What are the most influential books to you?
I'm young, I'm looking to understand more ways of looking at the world. What books do you recommend people to read that had profound impacts on your world outlook, character, or anything else like that. Future me says thank you.
Edit List (Books listed so far by Title):
"Accelerando" by Charles Stross
"A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess
"A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn
"A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
"Bardo Thödol" by Padmasambhava
"Brave New World" by Huxley
"Book of the Dead" by ?
"Cain" by José Saramago
"Capital vol.1" by Karl Marx
"Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold
"Collected Fictions" by Jorge Luis Borges
"Crime and Punishment" by Dostoyevsky
"Die Grundlage der Allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie" by Einstein
"Divine Comedy" by Dante
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick
"Don Quixote" by Cervantes
"Daughters of the Dragons" by William Andrews
"Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card
"Ethics" by Spinoza
"Fables" by Aesop
"Fahrenheit 451" by Bradbury
"Faust" by Goethe
"Flowers for Algernon" By Daniel Keyes
"Fragile Things" by Neil Gaiman
"God and the State" by Mikhail Bakunin
"Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R. Hofstadter
"Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
"Great Books" by David Denby
"Harry Potter" by J.K. Rowling
"Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams
"History of Violence" By Édouard Louis
"Homo Deus" by Yuval Noah Harari
"How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie
"Illiad" by Homer
"Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn
"Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami
"Le contrat social" by Rousseau
"Les fleurs du mal" by Baudelaire
"Leviathan" by Hobbes
"Maus" by Art Spiegelman
"Naked Economics" by Charles Wheelan
"Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss
"Neuromancer" by William Gibson
"Odyssey" Homer
"On the Origin of Species" by Darwin
"Paid Attention" by Faris Yakob
"Personality-Shaping Through Positive Disintegration Processes" by Kazimierz Dąbrowski
"Player Piano" by Vonnegut
"Poetics" by Aristotle
"Republic" by Plato
"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
"Shogun" by James Clavell
"Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut
"Tao Te Ching" by Lao Tzu
"Tales of Power" by Carlos Castaneda
"Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science" by Peter Godfrey-Smith
"The Ancestor's Tale" by Richard Dawkins
"The Bible" by :contentious_topic_here:
"The End of Eddy" By Édouard Louis
"The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt
"The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood
"The Lucifer Effect" by Philip Zimbardo
"The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes
"The Prince" by Machiavelli
"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins
"The Singularity Is Near" by Ray Kurzweill
"The Stranger" by Camus
"The Tao of Pooh" by Benjamin Hoff
"The Three-Body Problem Trilogy" by Cixin Liu
"Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" by Wittgenstein
"Traité d'atheologie" by Onfray
"Treatise of the Three Imposters" by ?
"Where Mathematics Comes From" by Lakoff and Nunez
"Where I'm Calling From" by Raymond Carver
"1984" by George Orwell
Might be a bit cliché - 1984 (Orwell)
Also, The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood)
The Handmaid's Tale is that TV/Web show right? Is the book truly better?
I've only read the book, so I can't really say, but I heard the TV series follows quite well.
The Stranger by Camus, Brave New World by Huxley and How to Win Friends and Influence People. All for different reasons but all have influenced my thinking in a serious way.
The Stranger was so haunting for me. I feel like it really drained some of my naive optimism about the world.
Hmm... do you mean influential in that they changed how we see the world, or influential in that they defined what we like in a book/genre?
For the first question, I'd suggest "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson; "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn; "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn; and/or "1984" by George Orwell. All of them have a very important significance in how I understand the world.
For the latter question, I've personally re-inspired my love of literature, and therefore, have greatly improved my enjoyment in life by reading books like "Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami, "Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss, and/or just reading and learning more about poets and poetry.
Probably the first question but both are important; and thanks ill add them to the list.
Here are a few that influenced me:
Tales of Power - Carlos Castaneda (this masterful prose "non-fiction" author been called a fraud which fits in with his concept of a Sorcerer)
Shogun - James Clavell (showed me that different cultures can be very different)
Tao Te Ching - (as an alternative to the Bible)
The Bible - (as an alternative to Taoism)
Great Books - David Denby (for slackers like me that didn't have time to read the Classic Canon)
The Singularity Is Near - Ray Kurzweill (maybe it isn't, but the concept is intriguing and also the premise for Accelerando by Charles Stross)
The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt (a favorite Dutch painter of mine as the premise for a prize-winning novel)
The Three Body Problem Trilogy - Cixin Liu (given enough time, the most heroic actions can be trivialized or vilified, the ultimate lesson in political correctness)
Where Mathematics Comes From - Lakoff and Nunez (to me, this controversial book has implications for General Artificial Intelligence)
Don Quixote - Cervantes (classic and also reminiscent of Alzheimer's Disease, to me at least, not to mention metafiction and metaphysics)
Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges (the man was the Library)
+1 Borges, great ideas and fantastic writing.
And also for the Tao Te Qing, a completely different way of understanding existence. Although hard to grasp.
You have to read around the Tao a lot to get a feel for it. Castaneda does that some with his discussion of the Tonal and the Nagual in Tales of Power. So does Alan Watts, who had a book I can't find now, Tao: The Watercourse Way. Basically it's like Fight Club, except instead of We Don't Talk About Fight Club, it's more We Can't talk about Tao.
Cool, I'll check it out.
I have a bad feeling about Castaneda for some reason. I used to see his books around as a kid and it always seemed to me very... sensationalist.
Also I recommend you read Blindsight if you haven't yet. It's one of my favorite books and it's free (check that link for downloads).
Looking at Blindsight now. Castaneda isn't for everybody, and his first book is only interesting as background as far as I'm concerned. His Magical Realism gets going in the second book, takes off in Journey to Ixtlan, and comes to a sort of completion in Tales of Power.
His concept of perception as a bubble continues to be of use to me today, as does the idea of a 'gloss' (discussed in interviews). A gloss is a particular world-view that one intuitively knows not to be absolute, but puts on as a second skin for various reasons. But in putting it on, that view becomes one's reality, unlike a philosophy, which remains an intellectual concept.
I believe he got the concept of a gloss from one of his sociology professors, and that's probably a source of its inherent relativism, to be used as a term for the world-view of this or that culture.
Influential in showing a future I want parts of and driving in my career today, then I'd have to list Accelerando by Charles Stross.
Tough read, though. But I liked it. I remember Stross saying on reddit that he didn't agree with that vision anymore.
Eyep, he doesn't agree with it at all anymore and I can't blame that. Neither do I entirely, but I do think certain bits in the beginning would be mighty neat.
Do you know in which sense he doesn't agree with it? (I meant, i thought it strange that he agreed to it at some point)
I don't remember offhandedly however let me shoot him a message. Then I'll let you know.
I read Douglass Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach" religiously during my middle-school to early high school years. I must've read it something like five times in a row, and an uncountable number of re-reads over the years.
I was a voracious reader and went looking for the biggest books in my Dad's library. The one with the coolest cover won out, and that was that. At first I really didn't understand much outside of the cool Escher prints and funny dialogues between sections, but as I got older I slowly understood more and more. I credit that book with shaping how I think about the world, my interest in formal systems, chaotic interactions, math, fractals, computers, semantics and wordplay.
His ability to relate things as seemingly distinct as Rubix's cube solving, Godel's incompleteness theorem, "typographical number theory", and the difficulty of translating puns never ceases to delight, and left an indelible mark on my impressionable adolescent brain.
It depends on your pre-existing knowledge of the domains they cover, but these were sparks that led to further illumination for me:
I was looking for something after Sapiens, I think there are some good suggestions here. Thanks.
The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff. One of those "buy two copies to lend one and keep one" kinda books.
I forgot to say that my book to recommend to anyone would probably be "Naked Economics," I feel more millennials need to read this.
I actually enjoyed and hated the Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo. It's not so much a narrative or story-driven book but its more along the lines of a self-reflection on tragedy and "evil" as seen by the author. As with anything covering real world events, you'll likely find most of the content despicable in nature; a few points of reference are the rape of Rwanda and Nanking, the holocaust, and the Stanford prison experiments.
The book itself gives an objective view on evil and the idea that anyone is capable of it.
Man, I can't get into Phil Zimbardo. As someone who studied and now works in the Psych field, the dude biased the Stanford Prison experiment in such a blatant way by telling the guards to be sadistic. But I will say that there is a lot of truth in the atrocities that people are able to commit for a number of different psychological reasons. He also fucked up the heads of a lot of his participants and there are a few of them with severe depression/anxiety as a lasting effect of his study.
Which, in a very meta way, goes to prove his point that seemingly normal people can do really horrible, unethical shit.
The Ancestor's Tale, which is a book which traces our genetic history, from humanity as we know it, all the way back past the Cambrian explosion to the cutting edge research (at the time) into life's nascence. I recommend this book to anyone and everyone who has some sense of wonder and curiosity about the world around them.
Daughters of the Dragon which is about a young woman during the Japanese invasion of Korea. Warning: this book gets really rough.
A People's History of the United States, which I have only read part of, to be honest.
Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
Where I'm Calling From By Raymond Carver
and of course, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quintilogy. I wish Douglas Adams hadn't died.
Honestly, I really enjoyed Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. It's a very quick read and I personally enjoyed how the main character, Ender, dealt with and lead his peers throughout the entire book. I thought it was an interesting take on kid geniuses.
I read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut in my teenage years and it directly influenced huge changes in the way I viewed reality, free will and war at the time. Great book and also a pretty quick read too.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
Book of the Dead ? ~ -1550
Illiad Homer ~ end of 8th
Odyssey Homer ~ end of 8th
Fables Aesop ~ - 620 - 554
Poetics Aristotle -335
Republic Plato -380
Bardo Thödol ?Padmasambhava ~ 8th
Divine Comedy Dante 1320
The Prince Machiavel 1513
Leviathan Hobbes 1651
Ethics Spinoza 1677
Le contrat social Rousseau 1762
Faust Goethe 1832
Les fleurs du mal Baudelaire 1857
On the Origin of Species Darwin 1859
Capital vol1 Marx 1867
God and the state Mikhail Bakunin 1882
Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie Einstein 1916
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein 1921
Player Piano Vonnegut 1952
Fahrenheit 451 Bradbury 1953
Treatise of the Three Impostors ? ?
Traité d'atheologie Onfray 2005
The most influential books for me were the Harry Potter series because they got me into reading in the first place. I loved them so much and read them many many times. All subsequent books were bonuses as a result of this.
Flowers for Algernon By Daniel Keyes
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett -- it's a seriously funny (if you can dig British humor) book that examines fatalism in a manner that heavily shaped my theology
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess -- a great dystopian read which is good for its take on crime, society, and punishment, but also as an exercise in decyphering slang so thick it's almost its own dialect
Neuromancer by William Gibson -- essential cyberpunk. The people who built the Internet as we know it read this book and loved it (I don't have a source for that, but the concept of cyberspace came from Gibson). Also contains a pretty serious conceptualization of what rights an artificial intelligence has or should have
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. A deeper dive into AI rights and therefore what it means to be an individual
There are already afew books here I would have mentioned but Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky had a profound effect on me as a teenager.
The End of Eddy By Édouard Louis
A really beautiful and painful autobiography about growing up gay in a small, poor town in the north of France. It's very blunt both in terms of language and the way it deals with topics such as class, gender and sexuality.
His next book, History of Violence, is very good too.
Cain; José Saramago. This opened my eyes w.r.t. religion. I was already questioning a lot of things, but this book stripped me off of religion. It follows Cain from him killing Abel and then him wandering in space and time throughout the lands and stories of the old testament.