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
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
Everyone? Idk. For most people though GTD is pretty high on my list.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. For me, I think Russian literature is a must-read.
A short history of nearly everything. Snowcrash
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.
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.
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.
The Stranger by Albert Camus. It’s very short, barely over 100 pages, and it helped me realize that nothing really matters.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Just the intermissions would get everyone’s blood boiling.
One of my favorite books and unfortunately lots of the story still is relevant today.
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.
I actually haven’t read any of his other books. When I was in high school Slaughterhouse 5 was one of the default books on class book report lists, so I assumed he was a dry, dusty, old-timey author. One of the things that surprised me reading Timequake was finding out he has a daughter my age.
It’s a very weird book. But it’s brilliant and touching and heartbreaking and eye-rolling kind of funny. He’s writing in his own voice. The setup is that “Timequake” was a draft novel he never finished… I’m not sure if that’s true on some level, or just a literary device. He says that in that novel the Timequake occurred in 2001, and pushed everyone, everywhere, backward to 1991.
But… not to change anything. Every single thing plays out exactly as it did the first time around. Everyone ended up in some kind of conscious “autopilot” with no free will, forced to repeat every event, every choice, every moment they had lived over those 10 years all over again, conscious they’re stuck in some kind of loop/nightmare watching and doing but unable to do even the tiniest thing differently.
Seems like it would make a horribly boring, pointless scifi story… but as a literary device, it’s amazing. It’s him looking back on life and coming to terms with getting older and not being able to change the things we’ve fucked up. One of the things that stuck with me the most was him saying that no one asked to be born, no one got an instruction manual for this “life” and “self-aware consciousness” nonsense, no one has any real idea what the hell we’re doing. Every one of us is just making it up as we go. We never got a chance to practice, just pushed out into this shit with no warning at all.
My parents weren’t the best, and I’ve definitely had my own relationship issues. It really helped put existence into perspective. It’s not a book you read for a story, it’s just sort of his life… but it’s the parts that pretty much anyone over 40 is sure to relate to.
