Any one of them.
Please.
The Maxims of Ptahhotep. First book we know of & filled with practical advice.
The section dealing with domestic demons by applying crocodile urine to your underwear is worth living by.
What number maxim is that?
A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson
Everyone? Idk. For most people though GTD is pretty high on my list.
For Americans I think “slavery by another name” and “bury my heart at wounded knee” should be required reading.
Don’t really know one book that everyone should read, maybe everyone should read more than one book
A short history of nearly everything. Snowcrash
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. For me, I think Russian literature is a must-read.
Green Eggs and Ham.
To kill a mockingbird -Harper Lee
After reading it, I felt I had read and understood something important that remained with me. Not a difficult or long book, enjoyable and interesting.
The egg by Andy Weir. It gave me the basis for Gnosticism / the spirituality that I genuinely think is closest to the truth ie: humans do have a soul, but it’s all the same soul / consciousness that just splits up into sperate little chunks of perception for a little bit at a time before rejoining the whole in different places and splitting off again from and to a completely different place. Honestly the main thing I learned from psychology, neurology, and physics classes is that time, or at least the human perception of it, is almost completely bullshit, and that our perception of our brain as a separate thing that controls the rest of our body, or even as our body as a separate thing from the world like a suit in space is a significant cause of mental illness.
Why does our sense of self so often stop at our brain when most of our neurotransmitters are in our gut? How can you be the cells but not the fluid you filter then piss out? Your upper layers of skin and hair are dead how can they be more you than the air trapped between them? There’s a reason drugs dissolving your sense of self, even temporarily, is often described as a positively transformative experience.
The Stranger by Albert Camus. It’s very short, barely over 100 pages, and it helped me realize that nothing really matters.
1984, so that people mentioning it online will stop sounding like complete fucking idiots.
Or perhaps The Jungle; it sparked public outcry and major overhauls the last time it became popular, maybe it can work its magic again.
Hah. I’d be happy to hear that everyone read at least one book in their lifetime.
Which is ridiculous. I’ve read one book since the weekend.
It should be made clear though that there are book and there are Books. I feel like this question is about the latter and those are not the ones you had to read in as part of your middle/high school curriculum. Also the one that I read probably doesn’t qualify as a capital B book.
Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I’d have never picked it up if I hadn’t been bored and trying to kill time, but it really put life in a new perspective. Genuinely think it’s made everything lighter since reading that one.
Is it like his other books? Slaughterhouse 5 was totally and completely terrible. IMO.
Anything by E.B. White. While the narratives are simplistic, there is a gentile under tone of trauma in each one that I feel might be rather meaningful and resonant to today’s emotionally fragile youth. These are books that deal with inevitable death, discrimination and ableism in frank, but subversively subtle ways.
