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  • P&S Moderators: Xorkoth | Madness

books that changed your life.

"See Spot Run" by the guy that did the Dick and Jane books. Insightful to say the least...
 
The Mahabharata (the English play version)
The Bible
100 Years of Solitude
1984
The Haj / Exodus (still need to read the rest of his books)
the Dune series (very good books)
I'm sure their are lots more I'm forgetting to mention..
 
In terms of long-term psychological impact:

God and Evil -- forgot the author; it's a compilation anyway.

Man After Man, by Dougal Dixon

Cycles of Fire, by William K. Hartmann and Ron Miller

The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien

2010, by Arthur C. Clarke

The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

1984, by George Orwell

Comet, by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

Enchiridion, by Epictetus

Confessions, by St. Augustine

Burnham's Celestial Handbook, by Robert Burnham
 
"Men are from Mars and women are from Venus" really put me in touch with my feminine side...*sniff* *sniff* 8)
 
Ender's Game, dunno who it was by, but was the book that made me really start thinking about deeper issues, back in like grade 1 :S... I was smarter then, then I am now :p
 
Orson Scott Card wrote Ender's Game, and it was very good. Supposedly it is being made into a movie, though I don't know if they even have a script finalized yet.

The Dune series sucked donkey balls because the underlying message was conflicted. Expansion and growth are good, and if humanity starts to stop and stagnate, then a wise leader may need to act like a brutal tyrant in order to knock humanity out of its slumber, so that humanity will rise up with the energy to free itself from tyranny and, in the process, rekindle the energy to expand and advance. I mean, lookng at this idea in the abstract, or seeing it played out in a fiction created specifically to promote this idea, it may not seem so stupid. But think about applying it in the real world.

Advisor: Great Ruler, our studies show the rate of expansion has steadily decreased for the last 300 years. The rate of technological advancement also seems to have plateaud. Apparently, humans have found the level of advancement at which they are comfortable.

Leader: Comfortable? I say people have gotten lazy and complacent. Comfort is a dead end. It leads to stagnation and eventually rot and death. No, to save the human race, I only see one path. Chain them up, and make slaves of them and mistreat them until they revolt. I never heard of a revolting slave being called lazy and complacent!

Advisor: Umm... Well.... I mean, that sounds like a fine plan, sir, but ... are you sure we couldn't just send everyone to a motivational seminar? I think I have some old Tony Robbins tapes lying around.... Or maybe we could just try to be honest with people? Send out a notice explaining to everyone how survival of our species depends on constant expansion, and to not expand is to stagnate and die, and try to instill the urge to expand and advance in people through positive reinforcement and reasoned debate?

Leader: Fuck that. Chain 'em up, I say! Now excuse me while I go bemoan the cursed fates that forced such a good and kind person as me to suffer the guilt of ruining countless lives in the present for some abstract, future good of humanity. Oh, I don't know how I can bear to be this unjust, alas it is my burden!

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I mean, at some point in the Dune series, I just wanted to throw the book down and scream, "Fuck with playing the cursed martyr forced to be a hated tyrant for some abstract greater good only you can see! If you are so goddam smart, you'd see there are ALWAYS other ways to solve your problems. Who are you, anyway, to decide that so many innocent people should suffer and die and live horrid, oppressed lives just so you can have your little "human expansion" a few centries later? How dare you presume to know that is best for humanity, so that you will not even engage in honest discussion and debate with the very people whose suffering will buy your future?

I mean, it was fine prose, and Frank Herbert has skill in the art of storytelling for pleasure (i.e., giving the reader "payoffs" in the form of creating a fierce conflict and then giving a satisfying resolution). But at a certain point, I get so I cannot stand to read something if the primary underlying moral message is flawed. As I perceived it to be in Dune.

~psychoblast~
 
Ender's Game and its first couple sequels were great books I enjoyed as a kid, too! Speaker for the Dead was especially great. But as far as books that have really given me something to mull over, these are what most come to mind at the moment:


The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Essential Tillich edited by F. Forrest Church
A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Guiterrez
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
Man and his Symbols by Carl Jung
LSD Psychotherapy by Stanislav Grof
Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh
I and Thou by Martin Buber
Trials of the Visionary Mind by John Weir Perry
Self and Others by R.D. Laing
At the Root of this Longing by Carolyn Flinders
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu


Oh, and Psychoblast, everything you say about Dune makes me think of Ayn Rand...
 
Psychoblast personally I thought that was a pretty good message. I haven't come across another author who thought so deeply about the actual politics of human expansion thousands of years from now. I thought it was pretty good and a damn unique story. Also, the God Emperor was able to actually SEE all the different futures for humanity and only through the actions taken would it result in humanity's continued existance, so it was the sacrifice that had to be made for the greater good. He was essentially God as he could see all those endings and he had to make that choice. I found that a rather interesting idea myself. I also like the very end of book 6. I was totally taken aback and confused but the resolution was there. Humanity had finally reached a new level of being (hard to explain, but the thing about the shapeshifters who could actually take other's memories and all that and the man and woman at the very end...).

Oh I almost forgot about The Silmarillion and the entire 2001 series (and all the other books by Arthur C. Clark). I really enjoyed those (its been like 12 years since i read them atleast though so they are pretty hazy now).
 
I haven't read any Tolkien and I was surprised to see he had another fictional work (I thought he was a linguist and didn't really spend much of his life on fiction beyond the four middle earth books), but could anyone give a quick description of The Silmarillion?
 
If you liked the Dune series, you should go back to the Foundation series. The same kind of idea of certain humans taking upon themselves to guide humanity through eons and eons. And I don't think they ever started pissing me off like the Dune books.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac would have to be on my list, too.

~psychoblast~
 
Tolkien wrote a bunch of other books. They were usually just short stories about Middle Earth characters in the past..

Silmarillion covers the entire history of Tolkiens universe, from God's making the world and races to the history of Elves interacting with Humans, etc. etc. Its crazy really. It's similar in style to the bible or other religious text. It's a really good read.
 
Oh I'm reading The Wheel of Time series (this shit is fucking looong) and I think they are really good. I personally like them better than Lord of the Rings series. Robert Jordan is an amazing story teller. Not a "book that changed my life," but real good books none the less.
 
psychoblast said:
If you liked the Dune series, you should go back to the Foundation series. The same kind of idea of certain humans taking upon themselves to guide humanity through eons and eons. And I don't think they ever started pissing me off like the Dune books.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac would have to be on my list, too.

~psychoblast~
Click to expand...

I remember really enjoying the foundation series... it was by isaac asimov right? all about a weird mathematical/psychological theory that you could predict the behavior of large groups of people but not individuals, but on a large scale chart out the future of humanity... it was pretty weird, but very interesting.
 
as corny as it sounds, Aldous Huxleys "The Doors of Perception" as well as "Brave New World". I diddnt understand the concept of either untill much time after the read, but change me they did.

Also THE BIBLE.
 
"Tell Me I'm Here" by Anne Deveson which is about the author son who suffered from schizophenia. Now everytime I see someone in the street mumbling to themselves I can empathise.
 
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