ITT we share the books that changed us, altered our views on

File: 220px-Recognitions.jpg (28KB, 220x316px) Image search: [Google]

28KB, 220x316px

>>7536541

File: c7044463742377572c62b0dde55d927f.jpg (18KB, 236x337px) Image search: [Google]

18KB, 236x337px

>>7536541
Really helped me with my financial situation.

File: Infinite_jest_cover.jpg (28KB, 300x464px) Image search: [Google]

28KB, 300x464px

helped me through my shitty alcohol habit...still smoke weed tho.

File: 342.jpg (32KB, 300x420px) Image search: [Google]

32KB, 300x420px

started with it and it led me to read a lot more.

File: 414999.jpg (55KB, 271x450px) Image search: [Google]

55KB, 271x450px

The ending left me feeling empty and at peace, bit weird all said.

>>7536679
Is there an equivalent to this set in the 21st century?

>>7536679
This book definitely did it for me too. Made me feel way better about being an unempathetic outsider. Not that the protagonist is a positive character, but at least he exists in some sense.

>>7536706

https://7chan.org/lit/src/Tatsuhiko_Takimoto_-_Welcome_to_the_NHK_novel.pdf

>>7536541
White guilt SJW detected

File: 51N1RCDQA3L.jpg (43KB, 336x500px) Image search: [Google]

43KB, 336x500px

>>7536541
when i read this as a young impressionable woman it moved me deeply and changed my life and relationship to literature wholly

File: 1428175138426.gif (2MB, 640x480px) Image search: [Google]

2MB, 640x480px

>>7536964
or he's black?

Discourses by EpicT was p cool. Rawls got me fucked up for a min, too, I guess

File: MasterHarold.jpg (26KB, 323x499px) Image search: [Google]

26KB, 323x499px

Offers a beautiful picture of what life could be if we all just keep trying

>>7536650
??? What abt your tv addictoin

File: 1Q84.jpg (61KB, 440x652px) Image search: [Google]

61KB, 440x652px

>>7536541
I used to be a very tolerant critic. I read things like Harry Potter and TFIOS and really, honestly tried to find the positive aspects of them because, after all, it was ALL up to interpretation, right? Any time I would struggle with any book, but saw a cult following of it, I just assumed that there was something I was missing that everyone else understood. Then I read all 3 books of this garbage trilogy and realized that people don't know anything about books, Ever since I had that paradigm shift, I have become a much better reader, my criticisms have been sharper, and I actually enjoy engaging with books that I had deemed "out of my league."
Anyone else have this kind of change?

>>7536591
The pace of this book is almost insufferable because of the length of the descriptions about everyone's Dolce & Gabbana shoes. Literally felt like the GQ Handbook to me.

>>7536541
I just picked this up for $2 on a used shelf at an indie book store after I read a Hannah Arendt essay where she references it. What about it changed you, anon? What exactly did it change?

I read Notes From Underground the same year as Invisible Man and I feel like Dostoyevsky completely overshadowed Ellison for me

File: the-confusions-of-young-tc3b6rless.jpg (28KB, 260x396px) Image search: [Google]

28KB, 260x396px

Fucked me up.

File: Mysterious-Stranger-Mark-Twain.jpg (96KB, 318x500px) Image search: [Google]

96KB, 318x500px

Pic related. It's a pity most people know Twain only from his "folksy storyteller" phase, this thing is BRUTAL.

File: 0140441212.1.zoom.jpg (21KB, 300x477px) Image search: [Google]

21KB, 300x477px

>>7536556
i'm curious, how?

pic related made me attempt to renounce attachments without becoming attached to renunciation.

File: TeacherManOldMan.jpg (27KB, 316x487px) Image search: [Google]

27KB, 316x487px

>>7536541
Tis was good, but I enjoyed pic related more.
I haven't read Angelas Ashes however

>>7536679
I have this on my shelf and the description of the character is so spot on (minus the attempted suicide part) that I'm kind of scared to read it

File: youth in revolt.jpg (48KB, 297x475px) Image search: [Google]

48KB, 297x475px

Blew my mind when I was in 6th grade. I still reread it often.

>>7536987
This.

Help me get over a terrible relationship and breakup.

>>7537361
*helped

>>7537313
I read it in a day. Just start it, it's an easy read

>>7537008
Most people think it's one of his worst books though. Give his others a chance if you haven't.

File: geb.jpg (444KB, 600x910px) Image search: [Google]

444KB, 600x910px

>>7536541

File: shobogenzo2.jpg (152KB, 550x606px) Image search: [Google]

152KB, 550x606px

Blew my fucking mind.

Only parallel in the western tradition might be A Thousand Plateaus.

>>7536541
Just finished it today, was dope

File: 61bahG8xTIL.jpg (65KB, 333x500px) Image search: [Google]

65KB, 333x500px

Really solidified my viewpoint of the world in these present times. Even 7 months after finishing it (which took me two weeks to finish as I blazed through it) I still think about it virtually every day.

>>7538044
From someone who has read it: what is it about?

>>7538133
Chaos. And that the "truth" is never really there

File: 1451877199973.jpg (24KB, 324x500px) Image search: [Google]

24KB, 324x500px

Taught me that there is literally nothing wrong with fucking pre-teen girls and the judge was the one that was in the wrong

>>7536541
For the longest time I thought this book was about the invisible guy from that awful movie called the league of extraordinary gentlemen .

>>7536650
I was really depressed and drinking most days when I was reading it and I kept thinking when I was done that the book would have led me out into the light

Didn't but it was pretty insightful.

File: Middlemarch.jpg (232KB, 800x781px) Image search: [Google]

232KB, 800x781px

Not sure how, exactly, but Middlemarch changed how I view myself and other people.

>>7536694
I enjoyed the first half or so of this, but disliked it later and absolutely hated every part after the arrival on the Overlords' world. Everything was so heavy-handed. Similar deal with The Lathe of Heaven; once the mysterious aliens are revealed, it feels like garbage.

At a climax in the struggle with depression and anxiety a year ago I read the first hundred pages of the Brothers. I'd been looking for an emotional connection that I haven't had in years, and with it, the reassurance of the possibility of recovery from the hell that is the lonliest place on Earth.

An insurmountable and torturous habit I think neurotics face is the capacity to confront denial beyond the means in which denial is given expression - to 'face the facts' of a conditionally objective being and achieve a form of valid self-reflection free from both internal and external pressures - or contradictions - in moralizing behaviour i.e. where the primacy of being is secluded in an Orwellian language of the ideology itself: Winston is a tragic character (within George Orwell's novel) in as much as his fatalism prescribes: to doubt is to stand in the image of, never to affirm independance towards. Without a valid language of the self, being becomes illness.

Reading one quote in particular from Dostoyevsky: "A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying--to others and to yourself".

A shallow irony given that Nietzsche writes on the condition of resentement - reflecting much of the attitude above - while this quote is delivered from a priest.

File: Dostoevsky-Brothers_Karamazov.jpg (106KB, 563x677px) Image search: [Google]

106KB, 563x677px

>>7538776

File: cover.jpg (33KB, 316x500px) Image search: [Google]

33KB, 316x500px

what a book

Brothers K by David Duncan

File: thewarofart[1].png (87KB, 220x352px) Image search: [Google]

87KB, 220x352px

Self-help books are designed to inspire goosepimples in the lowest common denominator of human beings but this book was comfy as fuck tbqhwy senpai

>>7538800
capricorn wasnt that great. but i still bullshitted people into thinking i was reading a classic. i'll probably give this one a try in a year or so.

File: tumblr_inline_n1mfetVby71rqcfmr.jpg (37KB, 396x500px) Image search: [Google]

37KB, 396x500px

I know im sorry

>>7538834
>if you don't express yourself you get cancer!!11!!
the book

>>7538862
>THIS being your takeaway from the book
that limb must have been sturdy as fuck

File: point omega.jpg (30KB, 274x420px) Image search: [Google]

30KB, 274x420px

>>7536556
this burned a lifelong pursuit of art into me, no matter my financial or social situation

>>7536650
helped me kick drugs (not joking)

read pic related a few months after my daughter went missing, pretty much permanently broke me

>>7536541
The gOD Delusion.

>>7536541
That book annoyed me - he just drifts from one thing to another.

>>7538834
this was pretty inspiring yet did not lift me from my unfathomably deep hole of procrastination and self-destruction.

>>7536694
Good book.