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 🙏
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
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.
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?
Meanwhile, it’s the only book I actively hate. I feel like it stole a fantastic name with a story that was too “I’m 14 and I am smart”.
I probably would have loved it when I was 14.
Maybe I read it at age 17 and didn’t much care for it.
I thought the martians were genocidal self-righteous assholes who I hoped the earth would nuke. The whole idea of thinking right meant doing things right and magically didn’t sit with me for a second. You can just look around, all these really dumb animals and plants managing just fine. You don’t need to know hydrodynamics to be a fish. And if magical thinking worked no way evolution wouldn’t have exploited the hell out of it.
Still it was kinda cool to see a novel that merged sci-fi, the Gnostic Gospel of Judas, and Joseph Smith in one setting.
If anyone here liked that book go read the Gospel of Judas and have your mind blown.
How did you like godel Escher Bach? Have it on my bookshelf, intending to read it eventually after my current stack.
