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Or anything Vonnegut or Philip K Dick
A personal "brain expanding" book for me was The Miracle Planet but timing is everything, as an 8 year old who had only been reading children's books it taught me that you can read through anything with persistence
The Bible has a lot of mind games & plot twists. I read it as an atheist seeking better perspective on a couple thousand years ago
Completely changed my world view. As someone who loves science, this book shows that Buddhism is not about belief but a way to look at the world. And that view might be closer to reality than the current one.
https://www.amazon.com/Heart-Buddhas-Teaching-Transforming-L...
The Magus, John Fowles Dune (all 6) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig Manufacturing Consent The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan If This Is a Man, Primo Levi Light, M. John Harrison
All the things by Christopher Alexander(Start with timeless way...explore the pattern language...move on to Nature of order...then others.) Zen and Lila by Pirsig Beginning of Infinity by Deutsch.
I would recommend Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter if you haven't already read it.
This is one of the few books I've read that I would actually call 'mind bending' (though stretching might be a better word). Another amazing book of his that I don't see mentioned a lot (perhaps because it is more technical that maybe any of his other books) is 'Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies'.
I'm reading that one now. I recommend it, along with Perception as Analogy by Melanie Mitchell, and the aforementioned Godel, Escher, Bach to anyone interested in AI / cognitive science. I've only read a small part of Metamagical Themas to date, but I've read enough to recommend that as well. Just the stuff on self-referential sentences makes it worth reading.
Try Julian Jaynes book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". Whether his conjectures are right or wrong, their scope is mind-blowing. Don't be put off by the title - it became a surprise hit as a popular science book.
House of Leaves is a great novel. Will feel like a completely fresh take on narrative form. Infinite Jest is also great, if you haven't read it. It gets a lot of bad press mostly due to being fetishized by a particular type of insufferable person. The book has its flaws, but is a great piece of writing and (depending how old you are, where you are in life, etc) may offer a different lens. Also, the writing is excelle…
Infinite Jest has been for a long time in my must read list, but never got to reading it. Heard not much, but only good things about it. >depending how old you are, where you are in life, etc may offer a different lens. Could you elaborate more on this? I am curious. Maybe I could be right now in that situation. So in that case it would be optimal to start reading it now instead of in a year or two.
Anything by Hermann Hesse. Not mind bending. No Twists. No roller coasters. Just a calm conversation with the author and yourself. And yet, it had a profound impact on me. One poem I revisit every once in a while: https://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=119749 If you understand German, I do believe it needs to be read in its original tongue. The translations I found thus far were not entirely convincing.
The book is written to convince the reader that evolution is valid.
But to me, the shocking thing was to really understand the religious argument for the first time, and understand why evolution challenges that world view.
In a nutshell, there is a web of related arguments which support the belief that God exists. One of them is that the eye is so complicated, that it must have been designed from the beginning by an intelligent being. Therefore God exists.
But Darwin showed that many small random changes plus natural selection are sufficient to explain the eye's complexity.
Why was this shocking at the time?
Just imagine you are walking around with a vague gut feeling that God must exist every time you see a beautiful bird or a flower. You figure that something intelligent must have designed that beatiful, complex living thing. You see another complex wonder of nature, and feeling gets stronger. Perhaps it becomes the main reason that you believe that God must exist.
Then one day, wham! Darwin releases his book, and it becomes clear that there is a valid scientific explanation for the complexity of that flower which does not require a supernatural designer.
Instantly your whole world view collapses. There's nothing in the science that says that God does not exist. Science only says that other explanations are sufficient. And yet, just that is enough to collapse that entire line of thinking. There are still other arguments for the existence of God. But the one you felt most strongly is gone.
Reading the book gave me a detailed understanding of that religious line of reasoning, and what it might feel like to lose it. It gives me some understanding of why people, even today, have a desire to reject the scientific idea of evolution.