Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?
I want to find the absolutely crazy-to-grasp book of all times.
Most articles related to this topic suggest something like the Fight Club. Even though, there are some good twists to the story, I feel like my mind could be blown away way more than that.
Needless to say that we are talking about a book for the HN audience.
150 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadGrimwood's “Replay” is a great time travel novel if you're into that.
I've read it several times and each time I found something interesting that I didn't notice.
https://books.google.com/books?id=Y0i8aZ94CJUC&lpg=PA514&ots...
It made me think about mortality, love and sexuality in ways I'd never thought of before
http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicamer...
I found it on this list:
http://spacecollective.org/wilfriedhoujebek/4076/Summery-Boo...
Where also the following books some of which I read to (Vehicles is really good) can be found:
The White Goddess - Robert Graves
Graves' grammar of poetic myth works at so many levels at the same time that I can't keep track of them all. This is not a book, this is a neurosis you can borrow. Druidic power to the nerds.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - Julian Jaynes
Never mind the bulky title. The theory of Jaynes seems preposterous at first: before man was conscious he would not stop and think when making a decision, instead he would literally hear a voice telling him what to do. When life became too complicated this faculty broke down, but not in an instant. Religion is a by-product of this neuro-catastrophe. Jaynes however knows to make use of historic material in such a way that in the course of his argument he becomes plausible! If you don't trust me on this, trust Daniel Dennett.
The Ghost of Chance - William S. Burroughs
Burroughs was a great admirer of Jaynes and here he uses the bicameral image of two dividing brain spheres as a metaphor for the divide between peaceful lemur on Madagascar and the war-mongering chimpanzee on the African mainland as a reminder that human evolution could have taken a better turn.
Ancient Evenings - Norman Mailer
This book, the only lengthy novel in this list, I first looked up because Burroughs referenced it as his inspiration for 'The Western Lands'. When I noticed it starts with my favourite Yeats quote I knew I needed to read this. Even though Burroughs could never have written it like this, at times it is more Burroughs then Burroughs himself. It is the autobiography of a Ka, the lowliest soul of the seven souls of the ancient Egyptians, which makes for unusual reading. Especially because Mailer uses an uncensored version of Egyptian mythology which, to put it mildly, differs from the version you get of it from the National Geographic. The Egyptians practised sex magic with the stamina of a bonobo. Mailer makes Aleister Crowley look like a prudish schoolboy. This is the boldest attempt to recreate a radically different mind from ours that I know of, and does so successfully. The novel as the creation of an artificial consciousness. At the same time it doubles as an All American Novel (yuk).
The Mind in the Cave - David Lewis-Williams
Palaeolithic Psychedelia anyone? Close your eyes, place a finger on both of your eyelids and press gently. What you see is the origin of all art, you only need to look at rock-art with a guide like Lewis-Williams to see it.
The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry - Ernest Fennolosa
Edited by Ezra Pound, the most spectacular misunderstanding of language ever to be reprinted. It reads excellent and it gives us a language (Chinoiserie-Chinese) that does not exist in this world but should exist in a better world.
Vehicles - Valentino Braitenberg
I have read so much stuff relating to Cybernetics, AI, emergent systems and self-organization that I am totally saturated with it. The material itself is exciting but the professional obligation of science to be dull gets on my nerves. But this is an exception, wonderfully written and illustrated with funky little drawings. Vehicles is a tiny book but its size is deceptive. This introduction to synthetic psychology describes a number of simple responsive vehicles that with each new feature became aware of the world around them a good deal more. Each new vehicle is a new ...
Not mind blowing in that there was any startling revelations in it, rather that reading and absorbing it changed my outlook on many things.
also, not a book but very good "The last question" Isaac Asimov [1]
[1] http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
How would that behaviour be rationalised from Foutainhead?
NOTE1: spoiler alert.
NOTE2: please don't think of me as some heartless Objectivist - I have adjusted my views since I read it about 10 years ago but at the time, the following points were earth-shaking revelations to me:
* It revealed to me how influence peddlers in society use a combination of coercion and guilt to suppress an individual's individuality
* It revealed that these "thugs" are interested in suppressing your thoughts and controlling your money. I read this book during the Bush years and the suppression of speech in the name of "patriotism" rang true, while prior regimes' punitive taxation policies also rang true as meeting Rand's definition of thugs.
* She basically posits that an individual's greatest purpose of existence is to create and to do the best for themselves that they can.
Within the above kernels, which with moderation I feel are very powerful insights, are interspersed a lot of distractions. Her writing style is retch-inducing and her hatred of native people in continents that were abused by colonialism is bafflingly naive. My edition of the book had about 1100 pages, 100 or so of which were Galt's long speech - it was an endeavor to finish this book but I am happy to have learnt the above insights.
It gave me a new respect for entrepreneurs.
It did so by presenting a fictional instance of unjust economic laws. At least I read it as pure fiction - whether such unjust laws actually exist anywhere in the world is, I think, best treated as a completely separate question.
Not that "crazy-to-grasp" approximates "good" in any way.
Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes Dune Series, Frank Herbert Foundation Series, Isaac Asimov Calculus Made Easy Paperback, Silvanus P. Thompson
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Nature-Paleolithic-Dale-Guthrie/dp...
The book is a mind-boggling journey through our own evolutionary history and delivers surprising and sometimes funny insights on many aspects of our behavior as modern humans (e.g. it attempts to explain the origins of religion, dancing and music). The beauty of the book lies in the fact that it makes you understand in detail which processes have transformed us from primates to modern humans. Truly fascinating, beautiful stuff.
Most people probably know Dunbar from "Dunbar's number", which relates the relative brain size of animals to the number of individuals with which they live together (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number). This often (mis-)cited number is but one example of Dunbar's ingenious, math-driven approach to many problems in biology and evolution.
To maximize mind-blowing capacity, combine Dunbar with Jared Diamond's "The World Until Yesterday" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Until_Yesterday), which explains how our ancestors and many traditional tribes lived (and sometimes still live), and "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene), which explains many aspects of life and social organization using mathematics and evolution theory.
For me, this stuff is more mysterious, thrilling and captivating than any fiction book I've ever read.
One of these days I will buy all of Jared Diamond's and Robert Greene's books and read them multiple times.