Really a tie between Blink, and Atlas Shrugged.
Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?
91–100 of 151 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?
#92"The Gods Themselves" is a easy to read but truly mind blowing book. Asimov's characters are a bit wooden but the ideas in the book really got me to look at the world differently. The line "I have an idea, a simple idea, based on the quite obvious fact that the number two is ridiculous and can't exist." has stayed with me for over a decade now as has the surprising lovemaking of the aliens. For a hard read that you m…
There's an interesting song based on the moral conflict faced by the three aliens in "The Gods Themselves", by Bob Kanefsky, and sung by Julia Ecklar: [1].
Kanefsky may be familiar to many HN readers for his song "Eternal Flame", about the superiority of Lisp to other languages, also sung by Julia Ecklar [2].
[1] http://www.last.fm/music/Julia+Ecklar/_/Meltdown+(Julia+Eckl...
Re: Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?
#93I really liked Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, although most of Murakami's stuff is pretty amazing. He does short stories for the New Yorker every now and then, too: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/kino
Re: Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?
#94[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?
#95Anything by Phillip K. Dick. Start with the Valis Trilogy.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?
#962 great sf books
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland Set as a satire of Victorian society "The story describes a two-dimensional world occupied by geometric figures, whereof women are simple line-segments, while men are polygons with various numbers of sides. The narrator is a square named A Square, a member of the caste of gentlemen and professionals, who guides the readers through some of the implications of life in two dimensions."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud I won't spoil this one for you, it's just a really interesting and suspenseful sf story. Richard Dawkins (writing in the 2010 Penguin Classics reissue) claimed the novel was "one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written."
Re: Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?
#97"Human Evolution" by Robin Dunbar ( http://www.amazon.com/A-Pelican-Introduction-Human-Evolution... ) The book is a mind-boggling journey through our own evolutionary history and delivers surprising and sometimes funny insights on many aspects of our behavior as modern humans (e.g. it attempts to explain the origins of religion, dancing and music). The beauty of the book lies in the fact that it makes you understand…
I read 'Guns, Germs and Steel' by Jared Diamond in College and it is single handedly the most insightful book I have ever read. One of these days I will buy all of Jared Diamond's and Robert Greene's books and read them multiple times.
'Guns, Germs and Steel' is pure geographical determinism, dressed up as something else.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?
#98Mind-blowing for those who've read 'The Selfish Gene' and thought it explained everything about evolution: 'The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme', SJ Gould and RC Lewontin 'The Origins of Genome Architecture', M Lynch 'Mutation-Driven Evolution', M Nei
Regarding 'the selfish gene', I still think that the concept that the gene is the unit of evolution and the resulting organism is just its proxy, is one of the greatest insights since Darwin.
Be that as it might, that is not Dawkins' idea (i believe the foremost thinker in that regard is W. D. Hamilton), what Dawkins did was just giving it the catchy name.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?
#99Mind-blowing for those who've read 'The Selfish Gene' and thought it explained everything about evolution: 'The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme', SJ Gould and RC Lewontin 'The Origins of Genome Architecture', M Lynch 'Mutation-Driven Evolution', M Nei
Also Lynn Margulis. http://discovermagazine.com/2011/apr/16-interview-lynn-margu...
Re: Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?
#100Crazy to Grasp: - Hermann Hesse - The Glass Bead Game - Hofstädter - Gödel, Escher, Bach - Bulgakov - Master and Margherita - Melville - Moby Dick - Joyce - Ulysses - Everything by Baudrillard (esp. 'Agony of Power') - Everything by William Burroughs (The ticket that exploded, Place of dead roads, Discipline of DE) Not that crazy to grasp, but still amazing: - Everything by Egon Friedell (mostly Historical, unbelieva…
Love that Bulgakov book (apparently the translation you pick matters a lot, but I wouldn't know, since my sister gave it to me as a gift).
I like the Hesse book a lot, although the metaphor is more powerful to me than the book, which is probably not the first Hesse book I'd suggest.