I've read a couple hundred books and I've enjoyed them but nothing has really spoken to me on a grander scale. Have you read a life changing book? If you have, how did it change you? I just can't see a book hitting me like that but I want to
>>24758343What is this exact type of look this guy has. Like this guy in reservoir dogs
>>24758349Perpetually angry bald boomer. A common phenotype
>>24758391I think theres more to it then that but I can't put my finger on it
>>24758391You would be pretty angry if you were bald and a boomer too, don't act like you're hot shit
>>24758343I've just finished a Jean Batten biography by Ian Mackersey. At one point in the mid to late 1930s, she was one of the most famous people in the world, and then she practically disappeared. It became quite a sad read and the circumstances of her death — while in keeping with how she lived — were especially poignant. I'm not sure if it changed me, but it gave me some thoughts about my own mortality and reminded me that even the brave and beautiful die and that the bell tolls on us all.
>>24758343Better never to have been by Benatar,and Denial of Death by Ernest BeckerOnce I realized how we're ready to create something that can experience harm out of nowhere just to deny our own mortality and satisfy our own hedonistic pleasure seeking impulses, I've started noticing every single act that leads or even hints at breeding as biological imperatives that pervade all our actions, and am constantly reminded that we're truly immoral apes on all levels.
>>24758349>>24758391>>24758397>>24758431So thankful for finastaride! The ultimate slaphead cure.
>>24758343I find this to be a confusingly framed question. Have any books changed my life? Loads of books have been 'life changing' in a subtle, incremental but vitally important way: it's through the experience of reading books that my particularly mental world, personality and imagination have developed. I would have an emptier head and a less exercised soul if I hadn't read them, just as I would if I had never left a windowless bunker, or never met another human. But there hasn't been one single book that made me decide to, like, become an entrepreneur or leave my wife or whatever, if that's what you mean by life changing. To me the subtler sense is the more important one.
Yes, Proust - In Search of Lost Time. I don't believe I'll read anything else that will equal him. I truly feel, for me at least, that he's at the summit of literature. (This is a personal claim, not an objective one, so don't get your knickers in a knot)There are passages which are more than beautiful, and which I feel have revealed to me a deeper life than the one which I (we) ordinarily live. I'd never felt such bliss before, true and lasting, transformative; so much so that it's that it's inspired me to follow in his aesthetics and attempt to be an artist myself. I'm even learning French so I can read it again in the original. Naturally I'm not a particularly artistic type - maths and science is what I'm good at - and I would've never thought I'd be so affected by someone who on the surface is so different from me, but Proust really achieved something special, maybe not for everyone, but certainly for me.
>>24759542You got demoralized by two jews
>>24759835Yes, I have, and no matter how much of my Aryan brainpower I muster up in order to refute them, I can not do it.In fact the more I think of these two books and how they map on our world the more I realize how precisely right they areIt's exactly what OP asked about. Once they click it's over.
>>24758343Jung (largely mediated through others) illuminated the psychological necessity of belief for me (& Frye's Words with Power & A Natural Perspective & Jung's Aion helped me look specifically at the necessity of the Christ archetype). Von Franz's Problem of the Puer Aeternus was an in-depth analysis of my struggles. New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton, coupled with Eliot's Four Quartets, showed me how Christian mysticism works. All of these were major developments for my mental journey. Tennyson helped me get into poetry, which has been something that I've really appreciated: one of the anons on here years ago said, "Never to have understood poetry is a kind of death." Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov provided me a bright light in a lonely adolescence.
>>247583431984 for its starkness alone Priggo would read konosuba, rip you glorious bastard ;_;
>>24759840Pynchon digs into this in M&D -- without transcendence, rationalistic exploration of mechanisms leads inevitably to death. Eliot -- "driven by demonic, chthonic / Powers." See also Simone Weil's idea of gravity and grace, the natural rhythm of the world and the transcendent. There's a reason the libidinal, phallic, egoistic serpent is the image associated with Satan. He is the Adversary in Revelation, "that old dragon"; apophatic theology -- the question "Who is like God?", which is the literal translation of the name of the archangel Michael -- casts him down out of the glorified places. The horrible tyranny of libido and ego -- "the god of this world" -- is not a new observation. I encourage you to look at the faith that has recognized and fought this, and (since we're on a literature board) produced Dante, Milton, and Thomas Browne.
Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher - Clayton Atreus.A random anon recommended it to me. I read this book during my law school years, when I was still living with a disability and using a wheelchair for daily mobility. It exposed the morbid reality of being disabled, and how both society, and even disabled people themselves often cling to denialism, framing disability as nothing more than "inspiration" or "motivation" to move forward and become extraordinarily special. In truth, this mindset only keeps us stuck in the same dirty pit: being powerless and dependent.This book changed me, literally. I was a disabled person in wheelchair before, but it made me realize I should not grow comfortable with my disability. I needed to heal to fulfill my needs, honestly, based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. That’s why I decided to undergo knee surgery. Now, I can walk: not as normally as others, but still, I can walk.
>>24758343My life went to shit shortly after I read C&P. I feel cursed
>>24760133Just keep fucking up till we make it, right bro? right?
