What clicked and made you have a different mindset? How long did it take to start changing and how long was the transformation? Did it last or is it an ongoing back and forth between your old self? I want to know your transformation and success.
Any kind of change, big or small. Anything from weight loss, world view, personality shift, major life change, single change like stopped smoking or drinking soda to starting exercising or going back to school. I want to hear how people’s life were a bit or a lot better through reading and your progress.
TIA 🙏
You must log in or register to comment.
Two Vonnegut novels—God Bless you Mr. Rosewater and Player Piano—fundamentally shifted the way I view the world.
The novels primarily discuss the economy, automation, and human wellfare. When I was young I defaulted to a laissez-faire economic mindset, and basically assumed automation and technology would always make our quality of lives improve. I was very much in the Ayn Rand club on economic and moral issues. These books were ultimately what made me reflect and consider the other “spiritual” (in the sense Vonnegut uses the term) aspects of human wellfare. Vonnegut was my introduction to humanist thought, and I owe the vast majority of my personal moral development to the influence of these two books.
Wow, stunning answer. Huge Vonnegut fan too btw.
I hated every particle of Playor Piano when I read it and still do today. Granted my field is automation and I am an engineer.
I am making the world a better place. Freeing humans from degrading filthy boring work. You know what really irked me the most about that novel? The population lived in a freaken utopia and couldn’t say one good thing about it.
I would love to have the lives of those “workers”. Think of what you could do with a life where your job required nothing out of you. Go have 8 kids, learn conversational French, become the world champion at the knife game. They start life on near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy and the author had the gall to heavily handed compare them to chattle slaves. Yeah I am sure people getting sold for sex or getting whipped to harvest cotton all day are really comparable in lifestyle to people who are bored at work.
Discworld - Hogfather. In particular the speech of death about the little and big lies and how justice and mercy are simple human constructs and that in return we are basically responsible for our own happiness/misery. Since they made a movie, here exactly what I meant: Deaths speech
I was actually going to respond with the Discworld series in general, but Death’s dialogue there puts it in a nutshell. We’re not creatures of reason, but of narrative, fiction. I might not have come to that view if not for reading Terry Pratchett.
Not a complete list, but maybe an amusing one —
- A Wrinkle in Time
- Emergence
- Revolt in 2100
- Aristoi
- Stranger in a Strange Land
- Illuminatus!
- The Left Hand of Darkness
- The Book of the Law
- The Journal Entries of Kennet R’yal Shardik
- Gödel, Escher, Bach
- That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen
- Le Ton beau de Marot
- Slavery’s Constitution
- Negative Math
- Programming in Haskell
- Good and Real
great list. Liber AL vel Legis is pretty wild
Cultboy got hella laid, but ended up a junkie though. As an aging dude I’d rather have Bob H’s end times than Al C’s.
The law is a decent rule to attempt in one’s life.
for sure. orgies interrupt my nap time these days!
Illuminatus is the most potent and interesting paradigm-shifting book I’ve ever read. It’s like an epistemological shotgun blast, guerilla ontology indeed. Anything by R. A. Wilson is advisable, but this one really shakes you loose of your preconceptions and opens the door to new perspectives.
Illuminatus! is the political weirdness of the post-JFK-assassination period; extrapolated into a psychedelic occult fantasy; as interpreted by two white male porno writers; who were on some combination of weed, acid, plastic nude martinis, and coke for most of it.
It is very much a product of a specific time period and social situation.
I’ve probably re-read it more than any other book.
Wilson went on to write some good stuff, and some utter bullshit, and he’s very clear on the fact that he’s not telling you which part is the good stuff and which part is the utter bullshit.
I’ve probably re-read it more than any other book.
I definitely have.
Honestly I don’t think he wrote any utter bullshit, as such. Anything that could be described as such, was basically intended as such, with the explicit purpose of making you a specific kind of confused. In that sense, the bullshit itself was deeply profound, in a sense.
Everything is true, and false, and meaningless. I think really grokking that, which requires the intermingling of nonsensical-sounding profundity with profound-sounding nonsense, underlies an elusive sort of dynamic enlightenment.
But what the fuck do I know?
Some people need to hear that everything is a little bit bullshit.
Some people need to hear that some things are a lot more bullshit than others.
RAW was a lot better at the first than the second.
Some people huff their own farts, metaphysically speaking.
The second is a pit stop on the way the the first, which itself is a pit stop to yet higher realizations. Some people need to figure things out for themselves, they just haven’t started asking the right questions yet. RAW excelled at assaulting you with more questions than you were really prepared to answer, and giving you the opportunity to try to figure out what he was really trying to say, without ever really giving you a solid answer. That’s why re-reads are so satisfying: every time you read it, you’ve changed enough to dramatically redefine which parts are bullshit.
If you need to be told which things are more bullshit than others, you’re not quite there yet. But it can still get you there, with enough iterations.
How did you like godel Escher Bach? Have it on my bookshelf, intending to read it eventually after my current stack.
It’s dated, but it’s still essential in connecting math & CS with art & literature. Hofstadter was in a great place to connect disparate fields that touch on related patterns.
His AI theories seem to have come out mostly as dead ends, but that might still change.
Very, very worth a read or ten.
Besides various scriptural books, “But He Never Hit Me” by Dr. Jill Murray.
I was up late one night, unable to sleep because of fear after my ex left. I didn’t have cable or anything, but I had broadcast TV on to down out the silence. Dr. Phil had an episode about domestic violence, and my eyes were locked to the screen. The phrase that kept running through my mind as I watched was “at least he never hit me.”
He had Dr. Murray on as a guest at the end, and my jaw dropped when I heard the title of the book she promoted. The next day, I mentioned it to my mom, who mentioned it to my brother, who worked at Borders. A few days later, I got a copy in the mail from him.
I started reading the first few pages and couldn’t continue. It sat on my shelf for months before I finally opened it and slowly—very slowly for a person who used to read over a dozen books per weekend—got through the whole book.
By the end, I had a name for what is been living through, and I finally realized I had done nothing significantly wrong in my marriage. It changed my life. For better, because it gave me the strength to avoid abusive relationship patterns. For the worse because that has turned out to be every single man I’ve tried to date.
Now I’m alone because I can’t bring myself to try for any more relationships. And the fallout from trying to raise kids also raised by an abuser, and having a child with trauma-related BPD , has left me almost completely isolated from anyone.
But I have a very sensitive abuse radar now, at least.
My story is a little different, but I resonate with that kind of change. After I found out my ex wife was cheating on me, it started the process of taking a lot of blinders off. I feel like I see reality better, but I do feel much more disheartened in trying to date.
I forgot to mention, the life saving divorce, while I wouldn’t say it change my life, was helpful at that time.
The Enders Game series had a pretty profound effect on my worldview, and also provided a big lesson on separating art from the artist because holy shit do some of the lessons I took away from that series seem to run totally opposite to Orson Scott Card’s personal views and politics.
It’s hard to say exactly what clicked where and what it changed for me because I read them in about middle school which is kind of when people are really starting to form real opinions of the world anyway.
Major takeaways for me include
A general dislike of war, even when it’s justified you’re going to end up doing absolutely terrible things and in retrospect there often really aren’t good guys.
Politics are in their own way just as terrifying as war.
Respect for life, cultures, and viewpoints different from my own, and willingness to examine the world through those different perspectives. That doesn’t mean I agree with them, or find them acceptable, or worthy of being tolerated, but I do think it’s important to at least try to see why they think the way they do.
A whole lot of awe at the potential of genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, etc. tempered by distrust of my fellow man to use them responsibly.
If you really want to hate him read Treason. It is, well let me put it this way: they are not going to make a movie out of it anytime soon.
On the plus side we get to see him put a 19 year old boy in a dress, have him/her hide who they are, and get flirted with. Which explains a lot about Card’s outspoken homophobic views. Yep nothing to see here. Just a perfectly normal story about a boy in drag written by a 100% straight guy.
‘Thich Nhat Hanh - Heart of the Buddah’s Teachings’. I didn’t become a Buddhist, but it gave me some really useful mental tools to be happier.
I had a bit of a fucked up childhood, left home at 15, was really angry & bitter for a while. I was already many years into a general attempt to let go and be happier, I believe the knowledge from that book has made me happier and more resilient.
Unlimited Memory: How to Use Advanced Learning Strategies to Learn Faster, Remember More and be More Productive - By. Kevin Horsley
This single book has affected my life and improved my day to day life. Although not all useful, it has some very useful tactics.
I don’t forget stuff as easily, I can recall better for work, notes are minimal and if I do take notes its one or two word per item. Truly life changing especially while I was a student.
- Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham Maslow - Made me believe people are fundamentally good.
- The Hardware Hacker: Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware by Andrew “Bunnie” Huang - Really changed the way I look at the human-made world around me.
- Dune by Frank Herbert - Because since I read Dune, I’ve now read 13 other Dune books and plan to read more.
The Stranger by Albert Camus had a big impact on me as an adolescent, expressing feelings of absurdism that I previously had no words for. Snow Country by Kawabata Yasunari changed the course of my life by drawing me to Japan.
Whoops, based on that prompt I was expecting the topic to be self help books. I will say The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Teens (based on the adult version) changed my life when I was 13. “Begin with the end in mind” is such a simple little phrase, but it applies to EVERYTHING in life.
- Should I buy this shirt at the mall? Well, what esthetic do I want my wardrobe to be?
- should I eat this ice cream? Will the satisfaction outweigh the extra exercise I’ll have to do later?
- where should I move to? Does the neighborhood have the activities I imagine myself doing?
Basically, picture yourself at the end of the process and figure out the steps you need to take to get there. Work backwards until you get to the beginning, and that’s where you start. I feel like I have more direction in life because I’m working to be the person I see myself as 5 years in the future.
My kids school has really pushed this. One time I drove my eldest to an activity and when we got there I noticed that we had forgotten our bag that has everything needed for the activity. Sigh. Long drive home and she announces “I should have checked to make sure the bag was in the car, beginning with the end in mind”.
The Godfather. Not that I’m in organized crime or anything, but the idea of not telegraphing what you’re going to do before you do it I think resonated with me after I read that book however many decades ago. “Threatening” to do something just gives other people time to prepare for it. If you’re going to do it, just do it.
Honestly, The Bible. No, I’m not Christian. I’m Agnostic. But so many fuckers who have read it love to wreck my life because of it.
So, you mean, it’s changed your life because of the effect it has had in other people?
Precicely
When I read Infinite Jest the first time I was in college I was dealing with a lot of “life’s crossroads” type issues, some of which I didn’t even know about until I looked back on them. The book helped me understand that I needed to stop relying on my “innate” talents and privileges and actually start putting in work for the things I wanted if I was ever going to have a hope of a good life. It also put into perspective a lot of substance use/abuse stuff in a really subtle way that ended up being very beneficial to me.
Now, on my second reading, there is none of the profound and personal wisdom present in the text. It is an enjoyable read, but for completely different reasons. I guess that first read was kind of just a “right place, right time” scenario for me.
2 years ago I read Divergent Mind by Jennara Nerenberg and it completely changed my perspective on the mental care industry and revealed, with studies and statistics, how women are systematically underserved when it comes to medical issues (both physical and mental). After reading that book it was like a big empathy door was kicked open in my brain that had been shut my whole life, and I suddenly started understanding some of the deep context behind the experiences of women in my life that I was previously never aware of.
This Is Vegan Propaganda: (And Other Lies the Meat Industry Tells You) by Ed Winters. I think it’s tough to read this book and not be vegan before it’s finished, it’s an extremely well considered and compelling book for for anyone who likes having their views challenged.
It changed my life profoundly in both outlook and actions, as it did everybody in my life who I suggested read it.
Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig
I love this book, warts and all. The rereads get harder as I see more flaws in both the text and Persig himself.
Regardless, I can’t deny the huge impact it had on my worldview. It helped me refine and improve the analytical mindset I take to the world around me and made me think routinely and deeply about what I value in my life and why.
I could see myself easily being obsessed with money and status at the point in my life where I am, and I’m grateful, in no short part to this book, that I’m not.
What is good? and what is bad? And who can tell us these things?
Persig does his best with these questions and gives you enough to put you on the same journey even if truly answering these questions is ultimately unachievable
