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fao_
I Am A Strange Loop by Hofstadter. The book he wrote many years before, GEB, is well-known. However, he was frustrated that so many people didn't get what he was trying to convey, so he took the central point and distilled it into another book. It's a really, really good read.
corysama
Even with GEB he had to add a “This is the central point:*” to a preface in a later printing.
Rerarom
His other non-GEB books are cool. I especially enjoyed Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies.
gargarplex
Hopefully this is not a submarine for Scribd- the only location where I could legally find a pdf! :). The library system appears to have copies as well. I’ve always wanted to really learn music theory, but it’s gonna have to wait til I really learn Leetcode algos, my primary goal for this year.

My contribution:

Richard Dawkins called Julian Jaynes's 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, “either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius”

bogoman
Haha, no, though it would have been an impressive submarine. I have a low quality copy I could share. If you do happen to go through the book and have questions/want to discuss it with someone, feel free to contact me! my twitter is in the profile.
arikr
How to get lucky by Gunther. Based on the premise that luck is very useful for getting what you want, and that there are very practical techniques you can follow for generating results that look like “luck”. Absolutely excellent book.
arikr
The married man sex life primer 2011 by Kay. Horrible title. Very useful book for me as a husband.
number6
He wrote a similar book called Mindfull Attraction Plan for none male audience.
thundergolfer
Ok, that awful title got me curious, and yep this book sounds awful.

For those wondering it's basically Pick-Up Artist (PUA) 'literature' for married men. Very sexist red-pill gender theory. A quick google around can confirm this.

cannam
Your harmony book sets a high bar for obscurity! I'm sure many of us with an interest in harmony would like to know more - please tell us something about it.

A book I am very fond of that I don't think is widely known (though it's not in the same league as your suggestion) is "Resisting the Virtual Life", a 1995 collection of essays on the theme of cyber-wariness published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights imprint - more often associated with poetry.

Also very obscure for a long time, though easily bought now: Mervyn Peake's self-illustrated children's book "Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor". From the author of Gormenghast, but frankly much better. Highly recommended.

bogoman
Yizhak Sadai, formerly head of the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv, was a brilliant teacher and philosopher. Many of the best musicians in Israel studied with him at some point during their career, even if for a brief period of time (As a recent example: Tom Oren, winner of the last Thelonious Monk Piano Competition, was his student for a year or so). I had the privilege to study with him for a year, and this book used to accompany our lessons.

The book is a thorough explanation of western harmony in its very basic aspects, from first principles. It also includes criticism of other, more famous music theory books, which is very interesting. One thing I love about it is how every theoretical concept comes first from what is perceived (hence "phenomenological"). A brief example of that is how some chords, which look like dominant chords if you look only on their notes, are sometime subdominant chords, because of the context in which they are played.

Some quotes:

On the approach of the book: "The conventional analytic approach as taught in academies is based primarily upon the depiction of the WRITTEN content of a composition by means of symbols and concepts inherent to the accepted analytic code. This analysis however, which describes mainly what is SEEN, does not always succeed in describing what is HEARD - the perceptual musical essence"

His definition of tonality which I loved so much that I had to memorise it: "Tonality constitutes the organisation of a given number of tones in a manner which creates among them differences of kinetic potential."

mellosouls
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban is not unknown but not hugely popular.

Post apocalyptic novel written in a made up language (think Clockwork Orange).

Poetic and deeply moving account of a boy's journey through a world where scientific knowledge has devolved to primitive ritual and incantation; and his dawning realisation that we lost everything.

I've never read anything else like it.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddley_Walker

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/776573.Riddley_Walker

mellosouls
Here's how it starts off, be warned:

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.

He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly.

He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and there we wer then.

Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, "Your tern now my tern later."

cannam
That's an amazing opening. I'd like to read that now. (I have heard of this book before, but only in outline.)

Edit: Oh my word! He wrote the text of the children's book "Bread and Jam for Frances" (and, I now learn, a whole series of others with the same character). That's a lovely bit of writing. I had no idea.

mellosouls
Yeah, it's like that all the way through, and some of it is inspired
heatherengland
so it's not a completely made up language like klingon but just a dialect of english? sounds entertaining for an amateur linguist to study!
mellosouls
Yeah, "made up language" was a poor choice by me - its an attempt at imagining a transformed English.
kkwteh
Reminds me a bit of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, which is an incredible book.
mellosouls
One of my favourites too, although I wouldn't link them apart from the darkness and poetic beauty of the language.
dri_ft
But it's surprising how quickly you settle into it, honestly.
mellosouls
Agree completely, but I know several people who have struggled or just given up because it never clicked.
Sophistifunk
Can you get it in English? I'd rather go to the dentist than attempt to read more than a paragraph or two of that gibberish.
mellosouls
It's not for everyone. Once I'd got my head round it I found it easy to follow and beautiful.
kragen
This is how we speak today, to the ear of a speaker of Anglo-Saxon or, here in Argentina, Latin. Only more so.
mellosouls
Yes. I guess that's what he was aiming at.
atombender
Riddley Walker was probably also a big influence on Iain M. Banks' Feersum Endjinn [1]. Most of the chapters are narrated by Bascule, a simple-minded (but certainly not stupid) young man who writes phonetically:

  Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Ergates
  thi ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u
  lately master Bascule, Y dont u ½ a holiday?
The novel is a bit out of character for Banks, and reminds me of something Gene Wolfe or Terry Pratchett might have come up with. I think it's a wonderfully underrated gem, and Bascule's narration is one of its endearing features.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Feersum-Endjinn-Novel-Iain-Banks/dp/0...

geden
I’m not sure I’d describe it as out of character.

Phonetically styled narrative from characters pops up in several Banks novels. I’d argue the The Barbarian’s Scottish dialect in The Bridge was a precursor to Bascule.

There are also smattering’s of fun phonetic speech in the first few Culture novels. Most memorably from Fwi-song the prophet of the Eaters cult.

I had the feeling with Feersum Endjinn Banks decided to go ‘all in’ on the fun phonetics.

In the early 90s I went to a Banks reading (possibly Crow Road or The State of The Art) in Sheffield and during the Q&A he talked with great animation and detail about his new as yet untitled novel, which a few years later turned out to be Feersum Endjinn.

Sorely miss him.

atombender
I mean the story, sorry, not the style. It's one of Banks' few self-contained sci-fi novels, and it's set in a rather odd universe that fits into the "dying Earth" tradition of dystopian sci-fi (Wolfe's New Sun/Short Sun/Long Sun sequence, Vance's Dying Earth, etc.) more than in Banks' more utopian/panoramic Culture novels. His other standalones, Against a Dark Background and The Algebraist, are much closer to his Culture novels, for example.
teh_klev
> I’d argue the The Barbarian’s Scottish dialect in The Bridge was a precursor to Bascule.

I'd certainly agree with you there. He's variously introduced his readers to Scots, the Doric and the vernacular in his books over many years. Feersum Endjinn was a fun read, especially for me as a Scot who has an interest in the Scots language.

> Sorely miss him.

I do too. I'd met him at various times over the length of his career. Always a bloody nice guy and always self deprecating in a way you knew was very genuine. I always relished him taking the mickey out of his famous neighbour in North Queensferry, Gordon Brown, every now and again.

mellosouls
I've never read that but can completely see it from your quote, thank you.
crimsonalucard
I never read Gene Wolfe or Riddley so not commenting directly on them.

But I wonder if this type of "puzzle box" interface to a plot line actually produces a false catharsis that makes what is otherwise a crappy plot seem a lot better than it actually is...

I'd rather have a story be narrated in utter clarity and be enamored with it rather then be given a puzzle and have to piece together the plot only to have my bias for the story be affected by the catharsis of solving the puzzles. Maybe the puzzles themselves are what make the story worthwhile.

Either way, I'm interested in the given opinions and opinions on this story despite the "puzzles." If Riddley or Gene Wolfe laid out their stories with crystal clarity, how good would it be?

atombender
Well, I question the reality of the idea of "utter clarity", or its usefulness to a narrative.

Common to all story-driven narratives is that the writer purposefully hides information. The author knows everything, and knows how the story will end; the characters don't. This creates suspense. That doesn't make the book a "puzzle".

Further, the choice of "dialect" has nothing to do with puzzles. Rather, it imbues the narrative with character. There's nothing in Bascule's particular language that obscures the plot. His first-person perspective certainly does, but that's because the character's understanding is more limited than the reader's. Bascule's odd and uneducated (and possibly dyslexic) choice of spelling reflects his young and carefree personality, but it also causes the reader to underestimate him at first; Bascule comes across as a simpleton, which he isn't. Feersum Endjinn is otherwise a pretty straightforward sci-fi novel.

Ultimately, good novels aren't about plot, they're about stories and how they're told. Take away that, and you're left with just plot.

As an aside, Wolfe is on another level entirely. He absolutely wrapped his stories in puzzles, and in his case the puzzle and the story are two sides of the same coin and completely inseparable. To decipher the puzzle is to understand the story. In The Fifth Head of Cerberus, for example, it's at times unclear exactly who is narrating the story.

crimsonalucard
My usage of the word utter clarity is more in contrast to Wolfe's style of narrative with hidden meanings and themes.

Basically any book that has to have the reader do extra work to solve a puzzle is using the catharsis of solving the puzzle as an illusory element that affects your bias towards the book.

If the author chooses to hide information then reveals it explicitly at a later time for the effect of suspense this to me is still a story presented with utmost clarity.

From your statements it seems as if Riddley is not exactly that type of "puzzle" book.

rrgmitchell
Riddley Walker is a stunningly good novel.

I've read it twice and I'd read it again. Many years ago there was a dramatisation of it at the Edinburgh Festival, very powerful.

One bit that sticks in my memory is when Riddley stumbles on the overgrown ruins of what must be the M25 motorway that encircled London. And he cries: "O what we ben wonce! And what we come to now!"

mellosouls
Yes, exactly! That's my favourite part, his realisation of the magnitude of the loss, it's completely devastating.
kristopolous
The Analysis of Art by Dewitt Parker. This was referenced in Dynamics of software development by Jim McCarthy. They're both pretty good but the Parker book is kinda rare.

Propaganda and Information Warfare in the Twenty-First Century by Scot MacDonald, it's purely academic but also a fantastic read. Also academic is Technoscientific Imaginaries: Conversations, Profiles, and Memoirs by George Marcus, also obscure but at least easier to find.

The 60s-80s books from City Lights are nice when you come across them. Pretty rare though.

timkam
Ariel Rubinstein - Economic Fables. For everyone who is interested in an intuitive and (self-)critical perspective on economic theory. The PDF version is available for free on Rubinstein's personal web page, but requires you to provide your email address: http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/books.html
b215826
Ariel Rubinstein is one of the most honest game theorists I've come across. He's extremely critical of the claims that game theory can be used to accurately predict outcomes of the real world [1]. Economic Fables is a semi-biography as well, and has details of his life growing up in Israel. I wish more scientists (across all disciplines) had the audacity to critically assess their own fields of research like Rubinstein. He also gives almost all of his books -- including his widely-used text "A Course in Game Theory" coauthored with Osborne -- for free on his website [2].

[1]: http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/articles/FRANKFURTER_ALLGEM...

[2]: http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/books.html

wprapido
Call me dumb all you want, I can't figure out how to download any of the books
ranprieur
Gaiome by Kevin Scott Polk, about the potential for highly ecological artificial worlds in space.
chubot
I remember getting Semiology of Graphics from the Palo Alto library around 2006. At the time it was sort of legendary and out of print, but it looks like it's since been reprinted. I think you can get most of the ideas from newer books, but it's well done and clearly ahead of its time.

https://www.amazon.com/Semiology-Graphics-Diagrams-Networks-...

https://medium.com/@karlsluis/before-tufte-there-was-bertin-...

Interestingly another relatively unknown book I like (and bought/read 20 years ago) is also about harmony:

https://www.amazon.com/Harmonic-Experience-Harmony-Natural-E...

I would say there's two kinds of harmony: harmony in equal temperament, and "alternative" harmonies based on physics, and this is about the latter. I can't tell from the link what the other harmony book is about. What's good about it?

As far as computer books, I've read a lot of recommendations here over the years like "thinking forth", "Computer Lib" by Ted Nelson, etc. They are well known to some audiences but not others.

----

I also enjoy reading what people though the computing future would be like. I have "Superdistribution" by Brad Cox:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21833331

And "Mirror Worlds" by Gelertner:

https://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Worlds-Software-Universe-Shoeb...

I'm pretty sure Gelertner claims that the Facebook feed is identical to his "life streams". I guess taken literally it's hard not to see the current Internet as a "mirror world" that's becoming the real world.

cannam
> I also enjoy reading what people though the computing future would be like

This prompts me to propose (although it's not obscure) "Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea" by John Haugeland. It's an AI textbook that is extremely readable and inviting - the best I've seen as a purely readable text, though probably far too basic for most readers here - but that is entirely drawn from the realm of "good old-fashioned AI", i.e. things like logic systems that have very little in common with what is understood as practical AI nowadays. Combine the readability of the book with the apparent hopelessness of its premise, and you have a perfectly nostalgic experience.

bordercases
I would recommend "Graphics and Graphic Information Processing" by Bertin over La Semiologie simply because the latter reads more like a reference book where Bertin is extremely thorough. But GGIP gets straight to the point and can frame your thinking while going through Semiologie such that you won't lose your way.

Unfortunately GGIP is expensive so I would try to find it at your local library. (French copies are online).

bogoman
Thanks for the recommendations. Many look interesting but are not books I would organically bump into, which is an alternative description of what I was looking for.

As for a Sadai's book: it is an extremely thorough book about western harmony from first principles. It treats what is perceived - what we hear - as the anchor, and not what we see when we analyse the notes on paper. A good example of that is how we decide to give names to chords. We tend to name chords based on the notes in them, but this can sometime lead to misunderstandings because the context and how those notes are spread through the chord are also very important. Basics like which note is in the bass is taken into consideration, but otherwise these factors are often ignored. Sadai shows many examples for that throughout the book - as well as such "Mistakes" in other famous books. A quote from the book about the approach taken: "The conventional analytic approach as taught in academies is based primarily upon the depiction of the WRITTEN content of a composition by means of symbols and concepts inherent to the accepted analytic code. This analysis however, which describes mainly what is SEEN, does not always succeed in describing what is HEARD - the perceptual musical essence".

profstasiak
Self-directed behavior - Watson

This is a textbook for behavior change course, but it is 100% practical (project to pass subject is to change some kind of behavior)

Only tested information Science-based. This book can change your life but you wont find it mentioned anywhere

bordercases
Very good book. I forgot how I stumbled into it but it's pretty much the text for changing behavior. Only person coming close is BJ Fogg's work on tiny habits who really just distilled the material into "You won't believe THAT ONE TRICK, psychologists will HATE you!".
riffraff
"once upon an ice age" by Roy Lewis (sometimes sold as "how we ate father" or "the evolution man", I think).

It's a first person narration of some Pleistocene hominid, somewhat educational but mostly just hilarious, in the sense of a Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett book.

I know 3 or 4 People who read it, they all loved it, but it's virtually unknown.

Animats
"Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" (1841). See all the large-scale scams in their original forms.
neplus
Depends on your definition of practically unknown. With that said, these are the four that immediately spring to mind as being both worth reading and relatively obscure (judging by date of publication in conjunction with being either out of print or with very few star ratings on Amazon).

Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? - Peter Termin, 1975

Termin is still going strong at MIT. His 1975 book was foundational for challenging Friedman on the cause of the Great Depression. Given what was to come in the 1980s this book quickly became overshadowed and destined for obscurity. However, it still provides an appropriate, timely lens to analyze monetary theory without the abstraction that has engrossed economics as of late.

The Supreme Court in the American System of Government - Robert Jackson, 1955

A series of lectures created for a Harvard lecture series in 1954-55 by Justice Jackson. He suddenly died before being able to deliver them, but they were compiled in a book now out of print. Justice Jackson is widely regarded - across the aisle - as one of the most brilliant legal writers of our time (or perhaps of any time). While this book doesn't set out his entire judicial philosophy, or even do what the title says due to his untimely death, it does lay a valuable conception of the proper role of the SCOTUS within the Republic. Also recommended, to see both his pen and intellect in action, are his opinions in Korematsu v. United States and West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette.

The Opium of the Intellectuals - Aron, 1955

Amazon does a better job of summarizing than I could off the top of my head, so here you go: "Raymond Aron's 1955 masterpiece The Opium of the Intellectuals, is one of the great works of twentieth- century political reflection. Aron shows how noble ideas can slide into the tyranny of "secular religion" and emphasizes how political thought has the profound responsibility of telling the truth about social and political reality-in all its mundane imperfections and tragic complexities."

An incredibly difficult read that is worth trying to get through. Brimming with ideas and not without its own pitfalls. Tells the story of 20th Century intellectual history and thought as well as any could, although in a rather indirect way.

The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (Aristocracy & Caste in America) - Baltzell, 1987

I'll let Amazon summarize again: "This classic account of the traditional upper class in America traces its origins, lifestyles, and political and social attitudes from the time of Theodore Roosevelt to that of John F. Kennedy. Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell describes the problems of exclusion and prejudice within the community of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (or WASPs, an acronym he coined) and predicts with amazing accuracy what will happen when this inbred group is forced to share privilege and power with talented members of minority groups."

My summary would be: what will happen (hypothetically, remember the date of publication) when an ephemeral class (WASPs) suddenly disappear from their previous pedestal of influence? Prescient, widely applicable to other countries with their own quasi-classes, and deeply interesting for those less familiar with the subject.

bordercases
These are some extremely timely books, can't help but think that was on purpose or that you're simply good at keeping up!
neplus
Thanks very much. These were all read before the 2016 election, if that's what you mean. I think they are important books for our times certainly though.
bordercases
USA seems like it's going to hit a crisis as fundamental productivity metrics have split from stock valuations, in favor of stocks... either the Fed has cracked the inflation nut with Modern Monetary Theory's promise of unlimited liquidity or we're absolutely super-duper screwed.
sah2ed
Two books first published in the 60s:

“The Science of The Artificial” by Herbert Simon, a multi-disciplinary treatise on the goals of design by practitioners in the physical sciences (physics, bio. etc), non-physical sciences (math, comp. sci, etc) and humanities (econs., psych., etc).

“The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn, coined the concept of paradigm shift and used it to revisit the history of science that was previously thought to be cumulative and linear.

ska
Fwiw, I don't think the Kuhn qualifies as 'unknown'.
sah2ed
Granted.

I must have mentally parsed the “unknown” used by OP as “not widely known” (to the HN crowd), and if you look at a lot of the contributions, many of the authors are not exactly “unknown” either.

ska
Fair enough. Very specifically I think that book is pretty standard reading for anyone interested in epistemology of science - but that doesn't mean it is generally known.

I read the original as looking for books that are good in subject X, but not well known in that subject area.

Rerarom
Fiction:

Mordecai Roshwald, Level 7

Alexander Dewdney, The Planiverse

Joseph Heller, God Knows

Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

Non-fiction:

Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man

Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts

C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image

Michael E. Brown, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads

Michael Harris, The Atomic Times

I may add guilty pleasures like the Legacy of the Force series, but I don't think this is what people here are looking for.

AndrewKemendo
I will always promote Jose Hernandez-Orallo's The Measure of All Minds [1]

It attempts to codify how we should go about measuring and evaluating the somewhat fuzzy concept of "intelligence." He proposes an extension of his "Anytime Intelligence Test" which could be used to test animal and machine intelligence on a level playing field.

Measurement of task capability against a baseline is the most overlooked problem in AI and as far as I am aware Hernandez-Orallo is the only one focusing on it.

Notice that all of the major "breakthrough" moments in AI over the last half century had a human baseline that an AI was competing against. Those baselines were ones that had been already developed over years (sometimes a century) and were part of competitive games already. Go, Chess, DOTA etc... had leaderboards or international rankings.

For fuzzier things like driving, translation, strategy, trading etc... there is no generally accepted and measurable baseline test for what is considered human level, only proxies and unit specific tests. So we continue to not know when an AI system is measurably at or exceeding human level. Without this we can't definitively know how much progress we're making on Human Level Intelligence.

[1]https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/measure-of-all-minds/DC...

zeroonetwothree
The Uneasy Case for Progressive Taxation

If you think it’s “obvious” that progressive taxes are better/worse than flat taxes this is an excellent look at the evidence which may make you less confident.

tzs
If instead of doing one tax to cover your whole budget, you do it is separate taxes for each item applied serially [1], and each of those taxes is a flat rate tax [2] that applies to income above a base amount [3], so that you are paying thousands of separate taxes, each with a very low flat rate, then when you look at the net result it is equivalent to a progressive bracket system with a lot of narrow brackets.

That probably says something interesting about the relationship of flat rate tax systems (as usually proposed) and progressive rate tax systems, although I'm not sure what.

[1] What I mean by "applied serially" is you take you income, and apply the first tax. Your income minus the tax amount becomes the income for the second tax, and so on.

[2] I say "flat rate" rather than simply "flat" because almost no one ever actually proposes a flat tax, which would be the same tax amount regardless of income.

[3] ...which makes it not really a flat rate, but rather a progressive tax with two brackets. I think that every serious "flat" tax proposal I've seen has been this way, so that's what I'm using.

imgabe
Twistor and Einstein's Bridge. Both excellent hard sci-fi novels by John Cramer, who's also a working physicist.
idlewords
"Light and Color in the Outdoors" by Marcel Minnaert. The book goes into the physics of a lot of outdoor phenomena; you will be amazed at the things you never noticed or thought about before reading it.

"The History and Social Influence of the Potato" is a pretty good time.

"Politics of Qat: The Role of a Drug in Ruling Yemen" may sound way too niche, but it's fascinating as a study of transportation in a drug economy. Qat is a perishable leaf (like salad) and the politics of the entire region depend on who can more reliably deliver it to gunmen.

pixelpoet
Funny coincidence, I bought the Minnaert book recently! Especially as a rendering engineer, it's absolutely fantastic.
abstrakraft
Any comments on the cheaper, earlier edition printed by Dover as "The Nature of Light and Colour in the Open Air"? Is the later edition worth the higher price?
chubot
I just saw the Potato book mentioned last night in Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan :) I had no idea that "potato vs. wheat" was a "class" issue in Europe, with potatoes coming from the Americas, but it makes a lot of sense.

In general Pollan references a lot of great work in all of his books. If anyone wants to find some stuff to read his books are a good first stop.

mjklin
The Priceless Gift by Cornelius Hirschberg, a very down-to-earth book by a man who gave himself an education by reading books on the New York subway. Although a bit dated, it includes great recommendations on how and what to read to become a widely read and curious person. Very motivating too!
heyhouletsgo
It sounds great by your description. Unfortunately I couldn't find any version online, so far. I got interested because I have a pretty significant commute now, that I use to read books. Would be interested in what he recommends!
phubbard
“Finite and infinite games” by James Carse. Philosophy and hugely thought provoking.
tw1010
I'm hearing this advice so often that it's pissing me off.

The book is BS. (I've read it.) There, I said it. It's always "this book is hugely thought provoking" (pointing at you Daniel Gross), and never ever and expansion on why or what insights it actually contains that's interesting. It has mildly interesting sentences that feels deep (mostly because they're confusing). The book has developed into some BS signalling device like Infinite Jest used to be. Everyone has read it, no one understands it. Everyone goes "oh yes, that's such a deep book, nothing has changed my mind like it since sapiens", and then we're all supposed to go silent to independently ponder it's many layered-ness, but in reality that's just what we do because we wouldn't come up anything remotely insightful if pushed into a corner. Frankly, the fact that this book is pushed so much makes me totally reconsider oft-repeated meme that "tech is low virtue signalling" (or low corruption). Clearly not.

(There, rant over. I'm overplaying how mad I actually am, I just feel like we need a few more rants against this book strewn about whenever this book is mentioned. Please, anyone, prove me wrong and a horrific narrow-minded dimwit by writing something more in-depth about what you think it contains and how it's insightful, I would love you infinitely.)

prepend
For me, I’ve found the book useful in understanding activities in a way that reduces my stress and helps me interact with people. Specifically, I don’t take things as seriously and try not to get wound up in arbitrary or not important rules. And that I get that some people get into the rules of an activity when I haven’t and that helps me understand where they are coming from.

I suppose there are many ways to learn that, but, for me, it was this book. The lesson helped me a lot.

And it’s really short book so I don’t feel so guilty recommending it. Brothers Karamazov is amazing, but recommending it is like giving someone a job.

Pamar
I tend to fall in the "disappointed" set about this one. It is short, but 1/3 into it I realized that the author is basically rephrasing the same concepts over and over and over.

Does it changes abruptly after the second half? I'll probably never know.

dlkf
Hahaha this is so on-point. Finite and Infinite Games is probably the most intellectually offensive book I've ever read. As much as I hate on the continental philosophy crowd, even those guys are better than Carse. At least their books have tasteful jackets.