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Mind-expanding books

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31–40 of 62 posts

Re: Mind-expanding books

#31
Those are mostly either heavily marketed recent books or some very popular books considered "classics" that sort of circulate as representing some field (which they mostly really don't).

If I had made a similar (probably much shorter) list about programming languages it would include Go and Pascal as mind-expanding languages.

Re: Mind-expanding books

#32
post #8

I’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 once asked a bunch of my colleagues if they ever used one of these awesome lists and their answer was no. I asked the same group if they bookmarked, stared, or shared an awesome list before, and more than half of them said yes. Whatever that means.

I am actually the other way around. I use them as one data point to find new libraries in fields I have never worked in. They tend to be incomplete and no curation at all. But still useful.

Re: Mind-expanding books

#33

I 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…

This is an elaborate SEO ploy for contributors and later sponsors. The variety of popular books casts a wider SEO net.

Re: Mind-expanding books

#34

I 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…

I also had to chuckle at that. Self-help gurus are not philosophers. As you can see from the ordering, this list is made by startup-folks and/or programmers. So I take inspiration from the startup, business and science section and ignore the rest.

Re: Mind-expanding books

#35
post #34

I 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…

I also had to chuckle at that. Self-help gurus are not philosophers. As you can see from the ordering, this list is made by startup-folks and/or programmers. So I take inspiration from the startup, business and science section and ignore the rest.

Self help gurus help themselves by making you give them money in exchange for the feeling of empowerment, if at all.

Re: Mind-expanding books

#37

I’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 find Goodreads to be a great place to find books from the reviews. Generally you'll see at least one review which looks compelling. Usually what I'm looking for is not a book target, but rather an on-ramp for the path to find the target. Often reviews lead to a key list of works for the subject you're looking for. Then you know you have found one of those keys when the reviews recognize the book as such and stop recommending other books. Though they will recommend similar texts which might be more accessible.

Aside from Goodreads reviews, you could do similar through tracing a path of sources from the book (if you can find the sources for it.) Maybe do both.

Re: Mind-expanding books

#38
post #8

I’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 once asked a bunch of my colleagues if they ever used one of these awesome lists and their answer was no. I asked the same group if they bookmarked, stared, or shared an awesome list before, and more than half of them said yes. Whatever that means.

Counterpoint here: I recently used awesome-gbdev[0] and found it fantastic. Not starred or bookmarked though!

[0] https://github.com/gbdev/awesome-gbdev

Re: Mind-expanding books

#39
Author of the list here. When I started the list 6 years back, the idea was to have a small collection of books that will change your perspective if you read them. But over the years, the list got 350+ pull requests and the number of books increased significantly. I ask the pull requests author why they think the book is mind expanding in the pull request description. If they can write a convincing sentence I would merge them. But ofcourse, what's mind expanding for some is not mind expanding for others. I think the repo now is more like a collection of books that might help you find the next book to read under a particular topic. It might or might not expand your mind. Hopefully going through the list you might atleast find one interesting book to read :)

Re: Mind-expanding books

#40
Thanks, just bought "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character" which I had wanted to read but forgotten about.

To address the other comments about this being "yet another list" etc, it's useful for someone like me who is quite busy and has to be opportunistic about finding good reads. Lists help.

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