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/lit/ - Literature

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19720904 No.19720904 [Reply] [Original]

>itt: books that changed you, for better or worse
>can be fiction or nonfiction
>pic related for me

>> No.19720912
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19720912

>>19720904

>> No.19720914

>>19720904
The book is obviously directed at shy, insecure girls who are otherwise normies though.

>> No.19720921

>>19720914
Yea, looks gay

>> No.19720929

>>19720914
>>19720921
as a guy who read it, it helped me immensely with social anxiety. based on the cover, yeah maybe that's the target audience. a lot of books on anxiety focus on anxiety specifically and don't give good help with social anxiety. this book literally changed my social life and nearly all of my personal relationships.

>> No.19720937

>>19720929
Quick rundown?

>> No.19720944

>>19720904
>Moby Dick
Opened my eyes for transcendentalist and pantheist philosophies, made me start reading Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (the former completely changed the way I saw the world philosophically, the later fit my generally right-libertarian sensibilities like a glove). Also, Moby Dick changed the way I thought about prose, the capacities of an exclusively written medium and literature as a whole. I went from seeing it as painfully limited to entirely limitless, from Melville's capacity of building, from his beautifully embellished poetic descriptions of the sensory the most seemingly random but still gripping allegories towards abstractions and concepts that he managed to tie back to reality and effortlessly made make sense, which feels like a magical way of information transmission.

>Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Much of the above also applies to this.

>Vampyroteuthis infernalis by Vilém Flusser
German-Brazilian philosopher writes a book comparing the deep sea creature known as Vampyroteuthis infernalis to the average Brazilian in a psychological, existential and metaphysical ways. Very similarly "transcendentalist" in 'seeing the self in the natural other", and a generally very abstract philosophical read.

>Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience
My favorite book for a while, a short and sweet and straight to the point dissertation on why the government is not to be inherently trusted and why it is a civic duty of every self-respecting citizen aiming to maintain human dignity and the fabric of society intact to disobey the government whenever it starts abusing its powers.

>> No.19720964

>>19720937
Just bee yourself

>> No.19720974

>>19720937
The first portion just talks about what it is and the theories as to why it is, the middle primarily addresses the different ways you can tackle it, then the ending mostly addresses the each of the core beliefs at the heart of all of it. This short summary doesn't really do it justice. When I was reading it I felt very seen, the author describes the behaviors to an eerie degree of accuracy. She does a really good job towards the end of addressing the different beliefs and mindsets that might keep you locked in with social anxiety. She ends it with a good chapter on how to actually build friendships.

>> No.19721009

>>19720904
>how to b urself
>a book, written by someone else
I love womemes