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

I'm learning Spanish and feel like reading is really helping me get to the next level. I've read 1984 and one part of Harry Potter in Spanish but now I'm thinking of trying some original, non-translated literature.

What Spanish-language books would you recommend (that are not too difficult to read)?

I've read a few novels, I think an excellent short novel is Elevation by Stephen King. It's not what you'd expect from a Stephen King novel (no horror elements), but it's a great read. I can't say too much without spoiling it, but here's the blurb:

The latest from legendary master storyteller Stephen King, a riveting, extraordinarily eerie, and moving story about a man whose mysterious affliction brings a small town together—a timely, upbeat tale about finding common ground despite deep-rooted differences.

It starts off a little slow, but give it a little bit of time. It's readable in an afternoon, I think I spent 5 or so hours reading it.

I was telling someone about a psychology book I'm reading at the moment. Intending to read it themselves they messaged me later to ask for the title. And I felt a bit unsettled at sharing it!

Whilst it's interesting and I'm enjoying it, I doubt I'll remember its lessons or claims in a year or two. Which got me thinking about books that I read years ago which still help me understand the world.

So I thought I'd make a post asking which books other users still found helpful year(s) later.

tldr; share books that are:

• Non-fiction (or at least serious fiction).
• First read over a year ago.
• Have been helpful to you multiple times since.

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk a bit about it.

Edit 2019-01-16: Add the link for Week #11 below.

Past weeks: Week #1 · Week #2 · Week #3 · Week #4 · Week #5 · Week #6 · Week #7 · Week #8 · Week #9 · Week #10 · Week #11

This is my 2019 project, to gain some understanding of the subjects of income and wealth inequality. I've prepared a reading list but was just wondering if there is a proper way to go about it. I'm from a third world country and didn't go to college, if that's of any help.

I buy a bunch of books each year, but it seems less than half of them get read.

Sometimes I'm just satisfied by the notion that I will eventually read the book and never get around to it.
However, I do actually go back to some of these books. For instance I bought Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer/Sword of the Lictor back in 2015 but recently finished it back in summer of 2018.

Some have sat on the shelf for much longer.

Orson Scott Card's Xenocide comes to mind. I read Ender's Game back in 2013, read the sequel some time in 2014, and told myself I'd get around to the third book (Xenocide) but I never have.

Another one I picked up last year that I've been meaning to read is The Confessions of Saint Augustine.

So, what are some books you've been neglecting? Write them down here to put them to rest, or even better, to motivate yourself to actually read them!!

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk a bit about it.

Past weeks: Week #1 · Week #2 · Week #3 · Week #4 · Week #5 · Week #6 · Week #7 · Week #8 · Week #9 · Week #10

I'm an audio engineer, and I spend many hours a day consuming music. I could talk your ear off about genres, sub-genres, vocal styles, rhythms, and exactly what combinations of those I really enjoy. Technology, recommendations, and websites like everynoise.com have really enhanced how accurate my recommendations are, and I'm constantly consuming music that I absolutely love.

But when it comes to books... I'm so lost. Literature genres are like the equivalent of listing what instruments play on an album. Okay, this book is "sci-fi," so I know it's probably got futuristic technology, may be set in space, and could have some aliens. But that doesn't tell me anything about the writing style.

I know enough to know that I can't go just by good reviews on sites like amazon. How do I learn to quantify what I enjoy and curate my recommendations more effectively?

In 1977, Stephen King published a novel about a school shooting called Rage. It is somewhat infamous, as it has been connected to instances of real-life school shootings. King, in response, allowed the story to fall out of print and has never reissued it. The novel has a lot in common with other YA stories and tropes: a disaffected protagonist, meddling/out of touch adults, and newfound social connection with peers. While the main character is undoubtedly disturbed, the novel feels somewhat uncritical (or potentially even supportive) of his actions.

Certainly fiction is a space where authors are free to explore any point of view or theme they wish. The beauty of fiction is that it is limitless and consequence-free. No people are harmed in Rage because there are no people in it. Its characters are merely names and ideas--they are a fiction.

Nevertheless, Rage addresses a real-world phenomenon, and the beauty of fiction is that it doesn't live as a lie. As Ursula K. Le Guin writes,

"In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little..."

We like fiction because it resonates with us, exposing us to themes that can affirm, shape, or challenge our mindsets.

With this dichotomy in mind, I'm torn between whether authors should be free to explore anything they wish from the safety of make-believe, or whether they have a social responsibility because their words carry messages and ideas that directly impact lives. I'm not sure what to think, and I can come up with great arguments for both sides. What's your take? What social responsibilities do fiction authors have (if any)?

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk a bit about it.

Past weeks: Week #1 · Week #2 · Week #3 · Week #4 · Week #5 · Week #6 · Week #7 · Week #8 · Week #9

Edit: #9, not #8; sorry for messing the title up. Would be glad if someone can fix it for me, I can't edit it apparently. Thanks a lot, Deimos, for fixing it up!

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk a bit about it.

Past weeks: Week #1 · Week #2 · Week #3 · Week #4 · Week #5 · Week #6 · Week #7 · Week #8

I was browsing a second hand bookshop the other day and I was rather excited as a Tolkien fan to find a first edition print of The Silmarillion from 1977. Unfortunately I did not have the money to purchase the book which was in rather decent condition but it got me thinking. What’s the oldest book you own personally, and how did it end up in your possession?

I ask because I have several physical books that I would love to have digital copies of.

Most of the services out there are destructive, so you lose the book when you send it in to scan. I'm fine with this in theory, except for the fact that I'd hate to lose the physical book and have it replaced with a crappy digital copy. I've not had terribly great luck with my own attempts at OCR with documents (but I'm also not a professional).

Additionally, some of the books I want to scan have extensive footnotes. The ideal would be that the book gets scanned and edited to have these footnotes hyperlinked in the resulting ebook, but I don't know if anyone offers that kind of service. I'd even be okay with the footnotes just being eliminated if it's too much trouble. What I don't want is them just being flowed into the main text of the document.

There are a lot of different options out there, and I'm more than willing to pay for a good job. Has anyone used one of these services and can speak to their quality?

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk a bit about it.

Past weeks: Week #1 · Week #2 · Week #3 · Week #4 · Week #5 · Week #6 · Week #7

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk a bit about it.

Past weeks: Week #1 · Week #2 · Week #3 · Week #4 · Week #5 · Week #6

I've started doing this amateurishly a few months ago, translating a novel slowly, and nowadays I'm thinking of going to a few publishers and asking for actual contracts. Currently, I'm using an Org mode file in Emacs to do the translation, but I'm not sure that this is the most optimal way to do it. I was doing it using paper for a while, but editing and commenting is more flexible in Org mode. Yet it is also rather cumbersome the way I do it:

<<pageNo.paragraphNo.sentenceNo>> Text, text text
#
some text with a comment
# comment about the part between this comment and the above empty one
more text, more text. <<...>> Another sentence

I'm thinking of adding some code to make this a bit prettier, though.

But are there anything that's better out there already. My preference hierarchy: Emacs mode, yayyy! > Open source app, that's fine > Proprietary app, shit! but better than nothing.

I'm not sure if this should go under ~comp, ~tech or here (~books).

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk a bit about it.

Notes: Do any one of you follow any literary magazines? How do you follow fresh pieces of literature, and grab hold of them "fresh out of the oven"?

Past weeks: Week #1 · Week #2 · Week #3 · Week #4 · Week #5