Tony Robbins under 'Philosophy and Psychology'?
Blindness by Jose Saramago under History?
Mind-expanding books
21–30 of 62 posts
Re: Mind-expanding books
#22it's way too many...
Yeah, smells of low effort. Make the list shorter and explain why those books are so good.
Re: Mind-expanding books
#23This list has Blindness by Saramago as a history book. Is this a joke going over my head?
Re: Mind-expanding books
#24I had to laugh a little bit when I looked at the philosophy section and it seems like with few exceptions it's books from the 2000s including such gems as
>Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!
I'm not overly conservative or classically leaning when it comes to education but I think people who really want to expand their minds would benefit from trying some of the classics first.
Mill, On Liberty. Accessible and incredibly important book for people who live in liberal democracies and want to understand where a lot of their own ideas come from. Plato's Republic. Not as accessible, but very important. Girard has become popular again and has some very unique ideas, so people will probably get a lot out of it. Same for Chesterton.
Kafka's Metamorphosis deserves to be in the Lit section. Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series is a must read for science fiction fans, the sci-fi section has some genuinely horrible recommendations in it. Also given that it's supposed to be a mind-expanding list, throw in Blindsight by Peter Watts. The fantasy section needs Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. (and throw Harry Potter out)
Sexual Personae by Paglia deserves to be named in the Gender/sexuality section.
And an off-beat recommendation. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud is a truly smart book on comics, in the form of a graphic novel.
Re: Mind-expanding books
#25Been wondering lately about "books that everyone should read". I used to go to Amazon search a category and then get the most popular / highly rated book. But is that really what I need or want? As I start to appreciate the value of uniqueness I wonder more about obscure books, books less read and have found these often contain gems.
Re: Mind-expanding books
#26I’m not convinced of the utility of lists like this, or the multitude of other Awesome JavaScript Yeahhhh!!! lists. As one of the issues in the GitHub repository suggest, it seems all that is needed for a book to be considered “mind expanding” here is for it to have a Goodreads and/or Amazon rating higher than 4. But what does that prove? There are people who rate Netflix’s Red Notice 10/10. Relative to those people,…
I'm on an Asimov binge right now. Just finished Foundation and Earth . So I jumped to the scifi section of the list and saw Ready Player One on there. I found that book mildly entertaining, but not a work of great literature, and certainly not mind expanding. I agree with your sentiment about the importance of knowing the reviewer. I think using general popularity as a gauge is a good way to get the worst recommendat…
There was a time where Amazon was great to explore books: "users who bought also bought". Good old collaborative filtering.
I feel bad for giving useless advice so as someone who read several times the whole foundation series as a teen may I suggest: A deepness in the sky, a fire upon the deep, the forever war, gateway (Frederick Pohl). If you like fantasy, or even if not: the blade itself. If you have an enemy recommend him/her "the name of the wind". It's a great book but it's the first of an unfinished trilogy.
Edit: how could I forget the cryptonomicon?
Re: Mind-expanding books
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm on an Asimov binge right now. Just finished Foundation and Earth . So I jumped to the scifi section of the list and saw Ready Player One on there. I found that book mildly entertaining, but not a work of great literature, and certainly not mind expanding. I agree with your sentiment about the importance of knowing the reviewer. I think using general popularity as a gauge is a good way to get the worst recommendat…
> I think using general popularity as a gauge is a good way to get the worst recommendations. Do you know a better way to get good recommendations? I am genuinely interested.
If you want to learn a non-fiction subject, university reading lists are a great place to start. It's a very different experience reading a textbook when you don't have to take an exam -- or even re-reading one that you read when you did. For me, the dry wit of the authors comes out more and you can focus on stuff that really interests you.
The other nice thing about this approach is that some textbooks are commonly recommended by different universities for the same courses -- and they're more likely to be good. For some random examples, Horrowitz and Hill, the art of electronics (for electronics!); Riley Hobson and Bence: mathematical methods for the physical sciences (for vector calculus); or David Mackay's book on information theory (legally freely available online, published by CUP and contains lots of Bayesian stuff the average HN reader would probably love).
Re: Mind-expanding books
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm on an Asimov binge right now. Just finished Foundation and Earth . So I jumped to the scifi section of the list and saw Ready Player One on there. I found that book mildly entertaining, but not a work of great literature, and certainly not mind expanding. I agree with your sentiment about the importance of knowing the reviewer. I think using general popularity as a gauge is a good way to get the worst recommendat…
There was a time where Amazon was great to explore books: "users who bought also bought". Good old collaborative filtering. I feel bad for giving useless advice so as someone who read several times the whole foundation series as a teen may I suggest: A deepness in the sky, a fire upon the deep, the forever war, gateway (Frederick Pohl). If you like fantasy, or even if not: the blade itself. If you have an enemy recom…
I’m currently working my way through the Hugo award winners and am in the time of The Forever War and Gateway. I also recommend them for the most part. Rendezvous with Rama around that time is also really enjoyable.
Re: Mind-expanding books
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm on an Asimov binge right now. Just finished Foundation and Earth . So I jumped to the scifi section of the list and saw Ready Player One on there. I found that book mildly entertaining, but not a work of great literature, and certainly not mind expanding. I agree with your sentiment about the importance of knowing the reviewer. I think using general popularity as a gauge is a good way to get the worst recommendat…
There was a time where Amazon was great to explore books: "users who bought also bought". Good old collaborative filtering. I feel bad for giving useless advice so as someone who read several times the whole foundation series as a teen may I suggest: A deepness in the sky, a fire upon the deep, the forever war, gateway (Frederick Pohl). If you like fantasy, or even if not: the blade itself. If you have an enemy recom…
I still recommend Name of the Wind. It's frustrating, but I would rather have loved and lost, than not loved at all.
Re: Mind-expanding books
#30This list has Blindness by Saramago as a history book. Is this a joke going over my head?
There are many miscategorizations like that. It is also clearly written by an American leftist, with, for example, Michelle Obama's biography as "mind expanding books everyone should read". I am sure they are completely oblivious to their political and geographical/cultural bias though, as typically happens.