Ask HN: Good Metabooks?

6 points·sambapa··5 comments

I'm looking for books like "Fluent Forever", "Make it stick", "How to read a book" etc. that teach metaskills and challenge the status quo.

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There is already a name for that: good books. Good books are not ultra, meta or uberbooks.

I know this sounds snob, but… After reading all kind of books, a lot of them often recommended here, If you want to actually find challenging books I recommend sticking with essay, textbooks (go to a university page and buy the textbooks listed for a course), and classics (stuff like Hume, not How to influence people), and avoid anything you can find in an airport bookshop. But careful, they are actually challenging, and won’t be as satisfying as reading some divulgation or self-help book, and will require actual effort.

I love to read books like How we sleep, or black swan, etc. but personally I think they make me feel good/smart, more than they challenge me.

100% absolutely not what you want, but perhaps what you need - “Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” is a metabook if there ever was one.

This is a textbook as a book, personally I'd do a reading/study group to get the most out of it. I don't have a math specialty but even with some of mid-level uni math courses around signals, random processes, and machine learning I still feel uhhh behind for this book

Second this. Plus you can skip the socratic dialogs (the turtle and Achiles ones) without feeling guilty.

- The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook http://socraticmethod.org/

>a way to think more intelligently about questions large or small

All Philosophy books are meta

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