Books that dramatically changed the way you think

[rousseau]

Books which, after you read them, made a huge impact on the way you viewed the world

A few of mine:

The Letters of Adam Hope

This is a book that was put out in a small batch by a Canadian publisher. It's a collection of letters written by a Scottish immigrant to Canada in the early 1800s. The light switch that went off for me when reading it was how important the correspondence between Hope and his family was. Counter-intuitively, it was actually one of the aspects of his life that he cared about the most. It really shed a light for me on how prominent communication is as a part of the internet and information age. In other words, one of the main things to emerge out of the internet is communication with higher efficiency. Probably a sign that this is what people really care about.

Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History

No particular perspective came to light when reading this, it's just world history on a macroscopic scale done really well.

Paul Johnson's 'A History of Christianity'

Just another good history on a topic that's very relevant to the world around us today.

Hume's Treatise on Human Nature

Specifically his idea that learning new information about an object changes our definition of the object.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. God, i was such a choir boy when i got out of high school. I mean, i was an atheist already, which was 'edgy' for my small town and upbringing, but i'd accepted every anti-drug message from Dragnet and Emergency and the other cop and doctor shows, and the school health presentations and the horror stories in the paper. I didn't drink or smoke or sit still while someone underage did... (I didn't get to go to too many parties, and none of the 4-H kids told me where they grew their Weed.)

And for the most part, Hunter's story shows people fucking their lives up through drugs. But then they visit the Narcotics Cop convention. People with direct knowledge of drugs and their uses and effects criticizing experts expounding on shit they knew little to nothing about, to an audience that just nodded their head, agreeing with the bullshit. It reminded me of a boy scout meeting at the Mormon Church, where they told the story of a black guy who was such a good and faithful Mormon, he woke up one morning to find that God had turned him White! And the idiots around me nodded their head, like that was a just and kind thing for God to have done... I mean, rather than just accept a black man as human, he got upgraded to Real Human.

And suddenly i started really paying attention to people offering these doom and gloom stories about drugs. Or sex. Or gays. Or interracial dating. Or trendy haircuts. I started to suspect a lot of them were just making shit up. And a lot of the people on either side of me at training were nodding their heads because they had no reason to think critically about this bullshit.

 

[Elixir]

The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
Read it in 7th grade, then followed up by reading every book he had written to date. That led to reading everything I could find by Bradbury, Clarke, Niven, Heinlein ... an unending list of sci-fi writers. Still can't remember a single thing I learned in school that year, but my mental "box" was radically and irreversibly expanded.

 

[KeepTalking]

The Left Hand of Darkness Ursula K. Le Guin

I read this science fiction novel shortly after having become a born again Southern Baptist. It helped to subvert the Christian indoctrination that had become the center point of my life up until then, and for quite a few years later. It probably also helped that I discovered alcohol and pot around the same time, but I digress. As I was toting the book around with me, my mother noted the title, and somewhat chastised me for it being evocative of evil. I explained to her, that in the context of the book, the left hand of darkness is light, so the message was not one of endorsing evil. She let it go at that, my mother was never as rigid in her Christianity as my father. The book did introduce sexual and religious concepts that I had not thought much of before that time. It didn't provide any immediate revelation, but looking back, it definitely put me on the path of learning about how religion and sexuality serve to both establish and control culture, and learning about those things is seldom conducive to remaining a religious adherent.

 

[bigfield]

The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins

Dramatically improved my understanding of natural selection.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins

Dramatically improved my understanding of natural selection.

+1 for this one. This is one of the few books I have read that opened my mind to a way of looking at things I hadn't thought of before.

I would add John Haidt's "Righteous Mind" and Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel".

 

[rousseau]

The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins

Dramatically improved my understanding of natural selection.

I've hummed and hawed about picking this book up, having heard good reviews of it several times.

I wonder, though, would it be useful for someone who studied evolution in depth throughout university, or is it more of a popular work for those who agree with, but are only generally acquainted with it?

 

[bigfield]

The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins

Dramatically improved my understanding of natural selection.

I've hummed and hawed about picking this book up, having heard good reviews of it several times.

I wonder, though, would it be useful for someone who studied evolution in depth throughout university, or is it more of a popular work for those who agree with, but are only generally acquainted with it?

For someone who studied evolution in depth throughout university, this book probably wouldn't provide any new insights and may be quite boring.

 

[bigfield]

Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel".

+1 for this. Provides essential context for understanding why some civilisations have had more success than others..

 

[rousseau]

I've hummed and hawed about picking this book up, having heard good reviews of it several times.

I wonder, though, would it be useful for someone who studied evolution in depth throughout university, or is it more of a popular work for those who agree with, but are only generally acquainted with it?

For someone who studied evolution in depth throughout university, this book probably wouldn't provide any new insights and may be quite boring.

Fair enough, thanks. I could probably use a refresher on some of the more in depth evolutionary topics, but the broad look at how it works has been clear to me for a while.

I could see why, though, if you had never really looked too closely at evolution before how eye-opening this book could be. I'd say my studies of evolutionary theory when I was doing my undergrad completely shaped almost all of my other lines of thinking. After physics and chemistry, evolution is really the starting point to understanding pretty much every phenomena of living things.

- - - Updated - - -

Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel".

+1 for this. Provides essential context for understanding why some civilisations have had more success than others..

If you liked this book, pick up Maps of Time, which I mentioned in the original post. Really incredible read. I actually bought it in tandem with Guns, Germs, and Steel, but haven't read the latter yet.

 

[prideandfall]

On a Pale Horse
Piers Anthony

it's a young adult fiction, it's not very well written (in a way anyone familiar with piers anthony will recognize), but i read it when i was 10 and it pretty much ended my christian upbringing.
the book presented what was to me the first reasonable depiction of what it would be like if god and satan were real, and realizing that the only time i'd ever seen god and satan described in a way that was consistent with the world in which they exist was in a fantasy book just made something in my brain click over into looking at the world around me and realizing all this god-and-jesus bullshit was a load of crap.

 

[Tinker Grey]

God, Freedom, and Evil
Alvin Plantinga

There was a certain joy in reading something so logically laid out. I don't think I've ever read anything like it, before or since. On one page, I'd raise an objection; on the next, he'd address it.

Ironically, I am now a non-believer and some of the credit may have to go to this book.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Tao Te Ching

A teenager and an atheist of a few years, there was still a lack of structure. In my Senior Year of High School, we read a few excerpts from the Tao Te Ching in English. I was hooked. We were actually reading Jonathan Livingstone Seagull (if you want to even consider that a book) and I blasted through that fetid piece of trash so I could grab the Tao Te Ching from the teacher's desk and read it, and read the whole thing.

It wasn't magic, it didn't solve all of the world's problems, but what it did was provide that there can be structure to the world and the actions of people that wasn't buried in dogma or myth or fantasy. It was universal and asexual. It was reason.

 

[James Brown]

I'll second (or third) "Guns, Germs, and Steel". A similar work would be "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" by Stephen Pinker. I'm much more optimistic about the future than I used to be.

Another one for me was "Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do" by Peter McWilliams opened my eyes to the absurdities of consensual crimes in a free society. It also paved the way for my future atheism.

Which came full into fruition thanks to "Atheism: The Case Against God" by George H. Smith.

In Science, my mind was radically altered by "The Case for Mars" by Robert Zubrin.

In Business, it would have to be "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Burton Malkiel.

 

[RavenSky]

It reminded me of a boy scout meeting at the Mormon Church...

Did you grow up in a Mormon household?

 

[RavenSky]

The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
Read it in 7th grade, then followed up by reading every book he had written to date. That led to reading everything I could find by Bradbury, Clarke, Niven, Heinlein ... an unending list of sci-fi writers. Still can't remember a single thing I learned in school that year, but my mental "box" was radically and irreversibly expanded.

I don't remember which specific Isaac Asimov book it was, and it was 4th grade for me, but that describes me, too. I can't imagine my life without science fiction and those authors. (And a little Douglas Adams thrown in for comic relief)

 

[credoconsolans]

Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan - started me on the road to skeptical thinking

The Jesus Mysteries by Tim Freke and Peter Gandy - despite the poor scholarship, was one of the first books that shocked me as I, like many others, just assumed Jesus was a historical figure.

The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman - and this helped put the so-called historicity of the Hebrew stories in perspective.

Ghosts of Vesuvius by Charles Pellegrino - helped me with the concept of deep time

The Great Fire of Rome by Stephen Dando Collins - stunned me by suggesting another sacred cow - Christians suffering at the hands of Nero - was false and perhaps the story was really about the persecution of another religious sect that was not Middle Eastern but that early Christians changed the story to benefit their movement.

The Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier - who also reported that the great fire of Rome and the story of the persecution was a dubious tale at best and really opened up the ancient world that was full of apocalyptic preachers and imaginative and plagiaristic and stylistic writers.

The Myth of Persecution: How early Christians invented a story of martyrdom by Candida Moss - just sealed the deal of my doubting most of the famous stories of early Christianity

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Fads and Fallacies in The Name Of Science - Martin Gardner
An amazing collection of pseudoscience - Creationism, UFO kookery, N-rays, Lysenkoism, and more. This book made me a lifelong kook watcher.

The Age of Reason - Thomas Paine.
Taught me at a young age how to read the Bible Critically.

KJV - Bible
Truly by turns hilarious and terrifying.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics - Richard Hofstadter
A good primer on the nature of bad political movements.

Obedience to Authority - Stanley Milgram.
As a teenager I watched Mutual of Omaha's "20th Century" a TV series that was a history of WW2. It showed for the first time on TV footage of the Concentration camps, truly horrifying. Then some years later Milgram did his historic experiments. I came about them in Scientific American. Milgram published in book for in 1974, and its a good read. I wish all young Americans age 15 or 16 could be familiarized with this, and forewarned, be careful of whom you view and as authority, and what you commit to do at their suggestions. From Milgram I learned to not give my assent to any authority unconditionally, and unreservedly.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds - Charles Mackay
More kookery.

 

[Lion IRC]

The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins

Dramatically improved my understanding of natural selection.

I've hummed and hawed about picking this book up, having heard good reviews of it several times.

I wonder, though, would it be useful for someone who studied evolution in depth throughout university, or is it more of a popular work for those who agree with, but are only generally acquainted with it?

This is one of those books that really helped me but didn't change the way I think about the subject matter.. Likewise, The God Delusion was very educational and helpul in understanding Dawkins' position but didn't change mine.

 

[Lion IRC]

The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
Read it in 7th grade, then followed up by reading every book he had written to date. That led to reading everything I could find by Bradbury, Clarke, Niven, Heinlein ... an unending list of sci-fi writers. Still can't remember a single thing I learned in school that year, but my mental "box" was radically and irreversibly expanded.

I don't remember which specific Isaac Asimov book it was, and it was 4th grade for me, but that describes me, too. I can't imagine my life without science fiction and those authors. (And a little Douglas Adams thrown in for comic relief)

Have you read the Perelandra trilogy?
Out of the Silent Planet is quite thought-provoking.

ETA - author CS Lewis