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Mind-expanding books

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119 pointsaxiomdata31661 comments

I’m not convinced of the utility of lists like this, or the multitude of other Awesome JavaScript Yeahhhh!!! lists.

As one of the issues in the GitHub repository suggest, it seems all that is needed for a book to be considered “mind expanding” here is for it to have a Goodreads and/or Amazon rating higher than 4.

But what does that prove? There are people who rate Netflix’s Red Notice 10/10. Relative to those people, I think I’ve seen more intelligent forms of life swimming in the milk in my breakfast cereal.

I read half of The Compound Effect — one of the books in this list. It was trash. I’ve also read Sapiens from this list, and I certainly would characterise it as mind expanding.

Even from these two titles alone, I’d say the quality in the selection is far too variable. I think reviews are near enough useless unless you’re intimately familiar with the reviewer, and trying to curate the works in a collection like this by writing unit tests is probably futile.

I'm on an Asimov binge right now. Just finished Foundation and Earth. So I jumped to the scifi section of the list and saw Ready Player One on there. I found that book mildly entertaining, but not a work of great literature, and certainly not mind expanding.

I agree with your sentiment about the importance of knowing the reviewer. I think using general popularity as a gauge is a good way to get the worst recommendations.

> I think using general popularity as a gauge is a good way to get the worst recommendations.

Do you know a better way to get good recommendations? I am genuinely interested.

I've had success looking up the book recommendation lists of people who I think are intelligent. For example, Bill Gates publishes a list of recommended reading. I know that Bill Gates isn't the sort of person who would waste his time reading crappy books. And even if he did, he would not waste his reputation recommending them to others. I'm not saying go read the books on his list (I have not). I'm just using him as a concrete example of smart people who recommend books.

To find recommendations for yourself: Think of a person that you respect. Then google "{name} book recommendations" That should get you some hits.

It's quite possible that if the person you respect is not too famous and busy, you could email them and ask for a recommendation.

# Regarding popularity

I can't speak with any actual authority on the matter of general popularity being a poor gauge other than my own observations that I've never been a fan of what is popular. I suspect that there are several people like me in that regard on this forum.

Talk about books with people you admire. My best reads came from recommendations by mentors, managers and friends. A quick message on LinkedIn is often enough to get a solid recommendation. Generally it seems people like being asked for that kind of advice.

If you want to learn a non-fiction subject, university reading lists are a great place to start. It's a very different experience reading a textbook when you don't have to take an exam -- or even re-reading one that you read when you did. For me, the dry wit of the authors comes out more and you can focus on stuff that really interests you.

The other nice thing about this approach is that some textbooks are commonly recommended by different universities for the same courses -- and they're more likely to be good. For some random examples, Horrowitz and Hill, the art of electronics (for electronics!); Riley Hobson and Bence: mathematical methods for the physical sciences (for vector calculus); or David Mackay's book on information theory (legally freely available online, published by CUP and contains lots of Bayesian stuff the average HN reader would probably love).

There was a time where Amazon was great to explore books: "users who bought also bought". Good old collaborative filtering.

I feel bad for giving useless advice so as someone who read several times the whole foundation series as a teen may I suggest: A deepness in the sky, a fire upon the deep, the forever war, gateway (Frederick Pohl). If you like fantasy, or even if not: the blade itself. If you have an enemy recommend him/her "the name of the wind". It's a great book but it's the first of an unfinished trilogy.

Edit: how could I forget the cryptonomicon?

I’m currently working my way through the Hugo award winners and am in the time of The Forever War and Gateway. I also recommend them for the most part. Rendezvous with Rama around that time is also really enjoyable.

I still recommend Name of the Wind. It's frustrating, but I would rather have loved and lost, than not loved at all.

I once asked a bunch of my colleagues if they ever used one of these awesome lists and their answer was no. I asked the same group if they bookmarked, stared, or shared an awesome list before, and more than half of them said yes.

Whatever that means.

It’s the developer equivalent of inane and/or factually incorrect chain emails from older relatives

I am actually the other way around. I use them as one data point to find new libraries in fields I have never worked in. They tend to be incomplete and no curation at all. But still useful.

Counterpoint here: I recently used awesome-gbdev[0] and found it fantastic. Not starred or bookmarked though!

[0] https://github.com/gbdev/awesome-gbdev

We need a Netflix Prize but for books!

I find Goodreads to be a great place to find books from the reviews. Generally you'll see at least one review which looks compelling. Usually what I'm looking for is not a book target, but rather an on-ramp for the path to find the target. Often reviews lead to a key list of works for the subject you're looking for. Then you know you have found one of those keys when the reviews recognize the book as such and stop recommending other books. Though they will recommend similar texts which might be more accessible.

Aside from Goodreads reviews, you could do similar through tracing a path of sources from the book (if you can find the sources for it.) Maybe do both.

This list is a great starting point. I have enough judgement to discern between books that are worth my time and books that aren't. Personally, I'm going to scan these titles and look up things that I don't recognize on Amazon and Wikipedia. At no point did I consider reading every book sequentially because of blind trust in a github list.

I take the same approach with any of the "Awesome" lists. They're meant to be used for overview and familiarization, not rote adoption.

I agree. Most of the best non-fiction books I've read don't have a 4.5 Goodreads score. They spark some controversy (many people expect to agree on a book they read), or they are not for everyone (topic-wise, level-wise, etc). It works the same for everything (movies, food). E.g. the best average score for movies is for the best average movies. Unless it is so niched that it is only read by people deep into a subject (again, then a high score says little about general quality).

But even for the >4.0-rated books, I find the collection bizarre.

E.g. "Metaphors We Live By" is here somewhere in the middle (at least got 4.08), while for me, it is the single most insightful book about human language as a way of thinking. "Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research" by Stanislav Grof (4.34), a book that unifies & classifies psychedelic experiences (going beyond "good vs bad trip"), religious experiences, and CPTSD - is not even on the list. But sure - this book is not that popular. Yet, "Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennett (3.88) is not even on the list - just to name a few.

So instead of pretending that it is some collection of "mind-expanding books", let's make it "Favourite books of hackerkid", assuming they read them. If not, then "a random collection of vaguely mind-expanding books".

I had to laugh a little bit when I looked at the philosophy section and it seems like with few exceptions it's books from the 2000s including such gems as

>Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!

I'm not overly conservative or classically leaning when it comes to education but I think people who really want to expand their minds would benefit from trying some of the classics first.

Mill, On Liberty. Accessible and incredibly important book for people who live in liberal democracies and want to understand where a lot of their own ideas come from. Plato's Republic. Not as accessible, but very important. Girard has become popular again and has some very unique ideas, so people will probably get a lot out of it. Same for Chesterton.

Kafka's Metamorphosis deserves to be in the Lit section. Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series is a must read for science fiction fans, the sci-fi section has some genuinely horrible recommendations in it. Also given that it's supposed to be a mind-expanding list, throw in Blindsight by Peter Watts. The fantasy section needs Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. (and throw Harry Potter out)

Sexual Personae by Paglia deserves to be named in the Gender/sexuality section.

And an off-beat recommendation. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud is a truly smart book on comics, in the form of a graphic novel.

This is an elaborate SEO ploy for contributors and later sponsors. The variety of popular books casts a wider SEO net.

I also had to chuckle at that. Self-help gurus are not philosophers. As you can see from the ordering, this list is made by startup-folks and/or programmers. So I take inspiration from the startup, business and science section and ignore the rest.

Self help gurus help themselves by making you give them money in exchange for the feeling of empowerment, if at all.

+1 for Scott McCloud. I follow this Twitter account that posts random images from the book and they often make me ponder: https://twitter.com/bot_mccloud

See for instance: https://twitter.com/bot_mccloud/status/1474575631778258950 -- I've used this image in slides for countless talks when I go into anything about abstraction in programming, by the way.

Author of the list here. When I started the list 6 years back, the idea was to have a small collection of books that will change your perspective if you read them. But over the years, the list got 350+ pull requests and the number of books increased significantly. I ask the pull requests author why they think the book is mind expanding in the pull request description. If they can write a convincing sentence I would merge them. But ofcourse, what's mind expanding for some is not mind expanding for others. I think the repo now is more like a collection of books that might help you find the next book to read under a particular topic. It might or might not expand your mind. Hopefully going through the list you might atleast find one interesting book to read :)

Thank you for putting the list together! If I may make a suggestion, what you wrote above would be an excellent first paragraph in the readme, as it explains the intent well and the criteria for how you add books to the list.

The whys seems to me like it would be a valuable addition to the list. It’s a shame they’re just in the pull requests.

Not seeing anything spiritual on there. That is aguably the most important, if not tendentious, topic.

Here's a problem I have with books... Say, I want to increase my productivity. Then I found a number of books, each takes time to do and each sells THE way to increase productivity. Long story short... Weeks later I'm still busy reading books, while got more confused.

My approach is to just understand principles, and skip these kinds of books

Seems like you are using books as they are intended. You do not need to be orthodox to the idea that is represented by such books just be inspired by them. This is especially true for maths, but also books like the Bible were you can not read the book and then know Christianity, you need the principles .

Those are mostly either heavily marketed recent books or some very popular books considered "classics" that sort of circulate as representing some field (which they mostly really don't).

If I had made a similar (probably much shorter) list about programming languages it would include Go and Pascal as mind-expanding languages.

It would be a help if the author of the list gave any indication of why each of these books is worth reading.

As it stands it looks like a list of the sort of worthy books that folk will think well of you for having read.

If you are an avid reader but yawned at this list, you are my friend!

Any books you'd like to recommend, friend?

A walk in the woods by Bill Bryson is fun — but it’s not exactly mind expanding. I know more about the Appalachian trail than before I read it, but that seems like a low bar.

The title is completely wrong: it should be "Books with high Goodreads score."

Also, arguably, all books (or at least should be) are mind-expanding as they provide you with new information. As for the quantitative aspect, it is a very individual thing: what is a huge trove of new information for me might be old news for you. With time, what was once new becomes more or less common knowledge.

Personally, I find the books on the limits of science to fall in this category - especially our grasp of micro- and macrocosm, but also biology and neuroscience. Chemistry is extremely interesting but my feeling is that there aren't that many breakthrough developments these days; nevertheless, it's fascinating to observe, say, the influence of various alkaloids on living organisms - there is so much to discover here. I love books by specialists in the field, preparing a meta-analysis of various phenomena, and then proposing a novel explanation for them.

Been wondering lately about "books that everyone should read". I used to go to Amazon search a category and then get the most popular / highly rated book. But is that really what I need or want? As I start to appreciate the value of uniqueness I wonder more about obscure books, books less read and have found these often contain gems.

You might want to read first "How to Read a Book" and then proceed to the recommended list [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book#Reading_lis...

Thanks, just bought "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character" which I had wanted to read but forgotten about.

To address the other comments about this being "yet another list" etc, it's useful for someone like me who is quite busy and has to be opportunistic about finding good reads. Lists help.

IMHO this kind of list defeats its purpose. Being popular / having high rating in the popular services is definitely not an accurate marker of being "mind-expanding". In fact, I would expect most of them be rather safe/easy/conforming to what people find acceptable, therefore not challenging their minds. Just looking at the philosophy section of the list proves the point. Also the sci-fi part is surprisingly poor in substance — one would think that technical people should be well-versed in that particular genre.

I would prefer to read a list curated by a single "expert" person. Such a list would be shorter, more biased, but hopefully not so bland. For example, Eli Bendersky puts every now and then a nice summary of his impressive reading adventures.

This list has Blindness by Saramago as a history book. Is this a joke going over my head?

There are many miscategorizations like that. It is also clearly written by an American leftist, with, for example, Michelle Obama's biography as "mind expanding books everyone should read". I am sure they are completely oblivious to their political and geographical/cultural bias though, as typically happens.

5 books not on this list that might expand your.mind:

* The Dice Man by George Cockroft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man?wprov=sfla1

* The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda.

* Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/624

* Poverty and Progress by Henry George

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55308

* The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt

I've read several books in the first section (and quit skimming through the list after).

I am sorry but to me this is completely useless. Someone whom I don't know can claim they recommend whatever. They have no authority, and lists like these don't say why they recommend some. I am far more interested in the why than the who or what. In other words, the most interesting piece (a well written albeit short review) is missing. Without that, title and aithor is pointless as they are rarely descriptive enough about content.

Master and Margerita at the top of the classics list – fantastic book, definitely recommend people read, but would not in any way say it was "mind expanding".

I read this because it gets recommended a lot on HN. I don't get the hype. It was decent, but nothing special.

> It was decent, but nothing special.

Especially if one have read some books from authors like Leonid Andreyev or (not directly related to those authors) you know some Gnostic concepts.

There is some GOLD on this list, that I had never even heard of until now. Well worth the effort to go through it. Thank you.

How do you know something is “GOLD” if you’ve never heard of it, let alone read it?

Umm because I looked it up didn’t I. Not that hard mate

One of the scores of lists people share and bookmark but never use themselves.

>Patrick rothfuss before lord of the rings This has to be bait

Patrick Rothfuss ruined other fantasy novels for me. Seriously, I usually now stop after 2-3 hours in because it is just bad in comparison. I know that there are some that do not like his books. For me those are the best fantasy books I have ever read. It is not even close. Like he is so much better that I can not even compare it to anything else.

For me it was the other way around. The first book was so bad that I stopped reading fiction all together because I realized there are more important things I can do with my limited time.

Why was it bad in your opinion? Always interested how you can argue against this masterpiece.

Unlikable mary sue character who constantly toots his own horn and boasts about how smart he is, boring cookie cutter world building straight from a how to book. This made the protagonist extremely annoying like a teenager who thinks he’s smart and talented because of good grades and then ends up working as a web dev later in life.

Did we read the same books? Everything that you mentioned is actually a plus for me. Alright, different tastes I guess.

Tony Robbins under 'Philosophy and Psychology'?

Blindness by Jose Saramago under History?

There are a bunch of charlatans on this list, which suggests a lack of consideration in the recommendations.

Sorry but this felt like a generic buzzfeedy list.

it's way too many...

Yeah, smells of low effort. Make the list shorter and explain why those books are so good.

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