Books that changed your perception

American Gods by Niel Gaiman

For some reason this book changed the way I felt about my sister moving away. I was upset that I lost our relationship as it had been since we were kids. Something about the story helped me to see that all things change. I must embrace the change or live in pain. I understood that our paths in life were quite different, and she had to chase her dreams because that is part of her essential nature. Can't fight that either. It's a great book.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie was a book that I had to read for a class tied to my internship in college. It's entirely about how to positively interact with people.

I can summarize the technique here, but his perspective is really the important part. His idea works on two things: People generally like to talk about themselves, and they like to be made to feel good about themselves. If you can consistently do these two things your life will be better for it.

The common retort I get is "It's just showing you how to manipulate people!" I even had this attitude and was open in discussing my bias coming in, not combatively, but just in the hope of having an open conversation and growing from it. My professor explained, as Carnegie does, that it's not about manipulation. Life is just better if, generally, you make it easier and keep people happy.

A favorite example of mine from the book that I think sums the premise up is a story Carnegie tells about himself going to the post office to drop off a package. The dude behind the counter seems pretty mad. He talks to the guy and says something, I believe "Your hair looks great today," or some other seemingly small compliment. The dude brightens up a bit, Carnegie gets his package handled, and it's over.

He explains that he had nothing to gain from the interaction. Mad or not, this transaction was going to occur, but the power was in helping the person feel better for the interaction. His main point is it's about making interactions better for their own sake, and not worrying about what you'll gain. There might be a windfall, but, yet another point of his, is that if you read his book and try to apply the techniques strictly for gain people will likely see through it, and it'll fall apart.

Even if you suck at small talk (I do), if you can just pay attention and keep your eyes from glazing over as you do it, it'll do wonders. It made me feel less self conscious in conversations because I didn't have to converse much.

I don't know if it will change the way you think but it'll definitely make you think:

• The first Dune trilogy. I just finished the third book, Children of Dune, but there's a lot of philosophy going on and I'm gonna reread it in a year to see how the second reading changes.

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything. His writing is highly enjoyable and makes for a real page-turner. This book gives a gritty and fun vantage point on the process of Scientific Inquiry and Discovery and left me feeling a sense of wonder for what we still don't know, and instilled a healthy plasticity to theories that are "proven". To sum it up, Science is messy and amazing

Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It really challenged my perception of time and consciousness.

Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, especially those centred around Vimes and Ankh-Morpork's constabulary. Sir Pratchett is so light-hearted he can make cold blooded murder look like just another beautiful Tuesday morning. He can kill people off and he makes it funny or cute, but in an a good way. If you don't understand me, just read them.

Blindsight made me reflect on consciousness and intelligence as two separate (and potentially unrelated) evolutionary traits, and I find myself thinking about this concept from time to time, especially with the recent rise of AI.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.

It's a metafictional horror story about a guy who is editing a book (which you're reading) about a movie about a house that's bigger on the inside than the outside.

The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts:

I read this book during a time when I was going through a rough phase post-college. It helped me put into context the my anxiety from the past and future, and helped ground my thinking in the here and now. I embrace impermanence in my life and accept that change will happen whether I want it or not, and that it is better to go with the flow. Don't get me wrong, I am not just a passive observer and letting life happen to me, but rather I happen *with *life, if that makes sense. I make mistakes but I don't let the fear of failing keep me from trying new things. I can't control every variable of my life and it is too short to plan for every detail. I also recognize more the interdependence of all things, and try not to frame things in life into dichotomies. It helps me be less judgmental.

I'm also able to just enjoy the ordinary. The internet has a way of shifting your mindset into the extraordinary. You can see all these things that are highly improbable, happening all the time, everywhere. But I recognize that there is a lot of good to be found in the simple pleasures of life: clean bedsheets after a hot shower, drinking coffee outside in the morning and feeling the cool breeze, the birds that eat out of my feeder on my balcony that sing songs and try to mate, etc.

But its not an overnight process, but rather a journey. I still have bad days, but even those are necessary to appreciate the good days. I'm not a perfect person, but this book at least helped me see my life in a new lens.

Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius by Lucius Seneca

The book contains letters written by a Stoic philosopher from the ancient Roman empire that cover a variety of human topics that are still very applicable today. I borrowed this from an Amazon review because I thought it described the book better than I can:

"Far from an ancient curiosity, Seneca remains a wonderful go-to resource for tips on handling anxiety, coming to terms with death, living in the moment, avoiding hypocrisy, being a loyal friend, and many other exceedingly practical ethical topics—all with a smooth, conversational, and what I can only describe as a non-dogmatic-and-yet-firm tone. He touches lucidly and casually on many areas of philosophy that are still widely discussed today, such as free will and the usefulness (or not) of abstract ethical theory. The book is littered with quotes from famous Greek and Roman philosophers, including many Stoics, but also Epicureans, Aristoteleans, etc."

I can't imagine something in this book wouldn't change your perception. I read the translation by Graver & Long and thought it was easy enough to interpret. There are some translations that are freely available online as well.

Two books that really changed my perspective on the world around me and how our society works were Ishmael by Daniel Quinn and The Disposessed by Ursula Le Guin.

The former is framed as a Socratic dialogue between a telepathic gorilla and a disillusioned young adult. The gorilla deconstructs a lot of the protagonist's preconceptions about our society and it's history, especially in relation to consumption and nature.

The latter is a scifi story comparing an anarchist society built around the communal good to that of a hyper capitalist one as told from the perspective of a theoretical physicist from the anarchist world visiting the capitalist one. It weighs the pros and cons of both and really opened my eyes up to how we can actually structure society differently if we had the political will.

Both fantastic reads I feel are written in an engaging and accessible way.

(Edit: adjusted some typos and grammar)

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace.

I heard once that you're either a fan of DFW's essays or his fiction. In that divide, I'm definitely in the essay camp. And at this point, DFW is considered cliche (or worse) but I've always loved his dense, intricate writing style. This book is my favorite of his essay compilations. It made me rethink Updike (or rather, start to think about Updike) as more than merely a postwar author. And it really made me reflect on the early 2000s. And obviously I think about it whenever I cook and eat lobster.

These broadened my view of the world:

To Kill a Mockingbird
Handmaids Tale
1984
The Red Tent
Kite Runner
A Thousand Splendid Suns
The God Delusion
The Crucible

And some fun ones that also gave me a different perspective:
Curious Incident of a Dog in the Nighttime
Flowers for Algernon
The Giver

Nonfiction:
Fast Food Nation
Thinking Like a Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning (I'm not a lawyer but this really opened my eyes to how they see the world)
A lot of textbooks. A lot of scientific papers.

One or both of these may be cliché, but both Slaughterhouse Five and The Little Prince largely changed how I see other people and the world, and thus who I am, (I hope) for the better.

Without a hint of exaggeration, not a single day goes by that I don't think of the fox and his beautiful wisdom on the responsibility of taming a new friend.

When I was still in a conservative Christian faith but wrestling with things I read Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller

The one thing that always stuck with me from the book was a story that they went to a college campus and set up what they called "confession booths" but surprised people that stopped by- by not asking for confessions, but giving one themselves: that they had treated LGBTQ+ people wrongly in the past and wanted to apologize.

I'm not in the faith at all anymore, and whether or not this seems cheesy or superficial or not enough or whatever, it's not really the details I am concerned with, but just at the time it really hit me to see the script flipped- not the church (through its followers) telling you to ask god to forgive you for all these things you're doing wrong- but taking the time to apologize for what the church had done wrong instead- which is not common.

Growing up I found that all sorts of conservative religious institutions I went to, had a "spiritual ego" so to speak because of thinking god is on their side, so they would rarely, if at all, ever admit their own wrongdoing, especially at an institutional / systemic level. Sure, there's plenty of preaching about self-analysis at an individual level (but restricted to the bubble/consistency of conservative religious beliefs), but certainly nothing institutional, and especially not when it possibly involves considering some stance they've been preaching to now be wrong.

To see the opposite of that happening in such a stark way in that story was mindblowing at the time and I think was a stepping stone to leaving the religion altogether eventually.

"Stories of your life and others" by Ted Chiang. Quite an amazing book that really makes you think.

I'm reading The Dawn of Everything by the Davids Graeber and Wengrow. It is a retelling of the "story of humanity" which aims to dispell common myths and tropes that are typically assumed to explain history and the origin of our core concepts and ideals. I highly recommend it!

"Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist" by Frans De Waal.
It describe and explains so well how some aspects of gender are most likely genetics while others are environmental and, hence, sociocultural. It links the biology of evolution, genetics, and environment with the concepts of leadership, mutual protection, empowerment, and peace. Easy to read. Full of well explained concepts.
We are all animals and there are consistent differences and there are consistent similarities.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.

Not many of his books seem to withstand aging very well, but of my memory reading this as a teen and again later in adulthood (the unabridged copy, slightly longer), it is still revolutionary to me and helped me believe in complete acceptance of anyone as they come and judge not the path, but help where ever possible as you never know where it might lead. Someone mentioned Gaiman helping to understand change and process it and this book helped me on that journey as well. It also helped me process out most of my religious upbringing.

The Bible.

The Bible tells me that I need to change the way I think and align my interests to that of God's. This plainly tells me to give up everything I thought I knew because I am wrong and so is everyone else.

The world tells me that I should be able to have my own mind and interests, yet put others' into consideration because everyone's truth matters. This confuses me.

I then cannot help but question, "By whose authority should I consider others if I'm my own person? Are universally agreeable things really universal if there are people and other species who do not agree?" And then I ultimately ask more and more questions until nothing makes sense and everything becomes pointless.

I became a completely different person and have been learning to suppress my challenging and nihilistic tendencies because of the Bible.

The Forgiving Self by Robert Karen really did change my life and my worldview. It's more of a psychology book than a self-help book (though obviously those terms are fuzzy), and it explores the idea of forgiveness in interpersonal relationships. What I love about the book is he doesn't polemicize about it; in the first chapter he discusses the fact that to many people, forgiveness is a weapon to wield or something to be avoided at all costs. He really puts a lot of effort into discerning that kind of weaponized forgiveness from the "real thing."

Included within the book is hands down the best explanation of attachment theory, if that's something you're into at all. Not to get too personal, but it completely changed my worldview and how I interface with the world and interpersonal relationships. It also reframed and even healed several aspects of my relationship with my parents, in a way literal therapy never did for me. It was just that good. Happy to share more insights if anyone's interested. I don't mean to sound like a shill for this book, but it was just so personally moving to me, and I wish more people read it because it's pretty unknown.

You might wanna give some Borges a go... Labyrinths probably being the best introduction.

I can't say this book necessarily changed my perception, but it aligned with the way I tend to perceive the world to a degree where it made me happy: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. Walking around, contemplating, just kinda making connections between the physical and metaphysical.. like, watching the wind blow through leaves on branches of a tree, the sun making its way through on occasion, a ray making it's way to your hand, a tender touch from god, close your eyes and the susurrous rustle a reminder to breathe, open your eyes and a squirrel's agility reminds you of humanity's clunky existence, etc..

Positioning. The battle for your mind. It is like marketing and branding 101.

Irrational Exubernace. Be afraid. Be very afraid of the next bubble.

Whale done. The power of positive affirmations.

I read these one after another and they left me very damaged for a while:

• no logo
• animal farm
• 1984
• brave new world
• the gates of perception

There is one section of one book which sits in the back of my mind, and actually influenced how I think about certain things, and has even changed my behaviour to a degree.

It's Chapter 12 of the 1989 revised edition of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, entitled "Nice guys finish first". This is one of the two chapters that Dawkins added for this revised edition. It's about the Prisoner's Dilemma, which is a famous game used in game theory. "Nice guys finish first" is about a iterated version of the Prisoner's Dilemma, where various computer programs keep playing the game repeatedly with each other - and can use their memory of prior rounds to influence their decision in future rounds.

Surprisingly, the most successful program was nice and forgiving. It was called Tit For Tat. Tit For Tat never did the wrong thing first, always punished another program for doing the wrong thing, but always forgave the other program if it stopped doing the wrong thing.

That made an impression on me. That has influenced how I deal with other people.

By the way, the rest of the book is well worth a read, too!

Barry Trotter series by Michael Gerber.

Changed my perception about mainstream media's parodies and comical writing as a craft in itself.

PS. The series is a chaotic wonderland. I urge everyone to give it a go.

Edit: Spelling

Catch22 and Good Soldier Svejk knocked away some of my idealism about the military.

Animal Farm showed me how to be skeptical of government at a younger age than I otherwise would have.

Man's Search for Meaning introduced me to a philosophy of how to survive and overcome circumstances.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen and Back Home by Michelle Magorian gave me vivid pictures of the experience of being an outsider to a culture, including to a culture you thought was your own.

The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir by Telford Taylor. This might be a little different from the other books in this thread, but this is more up my alley. This is more like a mixture of a memoir and part history book because Taylor had mixed in some of his memories and some of the historical context that surrounded it. According to him, the German people after the war and during the trials at Nuremberg did not simply supported them, and in fact did not support the Allies and Soviets efforts of bringing war criminals to justice. So it was interesting to see that it was different from what is was being taught in school, at least in the US (not sure about anywhere else).
Also, he had pointed out when the Soviets had put up the Iron Curtain, the relationship that they had with the other parties, the Americans, the British and the French, became more cold than usual. And that it was around this point of time that the Soviets had started their own trials without the other delegations.

How To Make Good Things Happen

I’ve gone from a generally unpleasant, pessimistic, addict to someone who is more empathetic, loving and less judgmental reading this book. It’s not some gimmicky self help book, it actually lays out the foundation for understanding your mind and reasoning the actions of others.

Highly recommend if you feel like you need a perspective shift. I wish you well, friend.

The Last Human by Zach Jordan. Its a book about individualism in the face of vast, uncaring systems, of collectivism even if you dont fully understand everything, and of the ethics of superintelligences, while also being an absolutely incredible ride. When I finished it, I just had to take a step back and think for a while...

I'm a lifelong atheist, literally, as in I was raised with no religion and have continued to not believe in any deity through my childhood, teenage, and adult life.

There are two books that fundamentally opened my eyes to faith, not in the sense of converting me, but in the sense of finally understanding why others believe what they believe.

Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Salinger's Franny and Zooey.

They both are also fantastic novel(las) in their own right. Can't recommend them highly enough.

Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse. It was recommended to me like 15 years ago, on reddit of all places, as a good book to read if you're having an existential crisis, which I was at that time. I was not disappointed. It's a great read.

The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. We have intuition, we have alarm bells, but they have been (metaphorically) beaten out of us by society - we should learn to tune into those instincts again, within reason of course.

Love 2.0 by Barbara Fredrickson. It's a little book about love, oxytocin, and its role in our society, development, and well-being. Its contents may surprise you.

The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. It helped me through a tough time in life. I guess also ties into the "we feel things for a reason, we have instincts and intuitions, and it's actually okay to listen to them within reason".

Glasshouse by Charles Stross. Just some cool hard science fiction.

1. The original Dragonlance trilogy - Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
   I grew up going to a very conservative Christian school during the "Satanic Panic" era. Although my parents weren't the "raving fundie" type, I adopted those attitudes from other authority figures in my life. When I was a little bit older (around 13), I ended up reading the Dragonlance series. A couple of things about it really affected me:
   • The world did not come to an end because I read a book about magic and monsters.
   • The character Raistlin felt very familiar. He was part of the "physically weak, mentally powerful" magic user trope, but Dragonlance was my first exposure to it. I was very behind in physical development as a child. When we had to run an obstacle course in PE class one year, I not only had the slowest time, but I believe it was twice as slow as the next slowest kid. I was "brainy", non-athletic, and socially awkward (to put it mildly). Those things didn't bother me themselves, but being made fun of for them really sucked.
     Raistlin was also cursed to see everything as it is affected by time, watching the world decay before his eyes. I have a similar problem where it somehow feels like all of time is happening at once and I am losing things that are right here with me.
2. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
   • Probably a pretty cliché choice, but this book's irreverent take on religion played a big part in leading me away from it.
3. Phantoms in the Brain - V.S. Ramachandran
   • An amazing look into how the brain generates our perception, and how it can be altered by damage. It pretty much re-wrote my entire worldview on concepts of behavior and whether it can be said that one "deserves" punishment.
4. The Quantum Thief - Hannu Rajaniemi
   • A hard sci-fi novel with some fascinating futuristic tech (especially in the nano/quantum realm). My favorite aspect is that the author doesn't really directly explain the tech, but lets you figure it out from context.

Educated by Tara Westover. It is truly one of the best books I've read about personal upbringing. Obviously, we all have a general grasp that everyone is raised differently than we are. Hell, when I tell people about my religious background, some are shocked by what I've gone through. But, this book was a definite, "I gotta pause and reflect on what I just read" book for me.

The Man Who Folded Himself (David Gerrold, 1973) is a mind-bending science fiction novel that explores time travel, personal identity, and the consequences of...

It's a 70s book and it shows, sci-fi free love taken to the extreme. Probably my favorite time travel tale of all time.

Permutation City (Greg Egan, 1994) is a hard science fiction novel about digital immortality, consciousness, identity, and the nature of reality. Some cool, trippy computer science and theoretical physics speculation. What I love the most about Egan's writing is that he makes no excuses about being a science nerd, and he's very good at taking a core concept to mind-boggling yet logical extremes. Ultimately, Egan explores transhumanist themes, questioning what really makes us humans and how far can we take our modes of existence without completely thwarting our very selves.

Blindsight by Peter Watts. I'm not entirely sure how to describe it. It's a book about first contact but it's very much more about psychology and how the brain functions and how it doesn't, and how other brains might.

Specifically what's stuck with me is the way one of the characters uses a computer to perceive data. The computer displays data as human faces contorted in different ways based on the data, reusing the parts of the brain that can instantly parse faces to instantly parse the data behind them.

Makes me think about ways we could feed data into ourselves, build entire new senses by taking over parts of existing ones. Like for example sound. Sound can carry so much dense information, the tone, the texture, the timing. How quickly could we adapt to a new sense that piggybacked on our sense of hearing to hear 2.4 and 5GHz frequencies? Would we be able to hear dead zones when setting up Wifi? Hear and track down sources of interference? What about hearing magnetic fields? Would our brains start incorporating that information usefully, would we get better at navigating if we could always hear the Earth's field around us? Some day when I have more free time I want to explore all of that, I don't think it'd take very much to experiment with. Just a phone and some non-noise-isolating headphones.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. While it falls into the trope of sanctifying hunter-gatherer societies it really helped me reframe my own role in societal structures. Seeing the invention of language, growth in the complexities of human organizations, and how as humans we create abstract constructs and coordinate to agree on the existence of these constructs really highlighted to me the challenges we have as a species. We moved beyond corporeal truth thousands of years ago. It has been useful as an organizing mechanism. But we are seeing how fragile that balance is with the rise of "post truth" media.

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier definitely changed my views (and somewhat cured my pessimism) about what the future of tech could look like. Highly recommended and imaginatively and persuasively written. And it might not be the manifesto you're expecting (spoiler: one of the takeaways I took from it is that maybe we'd be better off if data wasn't free, or maybe we'd better off with less detachment from the data we create).

I just read Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. It was really eye opening how these social media companies prey on our mindless attention.

Ended up deleting my Instagram and Twitter accounts after I finished.. Just need to quit reddit now.

The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts. This is a very short book recounting a pilosophers experiments with psychedelics in search of understanding. He explores how drugs like LSD, psilocybin and mescaline can be used as tools much like a scientist would use a microscope in a lab to get a clearer picture of their sample. Watts was a British philosopher with degrees in Theology and Divinity and approached his trips in a really interesting and enlightening manner. You could finish this in a few hours but you'll be thinking about it long after.

How the Other Half Learns was a really interesting book about Success Academy. While I still don't support most of the charter school movement, it did convince me that there is a good argument for them in certain cases.

It made me wonder which parts of the model (which, as described, is still in my opinion abusive to children) are necessary, and if certain, less necessary parts could be cut to make it less cruel while still getting similar results. Because the books main thesis is that Success Academy is selecting for high quality parents, which is how they get the best students despite the lottery. But that's not to say that the children still aren't disadvantaged -- they are, which is why the successes are still impressive.

When I was younger:

• The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
• Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault
• History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault
• The Prince by Machiavelli
• A Theory of Justice by John Rawls

These are all still very important to me, but we’re life changing in my high school and college years.

These days I often find myself noticing the smaller elements of books. I’ve been reading the Locked Tomb series, and the most recent entry Nona the Ninth hit me hard.

Peace of Mind: Becoming Fully Present by zen teacher Thich Nhat Han. After his death, I saw people writing moving posts about how important his writing was to them and how much his books had changed their lives for the better; so I impulse bought this one. I'm not spiritual or religious, but I do believe in the benefits of meditation. I'd never really been able to meditate before and thought I just didn't have the focus for it. This book explains things clearly and simply and it finally just clicked for me - mindfulness and meditation make sense and are possible for me now in a way they weren't before.

I keep the book in my car so if I'm having a bad day it's close by and I can flip through it for guidance on calming my mind.

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green. It's a very accessible view into the life of someone (in this case, a high schooler) with severe, chronic mental illness. I think it's the first book that really allowed me to begin to grasp what it means to have chronic mental illness, and how unfathomably large the accompanying challenges can be, especially in a world of people who largely do not understand what folks with these conditions are going through. It also does a really great job of showing how lives with mental illness can be complex and full and fulfilling, even with all of the pain and struggle and challenge, which is something that I think many depictions of mental illness struggle with.

I've been thinking about this for a while, and it's a book I have talked about a couple of times here, but the only example of a book that has really affected my perspective is Shardik by Richard Adams.

(I swear that I'm not going to stop mentioning this book until every single one of you PMs me that you've already read it. And I'll probably do it a few more times just for good measure!)

I read it while I was in my "angry at religion" phase, and the thing that it taught me was the inherant value of spirituality. I was still angry at organized religion - especially politically organized religion - but It was much easier to understand the thoughts and feelings of religious people.

It's also a really beautifully written book. It's full of very lush descriptions of nature, which makes it both soothing and helps transport you to it's setting. It's by the same guy who wrote Watership Down. It doesn't have a sequel and under no circumstances should you consider checking to see if this statement is true.

Recent reads that I believe are or could become "significant books" meaning there's something groundbreaking about them:

• The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It really challenges much of the conventional wisdom regarding indigenous peoples prior to and during the early days of European contact.

• Becoming Abolitionists by Derecka Purnell. A compelling and remarkably practical argument for police abolition.

• Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. A reminder to focus on what matters.

I’ll add two books I haven’t seen mentioned yet. These are both books I read over 30 years ago, but they’ve stuck with me.

A high school teacher loaned me A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. I was shocked to learn there’s (at least) two sides to every story, and to ask whose perspectives have been omitted from the stories we’ve been told. Teenage mind blown. This book would make a great gift for the smart young people in your life, or for yourself.

I read Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez after college. It’s ostensibly a personal finance book, but it’s really a work of philosophy that laid the foundation for the FIRE movement. When we work, we trade our priceless, finite life energy for money, so we can buy things. We trade our life for things. If we consume less things, we can choose to work less and live more. This book inspired me to live as frugally and as lightly on the Earth as possible.

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle guides you through exercises / experiments in human consciousness. That book transformed my life to some degree and no other book has come as close. One exception might be the follow up by the same author; A New Earth.

If the first chapter (or is it the intro?) doesn’t pull you in, fine, but I’d recommend everyone to try it and see if it’s for them or not. He explicitly says that we don’t recognize our own inner consciousness and aims to change that through the book.

invisible cities by italo calvino.

i can’t really say why and how it changed me as it gives away the game, but it’s not very long and i recommend it.

the premise is marco polo having conversations with kublai khan about the cities he’s visited in khan’s empire.