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List of books that will induce a mindfuck
- comboy 2y agoUh, I'd love some recommendations fitting the title, but many of those on the list are definitely not that.
- vidarh 2y agoI think I've read about a quarter of the list, and only a couple of the ones I've read fit that title to me. I wish the list contained a line explaining why...
- d1sxeyes 2y agoHard to do that without making at a 'list of books that will induce a mindfuck and their spoilers'
- vidarh 2y agoIt's hard, but I think not impossible. I was thinking mostly in terms of explaining to people who have already read the book why people believe it belongs there. E.g. I love all of Douglas Adams' books, but I have no idea what they're doing on this list. A non-spoilery hint at which concept in those books someone thought was a mindfuck, would be nice.
- the_clarence 2y agoI can't get interested in a book if I don't get a warm recommendation. Anyone want to recommend one of the books in that list?
- Morac0o 2y agoSame happens to me, and if I am not interested I can not focus on reading it.
- Hikikomori 2y agoNeuromancer and Snow Crash are usually recommended here.
- mindcrime 2y agoBefore looking at the list, two of the books that came to my mind as possible candidates were Permutation City by Greg Egan, and Glasshouse by Charles Stross. Permutation City made the list, and I definitely endorse it. Glasshouse is not on the list, but I definitely think it's worth a read. Neuromancer is on the list and it may be my personal favorite novel (if not #1 on my list, it's very close). A couple of Murakami novels were on the list here. I've read several of his novels and would basically make a blanket statement "read anything by Murakami".
- somedude895 2y agoI'm about 200 pages into 1Q84, and am not really enjoying it. Is it just not for me, or does it just take a while to get into?
- washadjeffmad 2y ago1Q84 marked Murakami's "Float On" moment, chosen I felt to allow him to cash out his career in a Western market. It wasn't especially superior, just a bit less abstract with a hint of "possible movie adaptation". If you enjoyed his other fiction, check out his nonfiction.
- somedude895 2y ago> cash out his career in a Western market. That's funny because one of the plots is about fixing up a book in order to win a literary prize
- relaxing 2y agoI would put that aside for now and go back to Hard Boiled Wonderland & the End of the World. That was an incredible read, and much more accessible.
- mindcrime 2y ago1Q84 is one of the ones I haven't read personally, so it's hard to say. I can just comment that all of the other Murakami works I've read really "hooked" me right from the beginning. After Dark was my first and that was pretty much a "I sat down to 'read a few pages' to see if I wanted to read the book or not, and when I looked up I was 2/3rds of the way done" experience.
- darkfloo 2y agoIain M Banks use of weapon is both an incredibly good book and a portal to the culture series , in which almost all books are just as good.
- euroderf 2y agoThe Culture series permanently changed my perspective on the universe. Earth is just one more of the oddball primitive worlds well off the beaten path.
- lukan 2y agoMany are just classics (and not mindfuck in my opinion). Hesse is good in general. Kafka is good in a weird fucked up way and to be recommended after one had to deal with the legal system for example. Castaneda is interesting fantasy, but many took it literal and a real cult evolved around his books (with him included as the Guru). Peter Caroll is interesting, if you like the occult. And Robert Anton Wilsons Illuminatus! is the bible of conspiracy theories. (But a really good book and deserving of the mindfuck category, I think it popularized the term mindfuck)
- vidarh 2y agoThe Trial does deserve the term mindfuck, I think, both because of the story and because it upends the notion of what most people expect of a novel. Kafka's other words are weird and wonderful and not nearly as hard to read as some seem to think, but if you've read The Trial, they're not very mindfuck-y, and that's a big problem with a list like this - each book you read that is still a mindfuck will make a lot of the rest seem pretty pedestrian (though often still good).
- kranner 2y agoTor Nørretranders' The User Illusion was a great read, hereby warmly recommended. One of the principal ideas was that our senses take in many orders of magnitude more of data than we are able to be conscious of. I believe he estimated something like 10 Mbps taken in and 80? baud being aware of — something like that, I should read it again sometime.
- thefz 2y agoJohn dies at the end -> all the other books. Silly scify nonsense that will have you giggling. Oh, and the Zoey Ashe trilogy too.
- comboy 2y agoRead them all and highly recommend them, but to be clear, these are not mindfucks, It's just well written entertainment, nothing ambitious.
- paxys 2y ago"Mindfuck" is being used a bit loosely. The is mostly just a list of top sci-fi/fantasy books that the internet crowd generally likes.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoThe page links to another page where the term is described, but also refutations that it's used in a different connotation.
- mahrain 2y agoMissing murakami's 1Q84
- satvikpendem 2y agoI started reading his latest book released in English this month, pretty interesting so far.
- flanked-evergl 2y agoAfter being indoctrinated to hate everything about the west and Christianity for most of my life — through school, university, news media, entertainment, and the administrative state — and after coming to hate the west and Christianity as a consequence of this indoctrination, I really found the following books to be the ultimate mindfucks: - Heretics by GK Chesterton - Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton - Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America by Mary Grabar - A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell - Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland
- somedude895 2y agoA Conflict of Visions is a good one. Thomas Sowell is a true intellectual. Sure, he has strong biases, but I believe those developed out of his intense study of the facts, rather than being implanted in him before he started thinking for himself, which is sadly the case for many so-called intellectuals nowadays. If you could recommend only one of the others, which would it be?
- flanked-evergl 2y agoHeretics GK Chesterton. By far one of the best books I have ever read, and I have read it about 10 times by now. One gem from the first chapter: "When the old Liberals removed the gags from all the heresies, their idea was that religious and philosophical discoveries might thus be made. Their view was that cosmic truth was so important that every one ought to bear independent testimony. The modern idea is that cosmic truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what any one says. The former freed inquiry as men loose a noble hound; the latter frees inquiry as men fling back into the sea a fish unfit for eating. Never has there been so little discussion about the nature of men as now, when, for the first time, any one can discuss it. The old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it. Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed."
- stvltvs 2y ago
- geraldog 2y agoI'd add Poker Without Cards by Ben Mack.
- geraldog 2y agoAlso, New Inquisition by Robert Anton Wilson. A huge treatise on epistemology and philosophy of Science and much more "mindfucker" than his fiction.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- chaostheory 2y agoI’m surprised that everything2 is still not mobile friendly.
- relaxing 2y agoI’m not. Every attempt to fix the site has failed due to the incredibly fucked up use of turn of the century style PHP.
- kthejoker2 2y agoPerl, not PHP. Source: was turn of the century developer at Everything2
- relaxing 2y agoBrain fart. Of course, I remember your name :) Hope you enjoy a tasty Butterfinger McFlurry some time.
- AntoniusBlock 2y agoNo Gaddis? What a shame. Everyone ITT should check out Gaddis' `The Recognitions' and `J.R.' (and his other books, of course).
- Yizahi 2y agoSkimmed through the list. First problem - it is gigantic. Statistically there is no chance that so many books are so revolutionary genius that they are on some other level etc. Second problem - it is a generic top100/top500 style list, populated by exact same old "classic" fiction books like every other list on the internet. There are some "above average" books intersperced in this list, but a casual reader will not know how to find them among the books being there simply on the virtue of being good and 50-100 years old. Being old book is not a virtue, unless we are in a history class.
- tarboreus 2y agoWow, 50 years, so old. It strikes me as a pretty decent list. The books on here I've read (maybe 30%) are worthy of recommendation. People always get offended by lists, I've noticed.
- vidarh 2y agoMost of them are worthy of recommendation, but few of them are "mindfucks". Very few have ideas that are particularly out there or unusual.
- tenderfault 2y ago"Revolutionary Road", by Richard Yates. Because it uncovers the greatest conspiracy of our time. Also "The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy, for the same reason. The real so called "mindfuck" comes when what you read unravels the reality around you, not when it sends you in some utopia with the promise of a metaphor built to solve a great mistery you actually don't give a f... about. P.S.This is just one of the HN threads which is more valuable than the article it refers to. Thank you for all the good books mentioned here, HN!
- deafpolygon 2y agoAs a teenager (30 years ago), I found this book to be a bit of a mindfuck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun I have heard of most on this list for obvious reasons but this book really got me to see war in a different light.
- medo-bear 2y agoWhat a huge ommision not to include anything from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles. The blokes 'mindfucked' the entire world during the last century
- hagbard_c 2y agoThere are other blokes who mindfucked the world and penned down some of their ideas who similarly, and maybe for similar reasons did not make the list. There's Mao Tse-Tung's 'Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung' and other works published in his name [1], countless works 'by' Joseph Stalin [2], Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' and other works in his name [3] just to mention a few. All of these had great impact on the world and inspired countless people just like the collected works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. I suspect this is not the type of inspiration the authors of the list are looking for, hence their omission. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4797485.Mao_Zedong https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4797485.Mao_Zedong [2] https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/138332.Joseph_Stalin https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/138332.Joseph_Stalin [3] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/30691.Adolf_Hitler https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/30691.Adolf_Hitler
- medo-bear 2y agoMarx and Engels were philosophers, not statesmen. Nietzsche is there but Hitler took alot of influence from him. Nietzsche was to Hitler what Marx was to Stalin. Hitler was financed by people who opposed the ideas by Max and Engels. People in Germany largely hate Hitler. Stalin did some horrible things primarily to Russians, but people in Russia to this day love Stalin. Same thing with Mao
- hagbard_c 2y agoThere's plenty of people who either (claim to) love Hitler or who - according to the media at least - are ardent followers of his philosophies (for lack of a better term) as well so in that respect he's right up there together with the others.
- omega3 2y agoThere Is No Antimemetics Division deserves a mention as well.
- smitty1e 2y agoI have a copy of Zinn, and one must know that he brings to his alleged task of writing history a deep Communist bias against his subject. Not that the United States is above criticism; just understand that there is a lack of balance on offer.
- popularrecluse 2y agoZinn is extra credit for people that actually know history. He says it right in the preface, it's one-sided, it's the history that is generally left out of your textbooks. You guys have your panties in a bunch over anything that challenges your hierarchical worldview.
- smitty1e 2y agoAs stated > Not that the United States is above criticism I'd be the first to admit that, for all its virtues, the U.S. Constitution (almost) completely blew off foreign policy. High time to re-think that, instead of letting unelected pencil-necks spread woe globally.
- delichon 2y agoI appreciate that Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead is in the same list. It's a sort of balance, expounding on the converse ideology. You can play mindfuck ping pong between the two. Cheers for the author's open mind, without which mindfuckery is at best foreplay.
- smitty1e 2y agoI've slogged through both "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged". Her model of human nature is soulless, IMO.
- anthk 2y agoAs a Spaniard, I don't find South American magical realism books 'mindfuckey', but maybe a bit half-unsetting and half-romantic, as if you gave some kind of personality to the environment itself. On Focault's Pendulum, [Spoilers, rot13] Gur jubyr obbx vg'f nobhg znxvat sha ba pbafcvenabvqf
- FooBarBizBazz 2y agoBlindsight by Peter Watts. That messed with my head but good. And not necessarily in a good way. But I have to mention it.
- Yizahi 2y agoThat one definitely fits definition perfectly. Still can't forget that idea, brr. Scary.
- bwb 2y agoI am a big fan of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism By Daniel Pinchbeck Amazing book
- djkivi 2y agoMissing The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Mind fucked…
- tyronehed 2y ago[dead]
- gom_jabbar 2y agoNietzsche is on the list, but Nick Land's Fanged Noumena is clearly missing. As Mark Fisher has written about Land's work: "There was a great deal of cyber-theory around in the 1990s but none of it seemed to come from inside the machines – which is to say, outside us – in the way that Land's did." [0] [0] https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10459/1/nick-land-mind-games https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10459/1/...
- sourcepluck 2y agoOoh thanks for the quote, I'll happily follow up on something Fisher says is worth a look.
- IHLayman 2y agoOne book not on that list that really threw me recently was The Anomaly [0]. The less you know about it going in the better. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anomaly_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anomaly_(novel).
- bloak 2y agoI was amused to see "The Outsider" and "The Stranger" as two books by Albert Camus, though "The Outsider" seems to link to novels by Colin Wilson and Stephen King. "L'Étranger" is a good book and not too hard to read in French because it's written in a colloquial style, or you could read one of the many translations: at least four just in English. There are a lot of books in that list that I liked so I should probably pay some attention to the ones that I haven't yet looked at.