ITT: Books that improved your life. I'll start.
On the run by jack kerouac
Solaris - Stanislaw Lem
DOGBOYS: A Farce in Two Acts
Don Coyote
>>8197616
>Penguin translation
You must be 18 to use this board.
Also, The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy. Really reminds you of your own mortality.
>>8197616
how to shitpost effectively
>>8197658
Clearly
bros karm
I think your answer has more to do with the age and life stage you read it during than the actual book.
>>8197656
Whats wrong with Penguin? or are you just shitposting?
>>8197656
>I am a mature, grown ass man
>I also happen to spew memes like a 12 year old
>>8197691
>being this knew
>>8197656
>Not buying a bunch of Penguins so that you can have a colony
The Divine Comedy
Read it as an agnostic. Made me read The Bible, a bit of philosophy and many theology writers
These two.
Also Don Quixote and Moby Dick.
The Good Earth tbqh. Put all of life into perspective and I felt so calm while reading it.
I'd say most of the books I've read have enriched my life in some way. Even the ones I didn't like still helped me to develop my own taste in literature.
>>8197764
Déjà vu
>>8197616
I don't think a book could change my life in a serious way. I've read lots with messages that could have if I applied them 24/7 but I'm not capable of holding a book in my mind constantly forever and honestly I don't think anyone is.
>>8197817
gentlemen, witness the untermensch
>>8197817cuck
>>8197740
shitposting, gotcha
>>8197637
nigga just how high are you right now
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Hans Fallada's books did.
Crime and Punishment
Story of the eye.
>>8198726
how did crime and punishment improve your life? just curious
So how many of the posts in this thread are serious replies and how many are troll posts?
>>8197656
Or MAYBE i have the italian/latin version and looked on google for an english one to make everyone on this board understand what book i'm talking about ;)
>>8197655
Is nobody going to correct this damn asshole! It's Quixote you jackass! Holy shit I'm mad
>>8198864
>Is nobody going to correct this damn asshole! It's Quixote you jackass! Holy shit I'm mad
Is nobody going to correct this damn asshole? It's Quixote you jackass! Holy shit I'm mad.
>>8198743
I read it in a pretty bad time in my life and found a lot of my thinking to be similar to Raskolnikov's from early in the book. I was really immersed in those vivid descriptions of his paranoia, and it basically scared me straight. I never got bad enough to contemplate murder though.
>>8198824
I own this book and it's been on my to-read list for a while.
Read the first pages and dropped for a reason I don't remember.
How essential is it? Why was it so important for you?
>>8198895
>I never got bad enough to contemplate murder though.
Just the fact that you thought this may indicate that you did have murderous thoughts and wish to genocide the Jews.
>>8198905
Go to bed Adolf
>>8198903
Trust me, if you dropped it at the first pages, you'll never enjoy it. Voyage au bout de la nuit is not a particullary GOOD book, it is very famous (at least here in France) for having introduced a new way of writing, with characters who talks closer to real life speach, and the choice by Celine to favor lines that express brutal honnesty rather than metaphors and pretty sentences.
It is an important book, however it's not that enjoyable, it's a classic, reading it will always bring you more knowledge about littérature, but enjoying it is not guarranted at all.
Sorry for the grammar im French
>>8198933
No worries, I'm French too
Thanks for the detailed answer, I can't actually remember if I had dropped it because I disliked it, it was quite some time ago. I have a bad habit of starting several books at the same time and sometimes end up dropping some unintendedly. IIrc I started reading Kundera at the same time and Kundera captured my interest more.
"Brutal honesty" seems like enough of a valid reason for me to pick up Céline again, thanks m8
>>8198903
I just finished it and if it did anything for me, it was showing me what cynical looks like if it is written well. I mean, it's the type of book you get when a writer who's cynical doesn't hold back for hundreds of pages. A lot of writers pick a certain concept to explore, or a subtler way to express their views, or have a cynical undertone.
Céline just goes at it, chapter after chapter after chapter. And manages to still be a funny guy.
Allthough i read the later added preface and there he was just stark raving mad. Like he as so hatefull he just stopped being coherent.
>>8198933
Nice post.
>>8197616
>>8197616
Never underestimate the power of dope!
No, seriously: A great read when you're feeling down.
Also: Maxim Gorky – My Universities
>>8198302
Can you elaborate? Any book specifically?
Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle ("Rhapsody"/"Dream Story") is a book that makes you believe that there might still be some good left in the world. It's a lovely one-afternoon read that still makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside whenever I finish it.
the colour of her panties - piers anthony
>>8197740
As an anon who almost never comes to /lit/ I'm serious, is Penguin hate a meme or is there an actual worthwhile reason?
Have you read William Irvine's book on Stoicism OP? I thought it was a pretty good modern application of a lot of stoic ideas, I pulled a lot of good practices out of it.
Besides that, this one seriously impacted my view of human rationality and just how suggestible we tend to be.
>>8197616
Agreed wholeheartedly.
While it's not necessarily a hard outlining of a philosophy that I think people could necessarily latch onto, Marcus Aurelius was a good, earnest man with a wealth of insight and humility. His perspective shed a very sobering light on my own life.
>>8197616
Quran
>>8201136
Is that book actually good? I thought it was some Dale Carnegie realted thing for some reason
>>8201221
Which one, the Stoicism one or Thinking Fast and Slow?
The Irvine's book is sort of framed as a self-help book (I think the title was a bad call for that) but it's got some good insights. It's a nice primer that breaks the usual stereotypes about stoics and gives a formula for practicing stoic philosophy. It also fills you in on the big stoic philosophers and has a good reading list in the back.
Thinking Fast and Slow is just loaded with cognitive science and goes over all the ways we're subconsciously irrational and how it can be harmful, and many can be countered so long as you're mindful of them.
>>8201258
Thinking Fast and Slow. But it sounds different from what I expected, I'll give it a try.
>>8201119
Personally, I think it's just a meme. The editions are relatively easy on the eyes and some have a good amount of secondary information. This is where it fluctuates though. Donne's collected poetry in this edition has half of the bulk dedicated to footnotes, which is sweet. Others don't have shit. Also the binding is hit or miss. Don't even think about buying Les Miserables in this edition. Spine will indefinitely break. And it's that shitty kind of break where the glue comes off along the width of the book and pages fall in chunks. Hate that shit.
>>8197837
/thread
>>8197817
>but I'm not capable of holding a book in my mind constantly forever
This isn't necessary for something to change your life. All that's required is for you to grasp a concept that influences the way you think or behave in a significant way. And you don't need to apply the concept 24/7 for it to be influential on your lifestyle either, "most of the time when applicable" is enough. Unless you've got a genuine problem when it comes to long term memory holding certain concepts in your memory isn't that challenging as long as you took an effort to internalize it. You don't need to memorize quotes and page numbers and shit, you know.
>improved
>not changed
plabs
Les misérables
Read this when I was about fifteen years old. Judge me but it was an introduction to Romantic ideas, writers, and poetry.
>>8201478
Forgot this.
>>8201258
> Full of cognitive science
I could never take books like those seriously
>>8201535
Why is that?
>Evolution teaches that traits persist and develop because they increase fitness. One possible hypothesis is that our conceptual biases are adaptive, as are our rational faculties. Kahneman offers happiness as one quality that our thinking process nurtures. Kahneman first took up this question in the 1990s. At the time most happiness research relied on polls about life satisfaction.
>Kahneman proposed an alternate measure that assessed pleasure or pain sampled from moment to moment, and then summed over time. Kahneman called this "experienced" well-being and attached it to a separate "self". He distinguished this from the "remembered" well-being that the polls had attempted to measure. He found that these two measures of happiness diverged. His major discovery was that the remembering self does not care about the duration of a pleasant or unpleasant experience. Rather, it retrospectively rates an experience by the peak (or valley) of the experience, and by the way it ends. Further, the remembering self dominated the patient's ultimate conclusion.
>"Odd as it may seem," Kahneman writes, "I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me."
The Enchiridion
The Brothers Karamazov
The Iliad
Don Quixote
>>8201535
Why not?
I find cognitive science to be a sort of "philosophy of the self backed up with application of the scientific method."
It might not be as infallible as some of the harder sciences but there's lots of compelling research being done, and it's a relatively young field with a lot to address.
>>8198734
>>8201258
>Subconsciously
>>8197788
checked
and you are based
>>8197788
>Just b urself! :')
>muahaha capitalism iz bad dur durr
and it's sad because you probably feel proud for reading these books
>>8202847
you know that you can summerize every book with retarded greentext like this, right?
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
Tragedy and Hope
The Wolf of Kremlin
Books don't "improve" life.
They distract from it.
>>8202976
yeah just like how i distracted your mum from you by fucking her
>>8202974
>Tragedy and Hope
You some sorta conspiracy nut?
>>8202981
what do you think
>>8202985
Yes.
>>8202989
that is correct!
>>8197616
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
Practical Ethics - Peter Singer
Reasons and Persons - Derek Parfit
>>8203006
Nice to see Parfit on here. I've been working my way through On What Matters.
>>8201119
They're generally pretty decent, always good to do some background check before you purchase a translation though. There are some which native speakers will tell you are quite bad and others (especially translations of verse) which might suit you based on a preference for keeping the originals substance, style, or melody intact.
>>8197775
You read the English version of it?
UPB by Stefan Molyneux is the best answer by far
>>8201551
>Enchirideon
>brofist
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn permanently altered my perception of scientific proofs and was very humbling.
>>8201119
Penguin is cheap because they are a company of max profits. Cheap build, cheap translators, yet often more expensive than better alternatives. The covers are trash as well, multiple huge logos so your books are billboards, lots of wasted space, bland, etc.
>>8203323
>often more expensive than better alternatives
Compared to Oxford World's Classics, that is. (Penguin has a cheaper price than other good publishers like Hackett but I would still choose Hackett for quality.)
>>8197616insincere answer:
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucaultsincere answer:
Preface to Paradise Lost by C. S. Lewis (in tandem with Paradise Lost)
>>8198864
>>8198933
I decoded the hidden message, but it just seems to be a mild insult
>>8201119
good quality but bare-boned when compared to the critical edition or annotated version if you're actually trying to study
so basically, it's casual-tier
Shakespeare
Fahrenheit 451
While not super complex or anything, it did get me interested in the hobby.
>>8201482
Love that book. Irresistible....A true literary gem.
>>8203336
Hacketts are so fucking ugly, though, and are unpleasant to read. They have thin, cheap paper, and the pages are long and the print tiny. If you're reading something dense (i.e., anything Hackett publishes), then the actual experience of reading can be pretty shitty.
But, they are 1) well-annotated and translated, and 2) cheap.
>>8203342
only correct answer itt
>>8201119
casual entry level tier for reasons already said. Buy a book from publishers such as Everyman's Library and you can see inmediately the increase in quality over Penguin
