441–450 of 747 posts
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. This book makes every bit of life advice you receive afterwards feel shallow. It feels like a reference to western thought. It's also very well translated and reads very easily, and is very short. I read about a chapter every morning when I feel motivated, and certain passages really stick in my head. It also helps to read whenever you feel overcome with emotion because of something.
I read Decartes in high school during the teenage existential crises we all go through and it blew my mind. Opened me up to the power of thinking from first principles and a love of philosophy and questioning everything. Cogito, ergo sum!
"Atlas Shrugged" gets a lot of hate, but it's a phenomenally important book. It was one of those that completely consumed me during the read. I could not put it down – stayed up late, work up early, and rushed home from work to get back to it.
"Rework", "Getting Real", the other books by the old 37signals crew, and of course "The Lean Startup" really changed the way I thought about software development and business. I credit them for much of my startup/programming success.
Taleb's Incerto series changed how I thought about investing, risk, and life in general. "Fooled by Randomness" and "Antifragile" are especially good.
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Oh man, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie is AMAZING on so many levels. A common thread with these books seems to be exploring consciousness and definitions of self. As a bonus it does stuff I find more from women authors, like quietly question gender roles without making a scene about it, question slavery, ownership, etc. Similar a bit to the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells but on a whole other level. Its a wonderfu…
Can second both Ann Leckie (her new book "The Raven Tower" is also a great page-turner) and N.K. Jemisin (who did totally blow my mind with her Broken Earth Trilogy). Ursula K. Le Guin also appears down below; The Left Hand of Darkness was a profound read.
Not mind bending for someone who spent some time trying to imagine a anarchist society (but still quite enriching), but maybe for others.
* Read any book you want
* Don't read books that you don't want to
* Get on with your life
Most likely no one is going to like this post. My father was a physicist and he had a large library of books. Growing up all of these books were over my head but I tried reading all of them. The more difficult the book the more determined I became to read and understand the content. I found this to be mind expanding. I began a life long quest to read the most difficult books and texts I could find. It sometimes takes…
When I read the Wiki for Stoner years ago I saw this line, "Bryan Appleyard's review quotes critic D.G. Myers saying that the novel was a good book for beginners in the world of "serious literature"". I looked up D.G. Myers and to see if he had a list of serious literature or a twitter where I could ask about such a list only to find he passed away in 2014.
Does anyone know of such a list? Googling provides results but nothing... conclusive.
In no particular order: Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (Keith Johnstone) The Master and His Emissary (Iain McGilchrist et al.) Emissary’s guide to worlding (Ian Cheng) Black Swan by NNT already recommended elsewhere in the thread. I want to go off-topic and recommend a non-book, Learning to Fly by Missing the Ground[0] (Venkatesh Rao). And further off the topic, the discussions in The Midnight Gospel were the c…
second this. I stumbled over it few months ago and keep thinking that I must re-read it soon. love it
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>is that women for most of human history weren't allowed to write. Isn't this sexism? Read my argument again. I literally said that the reason why there are more men then women authors on mind bending concepts is because of Sexism. We are in total agreement. I know of Ursula K. Le guin. If you read her biography you'll read about all the hardships she had to go through to get her work published. As a woman her books…
Okay, let me just say then that your tone is very, very confusing. What with the "Obviously, everyone here is a sexist. Wake up people!" It sounds like you were being sarcastic? Were you being sincere?
When something seems ambiguous you need to shed your biases and follow the logic and evidence. Read what I wrote in my response and both dispute and reason about the logic and evidence behind it. If you find the logic to be correct then we're good, if you find it to be incorrect then both of our premises are logically flawed.
"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig takes you deep into the philosophy on what is 'quality'. Once you see it you can't unsee it. A powerful excerpt from the book: 'So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings. When that is done successfully then everything else follows natura…
Despite all the praise it got, I really struggled with that book. I hated it so much that I had to check if I didn't pick the wrong book by accident. I found that it's a very polarising book. It's life-changing for some, and garbage for others. There were a few insightful passages, but most of the book was pretentious rambling. It was difficult to understand what the author was even trying to say, with his head so fa…
You have to balance the idea and quantity of a piece to describe it's properties. Then you can rank it into a hierarchy. The UK runs on this principle of reception and qualitative judgement.
Turning the brain off with "peace of mind" is necessary, can't be thinking up new ideas and directing thoughts when you are in a state of reception, nor can you be excessively self-aware of your own being.
I haven't read Zen, it seems boring to be in that state of reception all the time, to me.