Ask HN: What is the most mind blowing book you've ever read?

[Danilka]

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.

[sriku]

Gödel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. Both a work of literary and technical genius.

Le ton beau de Marot, also by Douglas Hofstadter. Was blown by his description of how making the typographical choice of starting the first word of each chapter with letters decreasing in height to the normal page font size, caused him to rethink a whole chapter (he couldn't use descenders, which limits the first word, which limits his first sentence, which constrains his first paragraph and so on).

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Every single chapter is potentially mind blowing. The whole approach of trying to instruct rationality through such fiction is itself brilliant I think.

[raspie]

Re: Eliezer Yudkowsky, also "Three Worlds Collide": http://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pd...

[BigCanOfTuna]

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkings. (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene)

The idea that organisms evolved to be survival vehicles for our genes totally inverted and simplified my view of life. It gave me a plausible explanation for how we came to be, and put the final nail in religion's coffin (for me).

[hga]

Ditto for me, although not with quite the same effects. It ties into so many things in the real world; for us, e.g. "Worse is Better" (https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html) because it has survival value.

[ThePhysicist]

"Human Evolution" by Robin Dunbar (http://www.amazon.com/A-Pelican-Introduction-Human-Evolution...)

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.

[karuneshkaushal]

I read 'Guns, Germs and Steel' by Jared Diamond in College and it is single handedly the most insightful book I have ever read.

One of these days I will buy all of Jared Diamond's and Robert Greene's books and read them multiple times.

[neilk]

Chomsky's oeuvre on politics, in general. There isn't one single book that states a thesis, it's about a perspective. So perhaps start with The Chomsky Reader. An easier-to-digest intro is the documentary Manufacturing Consent. The twist is that a lot of the things you think of as "bugs" in the political and economic systems of the Western democracies are "features" from the perspective of powerful elites. But the meta-lesson is that big questions can be answered. If you get past the mythology in your culture, and read primary sources, you can really figure this stuff out. Chomsky can go off the deep end at times (and his fanclub does so a lot), but his documentation is meticulous. Well worth reading.

For very different perspectives on programming, check out Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming (read it a decade ago and I use techniques from there every day.)

The Gift by Lewis Hyde. Although directed at artists, it is highly relevant to creative programmers and the phenomenon of open source. He is able to articulate things which are very hard to talk about, like the intersection of economics and artistry, and how the gifting ethos is necessary for any culture to thrive. If you think ESR had the last word on how open source works, you need to read this.

Another book of interest by Hyde is Trickster Makes This World, wherein you learn the hacker archetype - the giver of technology; the player of tricks - has been around since prehistory. It's not a coincidence that those two aspects are always seen together.

[devgutt]

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

also, not a book but very good "The last question" Isaac Asimov [1]

[1] http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

[vijayr]

Could you explain why you find Atlas Shrugged mind blowing? I read "we the living" and "The fountainhead" and found them quite annoying. Haven't read Atlas Shrugged, just curious if I am missing something.

[zodiac]

For me the main thing that Atlas Shrugged made me extend my conception of civil disobedience to economic laws. I believed that civil disobedience against for eg racial segregation laws is morally correct. Atlas Shrugged made me agree that in some cases, economic law can be unjust as well, and it would be moral to disobey it.

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.

[sergioschuler]

Atlas Shrugged is indeed mind blowing. The reason is because you can actually see this sort of thing happening (depending on where you are, in my case, Brazil).

It gave me a new respect for entrepreneurs.

[sanketsaurav]

Contact, by Carl Sagan. One of my absolute favorites. It's such an intense book emotionally. I read it when I was 14. It changed how I looked at life in general.

[SCHiM]

Gödel, Escher, Bach[1] has shaped the way I think in many ways and really warped my perspective on allot of things.

There's also the Imperial Radch series which is a very, very good sci fi series which is unlike any other sf I've ever read[0].

[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17333324-ancillary-justi...

>Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, British Science Fiction, Locus and Arthur C. Clarke Awards.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

[junkblocker]

Ann Leckie was being touted as Iain M Bank's successor with her Imperial Radch series. But due to that expectation being set up I was underwhelmed. It was enjoyable on its own but doesn't compare in quality to Banks's works, e.g. Excession, in my opinion.

[kbob]

Numerous people have already recommended Hofstadter, so I'll skip to:

The Moral Animal, Robert Wright. It looks at how natural selection applies to human cultures.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber. History of economic systems. Everything we know about money is one of many alternatives tried somewhere at some time.

Where Mathematics Comes From, George Lakoff. Presents the radical notion that math is not a truth we've discovered, but a byproduct of the organization of our brains. It looks at the evolution of the concept of infinity as an example, and so it resembles David Foster Wallace's Infinity and More.

I think these books all have the theme that what we think of as reality is just the current point on the random path of our culture's concensus. If that's not mind blowing, I can't help you. (-:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Animal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Mathematics_Comes_From

[tokenadult]

The Nature of Paleolithic Art by R. Dale Guthrie.[1] I accidentally chanced upon this book in a library catalog search while looking for something else. The author is a biologist based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who specializes in late Pleistocene megafauna (including Homo sapiens) and who is a very skilled visual artist himself. He analyzes most of the surviving rock art from the earlist period of human art around the world and along the way discusses hunting, ancient art technique, sex, and the nature of human nature. The book is full of interesting illustrations and lots of food for thought.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Nature-Paleolithic-Dale-Guthrie/dp...

[nish1500]

I am biased towards fiction.

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. The timeless beauty and innocence of the book remains unparalleled.

Light in August, by William Faulkner. It is the opposite of the above, dealing with complex emotions. Faulkner's prose and characters are unmatched in their depth.

[jepper]

The Selfish Gene - Dawkins, The Red Queen - Ridley

I've read these books midway through high school, already interested in biology and medicine. The depth and complexity of how life forms handle evolutionary pressure is mind blowing. Why you favor relatives over strangers, the competition between mother and child, progress through collaboration of genes etc. You see the world completely differently (after reading many more books on geology, genetics, anthropology, anatomy, cellular biology etc) afterwards.

For a novel: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson,

Truely changed how I look at computers and encryption as a not mathematically inclined reader. Building a computer out of church pipe organ components etc.

[minikomi]

Solaris by Stanisław Lem. Well, maybe the loneliest might be a more accurate description.

[lake99]

The Selfish Gene -- Richard Dawkins. Not crazy to grasp, but figuring out how nature works is mind blowing. Of all the books I have gifted to people, this one tops the list.

[Symmetry]

I'm just going to answer with the books that rearranged my understanding of the world the most. In no particular order.

"Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.

"Quantum Computing since Democritus" by Scott Aaronson.

"The Strategy of Conflict" by Thomas Schelling.

"Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "The World until Yesterday" by Jared Diamond.

"The Retreat To Commitment" by W. W. Bartley.

"The Myth of the Rational Voter" by Bryan Caplan. Despite the name it made me appreciate democracy a lot more.

"Wars, Guns, and Votes" by Paul Collier.

[eveningcoffee]

> "The Strategy of Conflict" by Thomas Schelling.

"Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace" by Edward N. Luttwak

[yodsanklai]

1984 made a very strong impression on me.

[sergioschuler]

Great book!

[fsloth]

Neal Stephenson's Anathem is fairly mind blowing if read in the correct mindset.

[jen729w]

Dan Simmonds' Hyperion/The Fall of Hyperion. Astonishingly good SF.

[dmux]

His last name is Simmons. And the Hyperion Cantos is an excellent series. His other books are worth reading too: Summer of Night, The Terror.

[nirai]

The Feynman lectures - http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

For me it consistently produces one OMG or more per chapter.

[aida_mirbadi]

"The Four Agreements" by Don Miguel Ruiz.

This book advocates personal freedom from beliefs and agreements that we have made with ourselves and others that are creating limitation and unhappiness in our lives.

[dikaiosune]

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. The core story is one of stalinist Faust but the whole arc is much better.

[eveningcoffee]

This is "a little" off topic but I wanted to share experience. I have been lucky to have been seen Simon McBurney's interpretation of The Master and Margarita in the theatre. The tram scene with Pontius Pilate just blew me away.