What book has impacted your life the most?

Atlus Shrugged

Currently reading, what am I in for?

in chronological order, a few of the biggest impacts starting in my first year of college:

-freud's introductory lectures on psychoanalysis changed the way i critically evaluated art

-nietszche's the gay science changed the way i approached interacting with others

-gravity's rainbow changed the way i thought about writing

-and william blake's illuminated works changed the way i feel about holiness

...

Nice. I'm surprised that it's not as talked about as Steppenwolf (haven't read) and Siddhartha (have read but preferred Demian).

Do you have any recs for me? I finished Demian last year and haven't read anything as of recently.

>tfw no Demian-like friend.

>-nietszche's the gay science changed the way i approached interacting with others

In what way?

Why not just say "affected"? I hate these impact fags so goddamn much.

Just read it and then come back, moron.

Books and articles in chronological order:

1: Lauray Mulvey - Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema showed me how cinematic form could be ideological and got me interested in feminist theory. This and the SEP article on gender/sex (i know but read it) are probably the texts I lift from the most when discussing feminism with neets.

2. Genealogy of Morals for revealing the connection between morality/ideas and social position/power/domination, which later led me to Foucault and those guys.

2. Communist Manifesto. I was 17.

3. Phenomenology of Spirit and the master slave dialectic changed my understand of history, consciousness, gender and politics.

5. Nicomachean Ethics and the connection between morality and health.

7. Gramschis Prison Notebooks and Ernesto Laclau/Chantal Mouffes Hegemony and Socialist Strategy for explaining the deterministic stupidity of historical materialism

The Bible, but besides that, probably Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has similar aspects.

>hopscotch
>portrait of the artist as a young man
>twilight of the idols/will to power
>either/or
>sun and steel

>>sun and steel
How are the gains?

>not being a static character

Same, OP

But that's from The Gay Science, not Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Fear and Trembling

It's in both

Mein Kampf.

No words needed

Most probably Stoner. The manner in which the book details Stoner's dedication towards mastering the areas he is most interested in whilst working gave encouragement to go to sleep at 4 A.M. and get up at 8 A.M. Sure my body is in agony and I feel like I'm going to succumb to cardiac arrest deep into the night though alas it is the only means of getting where I want to be (for someone who is relatively unintelligent).

wubba lubba dub dub my guys

Sleep is more important than any kind of knowledge you could achieve.

Also, if you don't get sleep, you won't get to any kind of knowledge.

Pic related
Had a psychotic breakdown and Valis got me back on track.

I can think of one word

art's rad as fuck

I admire Soren.
one of my favorite philosophers.

I'm pretty sure only genetic freaks like Trump can get away with sleeping that little. Isn't sleep necessary in anchoring memories as well as purging toxins? You're probably looking at severe brain fog in the near future at the very least.

It depends on the time of the day, morning isn't great and mid-day is often horrendous though past 6 I feel pretty conscious, once you get past the block at 11:00 P.M. where you body is begging you to sleep you're basically free. That and of course maintaining a decent environment, keeping fresh air, drinking water habitually etc. helps. I won't deny that I'm not optimistic about the future, still worth seeing how long I can go, of course for special occasions I will sleep though the morning after doing so is never kind.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Crime and Punishment

same

Pic looks like someone about to finger an asshole.
I can never unsee it.

>Values Nietzsche, but still values virtue ethics
What gives user?

maps of meaning, mememan has the right track

I still dislike christianity though, I don't like the submissiveness of it all

Ligotti - conspiracy of the human race

this dudes writings and talks changed my life

Infinite Jest, which I read in high school at a time where I needed to read it most and, in retrospect, probably saved me from suicide. Really captured a lot of the feelings I was going through at the time; I definitely feel a lot more in touch with myself since then.

Stoner, which I only read a couple years ago but still think about just about every day. I had a similar Shakespeare experience as stoner, albeit with The Book of Job, which very viscerally changed my life's interests. I originally wanted to be a lawyer, but now aim to become a professor. I think that book captures the quietness of living. It also portrayed stoicism in a way that isn't in any way obnoxious.

The Book of Job really kicked my ass, I think I cried when I first read it. It's the sort of spirituality I can appreciate and agree with. I had been an adamant atheist before reading it, I'm now more of an ignostic. Living is fucking scary y'know?

Marx's essays made me a socialist after being a pretty pro-capitalist liberal.

>letting a book impact your life
Damn plebs

>using cute anime images to increase the probability of evoking (you)s
clever

Edge

...

Eliot reconverted me to Catholicism, made me get out of an existential crisis, and forced me to become a good person. Where ever you are Tom, thanks.

kys weeb

>I had a similar Shakespeare experience as stoner, albeit with The Book of Job,

what

dude lmao is dat inside of a titty

1984

pretty good desu,
basically you can have strong convictions but they can falter when put to the test yatayata?

yea, last year I was living with the most worthlessly stupid and disgusting person, his presence in my flat alone was enough to keep my friends and girlfriend from coming to me. He was completely harmless, but just seeing him you would realize that he is not going to achieve anything in his life, he can't even care for himself, he will only go on being a parasite to everyone around him. I had similar thoughts than Rastolnikov at the time, namely that his murder would be a morally justified one, but reading C&P really put me in my place and revealed to me that I'm not the person who I take myself to be.
Thanks for reading my blog.

That's what the back cover is for

Jeez, tell me more about that guy user

I read it back in high school. Changed my view on everything. Then re-read it at the end of my 20s, and I realised it was a high school book. That's why it is not more discussed.
It is a really good book, but it is only really good at a certain age imo.

>have a full-on mental breakdown
>read pic related
>decide I don't want to be a whiny cunt like the main character and start turning my life around
Sylvia Plath's shittyness saved me.

nietzsche and aristotle are actually a lot more similar than you think. i was more surprised that he listed marxists alongside Nietzsche

'Clockwork Orange' while I was in high school, aged 14-15. I felt that I could easily draw comparisons from what the government was doing to Alex to what was being done to us at school. Not terribly complex, but it meant a lot at the time.

i can tell by your temporary jest that you didnt actually have a "full on breakdown"

>couldn't read, write or do basic maths
>had to drop out of school because I was basically a retard
>10 years later I'm only about 60% as intelligent as I was before it happened
ok man

no longer human

Yeah I fully agree. I reread it when I turned 20 and already then there was not much to get out of it anymore that I hadn't already picked up at 16. I am very glad that I read it at that age though, because it definitely pushed me in the right direction. I wouldn't recommend Demian to anyone with a large background in literature already. Although I think this can be said of Hesse in general, his ideas aren't as effective anymore once you grow past your teenage years. A great writer but his work is more like a springboard into more serious literature if all you're familiar with is YA fiction.

This book fucked me up. I was only 20 when I read it and shouldn't have connected with the protagonist but did, especially the scene where he finds his girlfriend in a coke fueled orgy getting gangbanged. I never cried so much reading a book and I don't fucking cry.

from religion/philosophy, Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha by Daniel Ingram

for literature, The Idiot by Dosto

if I had to choose only 1 it would be Ingram's book

> especially the scene where he finds his girlfriend in a coke fueled orgy getting gangbanged

Houellebecq is the best for that feel

Hesse is the examplar of real "Young Adult" literature perfect for the mid-late teens demo - relatively undemanding but not unmemorable escapist tripe either

Teen Witch by Silver Ravenwolf. No other book on Wicca comes close.

*early-mid teens

So you couldn't read but you extracted some abstract reasoning out of a novel.

Ok thanks for posting user

The Game (book)
followed by taking acid where Ego death and 'the game' (experience) occurred

calm down pickle rick

>start reading
>"man I really identify with this Harry"
>he reads Treatise on the Steppenwolf and gets called out on all his shit
>"...oh"

AND NO ONE CARES

I read Dune when I was 15. That shit changes you at that age.

Infinite Jest
>helped me look at the way myself and others might go about in having destructive behaviors often and solely due to idiosyncratic behaviors
Confessions of a Mask
>made me more conscious of the way most people secretly are more deliberate in projecting a certain image of themselves - not in a sociopathic way but in more emotional and mental reassuring way
The death of Ricardo Reis
>the novel is set in my home city of Lisbon in 1936 and completely chaged the way I look and walk the same streets
Tropic of Cancer
>Didn't really have that much influence on me as the rest but made me have a more relaxed outlook on life in general and made me also realize that not all lost generation bohemians are pseudo-intelectual con artists spewing drunk nonsense

East of Eden by John Steinbeck.

I read it when I was like 17 and it really made me think about what it means to be a good person. That was probably the first book I had read that really made me stop and think about what I was reading.

He talks like a gay person now
>duh

...

For whatever reason my when I was in highschool our school library had this book (I suspect the librarian hadn't read it at all, and it was one of the like 2 books that weren't American or British) and reading The Magic Theatre sequence at that age traumatized me for life. It's probably no exaggeration that if the school had had Siddhartha instead my life could have turned out quite different, but for now I don't regret it as it is a good book

divine comedy

first actual book with literary value. basically made interested to literature and forced me to study literature, theology and history

why are you posting my diary desu

i thought it was mine

Why that over On the Genealogy of Morals?

I just thought it was more about delusions of grandeur, how just because you think you have the world's answers, you are just a fucking loser.

MEME

This but unironically

This
Became a Christian

I am too special for a book change my life.

I don't let books change my life because I am te only one who can change my life.

e I'm not a cuck like the rest of you lilly livered louts and scrotum sucking scoundrels

>Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis
Everything about him I see in myself. I am both unhappy but comfortable in some regards.

>Savage Detectives
I dont know what it is, but it's just life changing reading this book.

>No Longer Human
made me completely change the way I view myself

Those books aren't very good user

...

"The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth" by Scott Peck.
And I haven't finished it yet. It made me into a perfect student pretty much. To everyone that considers psychiatry a bunch of psychobabble of no real use, read this. Anons for sure will identify with a lot of the shortcomings described here. Luckily, the author provides the solutions as well.

>Truth or reality is avoided when it is painful. We can revise our maps only when we have the discipline to overcome that pain, To have such discipline, we must be totally dedicated to truth. That is to say that we must always hold truth, as best we can determine it, to be more important, more vital to our self-interest, than
our comfort. Conversely, we must always consider our personal discomfort relatively unimportant and, indeed, even welcome it in the service of the search for truth.
Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.

The best anime have shit or non-existent manga though.

read this a few years back.

it's inspiring.