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Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

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Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#581

Post by danenania »

syndacks wrote: post #182

Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault fundamentally changed the way I look at things like school and work. Essentially, they're systems of discipline and control masquerading as something very different. Skip all the Malcom Gladwell crap and read some real philosophy. It's hard but rewarding.

Great book. The current situation certainly brings his ideas to mind. While it may well be justified, the speed and ease with which many open, democratic societies have gone into strictly enforced Italy/Spain-style lockdowns (essentially crisis-driven totalitarianism), shows us how thin the veneer of freedom really is, and how seamlessly our institutions can be made to serve the "carceral state".

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#582

Post by qznc »

javajosh wrote: post #523
carapace wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not supposed to spoil it. The whole point of these puzzles is the joy and knowledge you gets from solving them on your own. Publishing the answers is selfish.

Well, I for one don't consider this a satisfying solution (you could argue it does not count as a solution at all). How is the host supposed to evaluate the future? As I said in another comment, for that the host either needs iteration or an oracle, and both of those are missing from the premise of the question. It's like asking riddle where the solution is "Use a time-machine" when no time-machine is mentioned in th…

I don't consider it a statement about the future but rather about the inevitable consequence whenever this game is played. Maybe it should be rephrased as: For this statement one will receive prize A or C.

@Carapace I find joy in discussing the validity of answers like this and such discussion is not possible without posting the answer first. I do feel sorry if I spoiled someone the joy of puzzling themselves though.

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#583

Post by HaydukeLives »

Lavery wrote: post #197

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…

House of Leaves blew me away when I read it after it came out. I agree that is a fresh take on narrative form, and I personally found the process of reading it quite fun.

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#584

Post by chispamed »

binaryorganic wrote: post #299

Super 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?

While it may not completely change your life, a book that definitely opens your eyes (probably more so if you're white and male) when it comes to mondern-day racism and just how biased our thinking really is is "Biased" by Jennifer L. Eberhardt. You ask how many of the authors listed here a women but one could just as easily ask how many of the authors listed here are black and I think the answer would be just as shocking.

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#586

Post by LargeWu »

bobyfyfy wrote: post #296
Lavery wrote: post #197

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…

I've read both of these, and don't recommend them. House of Leaves has a very uninteresting plot, and raises more questions than it answers. It's physically painful to read, because most pages, you have to rotate the entire book every which way since the words go in spirals. Infinite Jest is good, but way too long. A good 70% of the book could have been cut out or condensed. The writing is also intentionally bad, whi…

Re House of Leaves, I don't recall it being most pages. There was a flurry of those at the end, but I found it was an effective machination that heightened the drama rather than distracted.

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#588

Post by fchu »

Bandrsnatch wrote: post #394

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…

This is precisely what Mortimer Adler suggests in his book "How to Read a Book", to read above your current levels this is only how you grow your mind.

Strong advice but I feel it's much harder nowadays to go down that route when there are distractions like YouTube videos that are easy to watch and make you feel you're learning when really it's scratching a superficial curiosity itch with no depth.

That said, to answer OP's question, I got Mortimer's book called "Great Treasury of Western Thought" that has compiled quotes from Western classics into key themes (the human condition, love, religions, etc), and it provided the missing link between getting meaty samples of key concepts, versus actually reading ALL the classics (the book started as the the index or 'syntopicon' of the 'Great Books of the Western World', a full compilation of Western works)

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#589

Post by bananamerica »

bemmu wrote: post #100

"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…

I could not think of a better answer. I've read this book 2 years ago and vowed to write a review or an interpretation of some sort when I got less excited. I didn't sleep for two days. And never wrote the review.

Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

#590

Post by jacobedawson »

ckosidows wrote: post #258
Lavery wrote: post #197

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…

I didn't finish Infinite Jest. I found it kind of insufferable. I really don't want to detract from anyone who found it enjoyable; it's surely a monumental work. But personally it felt incredibly depressing and that made it hard to read. The dialogues made it feel like experiencing isolation and disconnection from other people; the characters talk to each other, but don't listen or care for anyone but themselves or t…

I've just started it - I'm about 10% of the way in and I'm really engaged - enjoying it but with a kind of mental equivalent of full-body exhaustion way after a big day at the beach - it's fun but also hard and sometimes just plain difficult. I think DFW was swimming in so many ideas & feelings that Infinite Jest was a way of letting it all come out in a Kerouacian-stream without much thought for concision.

If it helps anyone decide whether to give it a go, two recent books I read and loved were 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, and Underworld by Don DeLillo, and Infinite Jest is satisfying me in the hard-earned way they both did.

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