format both as interlinear English/Arabic but also as Arabic only, and as a non-speaker of Arabic I often find listening to it being chanted a very calming and uplifting experience despite having no clue what is being said.

- Getting Real by 37 Signals.

As a programmer/developer/engineer since the late 1980s this was a revelation, bringing a clarity to my own thoughts and feelings about much of the world of enterprise software development. Very obvious points in retrospect that nobody ever (including me) seemed to have realised during my entire career before then.

- Web Copy that Sells by Maria Veloso.

A strange choice, given that there is nothing 'profound' in here. What it is, though, is a very well written book on persuasion which finally got me to see that I'd spent years avoiding 'sales' as something that wasn't for me whereas in reality it's for everyone and we do it all the time.

- The Body by Charles Colson.

Colson was jailed for his part in the Nixon stuff, then became a Christian. It's an incredibly moving book which is not his autobiography but an analysis of what is going wrong with the church. The impact comes from the stories he relates at the start of the chapters (especially the opening ones about 9/11). Those tales gave me an understanding of the potential 'greatness' in people.

nthobe• 4 years ago

The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll. It really crystallized how to approach problems by continually drilling down through the layers to find what's really going on.

athinkingmeat• 4 years ago

The book on the taboo against knowing who you are by Alan Watts. It has changed my life for sure, I am actually still tripping for the last of ten years or so after reading it. Is it for the better? I don't know it yet.

karkehan• 4 years ago

"The World Jones Made" by Philip K. Dick. Like much of his work it feels depressing and melancholy, however there is one paragraph, just one, that turns the story on its head. It is so thoroughly provocative and mind-bending that it made me re-evaluate my perspective on reality. A very Philip K. Dick thing to do.

kull• 4 years ago

Alan Watts, but rather than his books I recommend to start with audiobook with his lectures.

nurettin• 4 years ago

I really liked the sword of truth series from terry goodkind more than any other novel series I've read.

It isn't just medieval fantasy, there is a lot to take from his views on politics, human interaction and freedom.

haakonhr• 4 years ago

A good chance reflect. There are several:

- A Conferedancy of Dunces, Peter O'Toole: tragic, hilarious and absurd

- Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Taleb: this was my first exposure to a lot of biases and other interesting phenomena

- The Design of Everything Things: eye-opener!

Harry Potter, Tolkien, Dune and a lot of other sci-fi has also affected me, although I find it hard to point out one in particular. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein stands out a bit.

raymond_goo• 4 years ago

The Trial by Franz Kafka!!!

yboris• 4 years ago

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most - by three researchers at Harvard that have spent over a decade helping resolve challenging interpersonal conflicts. I read in it in my early 20s and have been using the framework they recommend for numerous conversations (even the not difficult ones). It makes for better communication and understanding between parties. Can recommend!

https://www.amazon.com/Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-What-...

AhmedMHassan• 4 years ago

The Quran, have you wondered what is inside it?

EdwardWarren• 4 years ago

I'll Cry Tomorrow. By Lillian Roth. Lillian Roth was an American actress who was an alcoholic. Because of some tragic events in my childhood and because of my nature I believed that I would have become an alcoholic as well. The book, along with other influences, convinced me to never take a drink of alcohol. I never did. You can't become an alcoholic if you never take a drink. I have 5 or 6 friends/co-workers/relatives that I know are alcoholics whose lives are ruled by alcohol. They live absolutely miserable lives. My life was definitely changed by that book.

Ask HN: What book changed your life?

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