Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It was a wild ride. Permanently raised the bar for fiction for me.
this book continues to represent one of my highest ideals. monastic orders that may form in the possibility of eventual hackstability
Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
561–570 of 747 posts
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#562Ubik by Phillip K Dick.
I'm kind of shocked that it wasn't cited already.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#563To venture into the more poetic/artistic realm, I really recommend Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. It’s quite short, but so layered that I actually have a hard time describing it. Framed as a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, the book is a series of vignettes describing fantastical cities Polo has visited in his travels.
Another great book by Calvino is "If on a winter's night a traveler". It has some mind-bending parts.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#564Most 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…
I struggle with this since I also want to read something I enjoy and not make it a chore. I tried reading Moby Dick recently and was so disappointed. I wanted to read the original but the old English threw me off and I found it boring.
Reading literature's pretty different from reading easy fiction. It takes a different approach and mindset to appreciate it but it's incredibly rewarding when one does. Think "acquired taste", or maybe the difference between reading a pop-math book and a math textbook. Ditto reading non-contemporary fiction, so that's two hurdles to overcome in this case. I don't have any sage advice on how to gain the ability to read and enjoy literature, aside from that for most people it takes practice and persistence before it's comfortable, like getting used to the temperature of a pool. Starting small helps and is probably how most people work up to the point of being genuinely excited and gripped by something like Moby Dick.
I guess if I had any advice to offer to someone wanting to achieve that (if it's an achievement) it'd be to try older popular literature (try King Solomon's Mines, it's amazing, then work your way to even older stuff) to get used to older English (nb not Old English, which is another thing entirely and you're not likely to encounter much of it in anything but an extremely deep reading of English lit) and to read short, relatively easy "literary" works that are more recent. Vonnegut's way at the easy end. Maybe try Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or his short stories? Salinger's Nine Stories? I'm not sure—at this point I have trouble judging what's approachable. I'd make a terrible teacher of literature.
Lots of things kinda work this way. Jazz and "classical" music usually take some work on the listener's part, to personally learn and develop, before they yield their greatest fruits. Most folks have trouble enjoying silent films, but there are some damn good ones out there. Just takes effort and time.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#565I haven't seen it mentioned yet: Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter - this book was a game changer for me - I read it in college over a partiularly rainy spring break and its content has changed the way I think about just about everything.
Systems Thinking: A Primer by Donella Meadows is also an incredibly thought-provoking non-fiction book, that really makes you think about the world and the systems we create differently.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#566"Mindset", Carol Dweck. Or her more scholarly one on same topic, "Self-theories"
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#567"Breaking Open the Head", by Daniel Pinchbeck
"DMT: The Spirit Molecule", by Dr. Rick Strassman
"The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge", by Jeremy Narby
"The Law", by Frederic Bastiat
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two things - 1. Seven habits - I can't get past Covey's personal 'experiences'. They are just seemingly so contrived and fake that they just ruin the entire thought process for me. It seems like he had to make up things that related to the covenants. Is that just me? 2. For writing - I would also suggest 'On Writing' by Stephen King for this as a different take. It's probably the best 'how to write' book ever made. I…
My issue with King is that to me at least, he’s a terrible writer. Prolific doesn’t mean quality. I’m suspect what someone can get out of a book about writing from someone who writes poorly.
Read the book. I was in the same camp as you. Most of his writing is just hack nonsense. But, some is well written (The Stand, Misery, Shawshank, The Green Mile, Cujo, for example). He's just inconsistent.
Seriously, read the On Writing book. It really set his theory up for me to understand exactly why he's inconsistent. You can read his books and tell when he's thinking and processing, versus when he's writing to pay for a car or house or whatever.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#569Super serious question. Of the 278 comments that have been posted to this thread in the last 8 hours, has anyone suggested a single female author? I looked for a while and saw exactly zero. Isn’t that kind of notable?
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, and the rest of the Maddaddam Trilogy. I read it a few years ago, but still think about it all the time. The writing is vivid and visceral, and the characters have an emotional and spiritual depth that you almost never find in dystopian scifi. There are also some spooky parallels to what's happening now.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#570"Permutation City" by Greg Egan is mind-bending in a way similar to The Matrix, except taken up a few notches. Explores the consequences of consciousness being just a pattern. Would it continue if the pattern is paused? Seems yes, since we survive being unconscious. So we move in space and time, but still consciousness feels continuous. What if you pause it, destroy it, recreate it somewhere else. Would it not contin…
Egan is a close second for my all-time favorite sci-fi author. Some of his books read like mathematical dialogues or transcriptions of lectures (lots of the Orthogonal Series is conversations between professors and their grad students reasoning about physics of a world that we don't live in), but he also delves deep into mathematics and fringe ideas and presents them in a vista where you can enjoy the absolute splendor of the abstractions.
He also never thinks small. I thought I knew "the point" of Diaspora about 6 or 7 times, but then he just "zoomed out" and made the last point look small and trivial by comparison. The opening chapter of that book is so abstract and yet describes the birth of a consciousness in a way that feels understandable, believable, and internally consistent.
If you love finding interesting puzzles to reason about, then I strongly recommend Egan's books!
I haven't read Permutation City, though. I'm bumping this one to the top of the queue :)