What book (or books) changed your life? I'm looking for inspiration and would love to hear what and how you were impacted.
Ask HN: What book changed your life?
1–10 of 539 posts
Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?
#2How Life Imitates Chess
Book by Garry Kasparov
This book explained me concepts of - material - time - and quality
in chess and business life.
Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?
#3Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
Introduced me to the beauty of logic and its limits. Also gave me solid mathematical thinking foundations.
Pro tip: Try listening to Bach while you read about Bach.
Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?
#4Previous threads:
- 2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2147034
- 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6975638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6413600
- 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10914079
- 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17168136
- 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22011867
- 2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24361132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25356908
Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?
#5Kurt Vonnegut probably had the biggest impact on me. Mother Night and Timequake in particular. Two quotes I use all the time:
"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."
And
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?
#6One of the recommended lectures on a logic class I had at my school, which was run by missionary nuns from Minnessota (and the teacher himself was catholic), was Carl Sagan's The demon-haunted world. It turned me into an atheist.
Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?
#7Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.
And not a book, but a documentary – The War by Ken Burns.
Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?
#8Basic Economics from Thomas Sowell.
It show me there is another world if you go outside socialism and that socialism has a lot of bad consequence that are never talked about
Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?
#9A classic: How to Win Friends & Influence People - D Carnegie
Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?
#10Painting and Experience in 15th Century Italy by Michael Baxandall