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Crazy to Grasp: - Hermann Hesse - The Glass Bead Game - Hofstädter - Gödel, Escher, Bach - Bulgakov - Master and Margherita - Melville - Moby Dick - Joyce

by hoers 11y ago

Crazy to Grasp: - Hermann Hesse - The Glass Bead Game - Hofstädter - Gödel, Escher, Bach - Bulgakov - Master and Margherita - Melville - Moby Dick - Joyce - Ulysses - Everything by Baudrillard (esp. 'Agony of Power') - Everything by William Burroughs (The ticket that exploded, Place of dead roads, Discipline of DE) Not that crazy to grasp, but still amazing: - Everything by Egon Friedell (mostly Historical, unbelievably dense and awesome) - Chatwin - Songlines - Ludwig Marcuse - Philosophy of Happiness / Philosophy of Unhappiness

tptacek 11y ago
Love that Bulgakov book (apparently the translation you pick matters a lot, but I wouldn't know, since my sister gave it to me as a gift). I like the Hesse book a lot, although the metaphor is more powerful to me than the book, which is probably not the first Hesse book I'd suggest.
- hoers 11y ago
  Yeah sadly a lot of books from the former soviet union are still circulating with horrible translations (if any). I can't really give a recommendation either because I read it in german. And truth to what you say about the glass bead game, the first 200 pages are a torture, but I still cherish it even for the metaphor alone. Do you know of any book that does a better job bringing that across? That'd be very interesting. + Edit to my post: Meant to put Finnegan's wake to Joyce, not Ulysses! (even thought that's a pretty decent mindbender in itself) + Some I forgot: - C G Jung - The Red Book (get the readers edition) - Nobody mentioned McKenna! 'True Hallucinations' for example. Skip everything to do with I Ching and Timewave. - Illuminatus! trilogy was only mentioned once for some reason (but then horrible to read) - Toffler - Third Wave - Gibson - Neuromancer - Hesse - Demian - P K Dick - Electric Sheep - J A West - Serpent in the sky - R A Wilson - Prometheus Rising and some awesomely trippy, mindbending 'children's books': - Preußler - Krabat - Lindgreen - Brothers Lionheart - Ende - Momo

by hoers 11y ago

tptacek 11y ago

Love that Bulgakov book (apparently the translation you pick matters a lot, but I wouldn't know, since my sister gave it to me as a gift). I like the Hesse book a lot, although the metaphor is more powerful to me than the book, which is probably not the first Hesse book I'd suggest.

hoers 11y ago
Yeah sadly a lot of books from the former soviet union are still circulating with horrible translations (if any). I can't really give a recommendation either because I read it in german. And truth to what you say about the glass bead game, the first 200 pages are a torture, but I still cherish it even for the metaphor alone. Do you know of any book that does a better job bringing that across? That'd be very interesting. + Edit to my post: Meant to put Finnegan's wake to Joyce, not Ulysses! (even thought that's a pretty decent mindbender in itself) + Some I forgot: - C G Jung - The Red Book (get the readers edition) - Nobody mentioned McKenna! 'True Hallucinations' for example. Skip everything to do with I Ching and Timewave. - Illuminatus! trilogy was only mentioned once for some reason (but then horrible to read) - Toffler - Third Wave - Gibson - Neuromancer - Hesse - Demian - P K Dick - Electric Sheep - J A West - Serpent in the sky - R A Wilson - Prometheus Rising and some awesomely trippy, mindbending 'children's books': - Preußler - Krabat - Lindgreen - Brothers Lionheart - Ende - Momo