"Pragmatics of Human Communication" by Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin Bavelas, and Donald D. Jackson followed by "How Real is Real?" by the same author.
Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
321–330 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#322The Brothers Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky. At the time I didn't realize that it changed me, but looking back on it, the perspectives I learned from it fundamentally how I viewed and understood other people.
It’s so good. I just finished reading the Constance Garnett translation and it’s just gripping all the way through. Well, I guess apart from Zossima’s life story in the middle, but that definitely has its place. The Gutenberg HTML of it is definitely a labour of love and extremely high quality: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28054/28054-h/28054-h.html . I converted it to a nicely formatted epub for Standard Ebooks a…
Thanks for contributing to Standard Ebooks. It's a great resource. Since you modestly didn't plug it, let me:
An excellent source of carefully formatted and corrected free ebooks (mostly classics).
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#323Animal Farm was a really important book for me. I picked it up aged about 10 or 11 and I remember being really struck by how easily the pigs were able to exploit the other animals' grievances with humans to secure their own power. It felt like a grown-up story with some quite powerful, disturbing meanings under the covers. So I told my English teacher about it and all she told me in response was to go look up the Rus…
One of the strangest things about that text is that very few of the folks I've talked to about it seem to feel that the issue with the pigs at the end is that there is a farmer. That is to say, I very rarely find anyone who will agree that the book is anti-capitalist at teh same time that it's opposed to Stalinism. I see the book continually taken happily anti-communist text. But the text is certainly not _just_ abou…
I agree with you I think.
I took it as more an anti-authoritarian story than purely anti-capitalist or anti-communist. The anti-capitalist parts are fairly self-evident, at least to me: that's the rather brutal system the farmer has imposed on the animals at the start.
Booting the farmer out and starting again with the animal-owned collective sets the story up for the real message, which is that power corrupts and it is very easy for anyone attracted to power to co-opt legitimate grievance for their own ends. The return of the farmer brings a nice circularity to the story as well as giving the idea that the imposition of will on others is usually to their detriment. Capitalism or communism are basically indistinguishable to everyone existing without power or influence.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#324I think one book that changed a lot was the Qur'an - it made me an atheist. I don't come from a muslim background but it made me realize, how some religions (well at least the abrahamitic ones) came to be.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#325Thanks for all the suggestions so far. I'll throw in several more favorites that have changed the way I think over the years, in no particular order:
* The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt
* 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen Covey
* The Emperor of all Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee
* The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
* Getting Things Done - David Allen
* The Worthing Saga - Orson Scott Card
* The 4-Hour Work Week - Timothy Ferriss
* The 5 Love Languages - Gary Chapman
* The Total Money Makeover - Dave Ramsey
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#326Ulysses, by James Joyce.
It will change your whole conception of what language is and how it can be used. It’s not about the characters or plots; they are recycled from antiquity. It’s about the absolute mastery of interrelation between words and imagery. It is something that has a meaning entirely emergent of its’ own self referential structure, rather than what is being described, in a sense that is almost mathematical. Realizing that was possible with writing really blew my mind.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#327Animal Farm was a really important book for me. I picked it up aged about 10 or 11 and I remember being really struck by how easily the pigs were able to exploit the other animals' grievances with humans to secure their own power. It felt like a grown-up story with some quite powerful, disturbing meanings under the covers. So I told my English teacher about it and all she told me in response was to go look up the Rus…
Does anyone have any recommendations for reading up on the Russian Revolution? Books, videos, or otherwise.
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#328Society and Money: Debt the first 5000 years by David Graeber
Society and structure: Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper
Business: Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
Life: The Gospel of Matthew
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#329"Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell. Not an easy read, but it deeply changed the way I think about incentive structures and the law of unintended consequences. It's a tough pill to swallow for people (like myself) who cling to utopian ideas, but the older I get the more I realize we must live in the world as it exists, with human nature as it really is. Dreaming of a better world is counter-productive if one does not…
The Quest for Cosmic Justice is another great book by Sowell that challenges the utopian mindset that underlies many modern policy discussions. It contrasts utopian "cosmic" justice with the much more prosaic (but achievable) "human" justice
Fascinating! Just ordered it, thanks :-)
Re: Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
#330"The Compound Effect" by Darren Hardy
One of the most practical books I have read which you can easily implement in your real life to see positive outcome.
https://www.amazon.com/Compound-Effect-Darren-Hardy/dp/15931...