What book(s) changed your life?

The myth of sisyphus. Since then I've been turning my suicidal thoughts into motivation

steve jobs by walter isaacson

Moby Dick
Ficciones/ Borges in general
The Man Without Qualities
Stoner
Black Snow Bulgakov

The illiad and the odyssey changed the way I read and understand literature. Memes aside it's a great (re)starting point for readers. I used to read mostly sci-fi and fantasy before.

Hero With A Thousand Faces. Campbell got his start after seeing buffalo bills show. He went to the library and read everything about natives and the rest is history.

Well. I was a drunk Indian attending the local tribal college and I stumbled on Hero by accident. It was the first book I ever read on my own and I devoured it in a week. I got lost in the footnotes and myths. Things made sense for once. There was an under current below mankind. Cool springs in a harsh desert. And that led me to Jung and his followers. I found the medicine wheel in alchemy. Nigredo, Albedo, Citritinas, and Rubedo. The dead symbol hanging everywhere had life again. It was the quaternity. It was a path of psychological development. It taught me many things. Gave me a taste of the world's poems and creation stories. Tied together dreams and religion.

And then I finally found a mushroom and had my first and only mystical experience. Here I was in a godless society. Stripped of my culture, of my language, of my purpose, of my myth. Twenty two long years lost in a direction less void with only my depressive thoughts keeping me company. Cut off from companionship and understanding. And the mushroom gave me my first taste of love. Tangible love. It rained down on me with golden sunlight tied to forgiveness. I saw the black spiral of extinction. Saw my purpose on earth and that was to guard love and wisdom like a candle in a wind storm. To pass on what I learned to the next generation.

Campbell and the Jungians became the articulating voices filling the hole left by my non existent ritual elders.

And I changed. I suffered five years lost in booze. I learned how to meditate in the drunk tank with mace covering my face. I walked six miles in a snowstorm and survived. I walked two miles barefoot covered in puke, drunk out of my mind, stepping on stones as big as my fist. I overdosed on k2 and accepted death and buried a good friend.

It was Campbell who opened the door. It was the Jungians that gave me strength.

And now I read.

Meme book as hell but.... Atlas Shrugged.

It felt as if she wrote the story for me. She was the first person I believed when she said I matter. It gave me strength to stand on my own and do what I think is right.

Boom.

Still have one hundred pages to go but Suttree. Cant imagine how I'll feel about it after the end.

hope this is copypasta but if not I'd just like to let you know that if you wanted to tell us how awful you and your life were you could have just said you liked Jung.

Barbara Demick - Nothing To Envy - Ordinary Lives In North Korea
Kang Chol-hwan - The Aquariums of Pyongyang
E. G. White - America In Prophecy
Carl Sagan - Cosmos
Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception

also youtube.com/watch?v=I1IXWnS6vwk

you talk like a fag and your shits all 'western canon'

It is not pasta. It can be though. Be a neat legacy don't you think?

Readings a bitch, man. I hate it. I hate it with every ounce of my being. Its slow work and makes me sleepy but the ideas are strong.

It took a long time to get into fiction, to find fiction that made reading a fun past time. And I wonder what it'll take for us common folk to pick up a book.

Good reply user

>the ideas are strong
>reading for anything but prose

I'm finding it pretty easy to believe your ancestors traded rhode island for some glass beads right now.

>and like anyone else who read Joyce in their 20's and fancied themselves a writer, it inspired me to write.
more proust in my case t b h

Such is life, user. I don't claim to be in the same league as you guys. I'm just a man looking to be better than I was in an old life.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_epistles

This and the New Testament. A good man's life needs nothing more than these books. The rest, philoshopy included, it's just mere entertainment, it's not real food for the spirit and the elevation of the mind.

- Enid Blyton's children's mysteries (Secret Seven, Famous Five, esp.): the first so-called "chapter" books I recall reading and enjoying for myself (followed by Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie in later childhood; and detective fiction remains by default light reading)

- Lord of the Rings: first thing I read that didn't aim at contemporary or historical realism

- Sophokles' Theban plays, Ovid's Metamorphoses: start of a lifelong interest in mythology and mythological literature

- Lolita: stylistically, I'd never read anything like it before

gay af tbqh family

You don't seem half bad user. I'd tell you to ignore these guys, but I don't reckon you read for their approval, so I'll just tell you that you've got mine if you want it. Nothing wrong with putting in a little effort to make the world a little better.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

I recently read fathers and sons, and I'm curious as to how it changes your life. I did enjoy it immensely but I feel like I didn't really "get it" you know.

This. Lots of people hate Rand, but she inspired me to be an individual.

Brothers Karamazov

Up until that point, I had read angsty teenager books ie 1984, BNW, Animal Farm. I was lost, hopeless, and these dystopian worlds had meaning, be it good or bad, for everyone. I had not read anything on my own will after that.
Then I discovered lit.
I browesed, I partook in thr memes, and someone recommended BK. So I went to my school library, and when I saw it was 800 pages, I got scared. But I pushed through, and I saw the light of God. Zosima's and Alyosha's lives had real impact, but I found myself in Ivan's hopelessness, his rhetoric and so on. It was the first book that I wanted to not have read, so that I could experience it anew.

Say why

To The Lighthouse
Portrait of an Artist

What translation did you read?

An autobiography.

is it too late for me?

Say fucking why for both books

nah

It was a Serbian translation during SFRY. I think it was really good, since both languages are close families

GEB

I was really struggling with my math courses in high school because I just didn't "get" it. I could learn everything needed to get by through intense studying but I hated it and it was time consuming. I really liked logic and programming but it was hard to advance without the necessary math skills and I was about to just give up after taking Calculus I three times before I could get an A. Read the book my senior year of high school and while I obviously couldn't understand all of it, it really put a lot of things in perspective in a way I can't exactly explain.

>I obviously couldn't understand all of it

That's ok, neither did Hofstadter, it's a convoluted mess of a book that says absolutely nothing.

The reason you read "GEB" is so you can smugly recommend it to anyone who asks you how you liked it. They'll know you read it because you'll display it prominently and bring it up during unrelated conversations (you'll think they're related though because you have no clue what the book actually meant).

Didn't read it but my pseudo roommate had it on our shared bookshelf and always pointed it out to people. The one kid I saw pick it up was this smug nerdy kid who came to one of our parties and read through the introduction. I saw him and something condescending like "Oh THAT book huh?" and he just sneered at me like an idiot.

So yeah this guy seems pretty on point

It's not a difficult book to understand all, it's just a really dry maths primer with some weird stories to explain some concepts

t. another person who doesn't understand the book

My Struggle

Wise Blood, Every one of Dostoevsky's last 5 works and Kafka's Short Stories (Especially Metamorphosis)

My degenerate druggie friend who's tripping almost constantly really likes the book

If that's not enough of a condemnation I don't know what is.

It's just air. Fancy, well written air. Nothing.

I'm reading it right now. Previously got about 200 pages into it before putting it down.

There's some things I really like about it: Its exegetical content really drives home the significance of certain developments in math. Most notably, Godel's findings, but I liked the way he portrayed Turing's. I like his notion of 'loops'; I think there's a lot to be said of it, especially with the developments being made in neuroscience (which is a really active area of research, but which is stuck in a very... documentational paradigm at the moment).

Simply put, it's a good book to turn someone's attention to the right things. That being said, the core ideas can be explained rather easily but reading through them in the obscure, sometimes pedantic, and sometimes drolling manner characteristic of him can't be anything but beneficial (or at least I hope).

It baffles me how it got onto the New York Times best-sellers list. I think a couple of academics gave good reviews (since the core ideas are very interesting), people would pick it up and see funny pictures, thinking it'd be a leiusurely read, then ultimately buy the book without finishing it or reading it seriously.

On the one hand, the book doesn't deserve to be as famous as it is (Hofstadtser essentially won the lottery on this), but on the other I'm kind of glad it is... otherwise I wouldn't of heard of it.

That video is terrible. He basically invents stupid shit that no one needs. He never considers an optimal use of resources. He just invents obscure things he wants to and has no concern about the end user.

He wants to build buildings that are just pleasing to the eye, but are extremely inefficient to build and are not practical to use. His ideas are like a bad science fiction novel. For a smart guy, his designs sure are bad.

He has failed to realize that things are built the way they are for very good reasons. Everything around you is optimized for cost and use.

It's cool how much he thinks outside of the box, but it seems like he draws futuristic things and then tries to validate them.

Like his idea on making a flat fluorescent lights. He states there is waste in the product but never quantifies how his method will be more efficient, easier to use, or cheaper to produce. He just says, " I want to make a flat fluorescent light."

Or how all his building have curves. Yes, it looks interesting, but what purpose does a ceiling curving down to the floor serve? That space isn't usable. There is a reason that curved windows are so much more expensive, they are much more difficult to make.

He's a central planner that doesn't care about efficiency. For some one who loves Gaia, he should really try to minimize his use of natural resources.

He's pretentious as fuck.

It's a really great book to read if you're actually studying what it's about (it was recommended reading for a machine learning class I took) but I would imagine it's pretty boring if you're just looking for a philosophy book.

...

how did it take this long?

The Bible is literally a large collection of memes.

lol

>Readings a bitch, man. I hate it. I hate it with every ounce of my being. Its slow work and makes me sleepy but the ideas are strong.
Typical Jung fanboy

I can't really say what's changed my life drastically, it's really more subtle I guess. But as far as drastically changing me as a writer tho, definitely The Sound and the Fury and the Things They Carried. Both taught me a fuck load about writing.

t. illiterate

You are letting snarky teens and undergrads mess with you too badly. I doubt any of them have read Jung's 'Red Book'. They are only going on half a picture of the man; if that.

Marius the Epicurean.
It has its flaws of course. Pater is not a novelist, he cannot write compelling characters and has no real dramatic skill. To me, it was a splendid novelistic multifaceted essay. Until then I considered aestheticism very shallow; I thought of Wilde as a mere purveyor of witty yet shallow aphorisms and saw no worth in what I felt to be a worship of texture.
When I read Marius straight out of High School I was transformed. It was a sunny summer and everything became super-charged. For the first time I believed that the world could be a beautiful place and that true beauty was something quite serious.

I've come on a little since then, but it first created the necessay attitude to be able to read any text and approach it on my own terms. Until reading Marius I would have never have even thought of reading the Bible.

I may read it again soon to say how I feel about it now.

They are by no means messing with me. We have different priorities. When they speak of life changing books its related to their reading habits. When I speak of it it's about a sparsely used path that's been here all along. One that was hell to walk but turned out pretty a okay.

I would have to agree with this, top notch book

>read high school diary
>fall back into crippling depression
Don't do it lads

>It was the first book that I wanted to not have read, so that I could experience it anew.
this is how you spot a pleb

literature only gets better with subsequent reads
this mindset is that of someone who reads game of thrones and thinks literature is all about surprise and twists
there is nothing about the brothers karamazov that did not have more impact the second time i read it

Oh fuck off mr meme patrician.

Probably reading Harry Potter when I was 8. Back when the world was new and exciting, with things to do, trying to attach surrealness to everyday events.
Recently, I would say the brothers karamazov. Something about that book.

But he's right. One cannot read a book: one can only reread it.

ugh, Ayn Rand's writing is a libel against the human race.

I take it your ancestors are a bunch of assholes who participated in genocide?

Harry potter
The iliad
Lord of the rings trilogy

Harry Potter. It inspired me to be a wizard

harry potter

Hi Jeff

Don't know if it is supposed to be sarcastic, but I can relate to this.

Chesterton's writings kept me sane in college when I was surrounded by nihilists, drugs, and German philosophy. That book was my introduction to Chesterton.

>I take it your ancestors were winners?
yes

Candide b

Call me a fag but I loved it.

In that regard I'm reading the everlasting man right now. It has really helped me verbalize why I hate atheists.

Perfume, Nausea, Storm of Steel, Swann's Way, The Man Who Was Thursday, Bhagavad-Gita,Phenomenology of Spirit all mark some kind of change in perception or imagination. The last change came with Meister Eckhart's German sermons. When I read his description of God as that which has nothing of the creature in it, I felt like the world lifted and became transparent.

Erich Fromm's The Art of Love

Can you explain why? Ive read the opening sentence and got chills. Ive considered ordering it as all the libraries and bookstores around me don't seem to have it.

Also two books have changed my life were
>The Stranger
>2666

you talking shit about white fang?

chronologically, starting as a kid

greek stories (espcially the odyssey)
the hobbit
the physicists
the new york trilogy
solaris
ham on rye
cat's cradle
L'ecume des jours
camus in general

then nothing until now I guess

Ever read any of the Red Book?

Notes from Underground

This is the book that gave me the 'Catcher in the Rye' experience. The narrator's raw, unrelenting and brutal honesty about himself blew me away. And it may sound like some bad Freudian reduction, but if you picture the narrator as having experienced some sort of awful childhood trauma it adds another dimension.

Do... do VNs count?

Lolita.

It was the first book that really showed me the precise kind of emotional demonstration that the written word is capable of. I'll never forget how it felt reading that first half in particular.

i think LNs would count more than VNs

Solaris eh. go into further details about that one. I read it not to long ago.

The only difference, most of the time, is the way it's presented.

One route of a VN has the same or greater word count as the average LN.

Miles Davis' autobiography. How one motherfucker could be so honest and articulate is beyond me. I remember reading parts of Twain's memoirs where he is like 'I'm holding shit back because no man can be totally honest, but if some dude was that dude would be a fucking badass and I want to read that fucking bio'. Miles is that motherfucker. Goddamn that book is great.

What is reality? Shit, who knows...

Can you elaborate on how it helped you? I'm having a hard time doing this after having read it.

Not yet. My friend has a copy but he lives a good two hours away. I have listened to Stephen Holler's lecture series on it. He gives you a few excerpts and goes deep on 'em.

I'm going to use Lament of The Dead for a guide when I do get around to it though. Jung is super dense for me with my lack of background in philosophy and religion. I read the post Jungians (been reading Edinger a lot over the last year or so) for the most part. I'm working towards it the man himself but I'm not all too confident in my interpretation and understanding of his work directly.

The Bible - It has shaped my perspectives and influenced my growth and success in just about every way you could imagine. I've read it several times, and will continue to do so for the rest of my life.

The Republic, by Plato - This was my introduction to philosophy, and I loved every minute of it. I consider it to be full of wisdom, and a true treasure.

Musashi, by Eiji Yoshikawa - This was the first, and for a long time, largest, book I read as a young man. It was my introduction into Eastern literature, and, at the time, felt like the most adult book I had ever read (8th grade).

Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman - When I read this, I realized I was emotionally stupid, and had been for most of my life. That stupidity was the primary reason for most, if not all, of the regrets of my life, and the awareness and subsequent change was, well - to say it was worth the read is a vast understatement.

Lastly, is not a particular book. Poetry has changed my life. In particular, the works of Lord Alfred Tennyson, Basho, Yeats, O'Shaughnessy's "Ode," Issa, and many others. To me, good poetry is about saying a lot while saying very little, and there are many life lessons I've found in the short breath of a few lines.

There are so many other books I've read, and many of them touching and changing me in some intangible way - it's difficult to choose from among friends.

That book is the essence of being 9 years old for me. I read White Fang seven times that year, and Call of the Wild, five. In those days, I dreamed of being a Naturalist, Marine Biologist, or something along those lines, and Native American mythology was a huge part of my recreational diet. Recently, I re-read Call of the Wild, still incredible.

Alright Buddha, who uploaded your consciousness to the internet? It was Laurence Fishburne wasn't it?

I'm always blown away by people who think valis is a good book. It's just a gnostic dump out of the mouths of stupidest characters. I had all of those ideas in my teens on mushrooms. Reading carl jung and terence mckenna in my early twenties wrapped an academic vocabulary around them. By the time I got to Philip K Dick's stuff I found it as annoying as every twenty year old in the drug scene who doesn't expect any kind of continuity from their own opinions. It's like writing a novel where your main character is a writer. It's obviously laziness. And the same applies when all your main characters go nowhere and do nothing but drugs. Anyone can write it. All you have to do is know nothing and go nowhere and do nothing but drugs.