/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6783186]

Books which make you smarter?
By no means a comprehensive list.

A mix of modern popular science, patriciancore and middle-tier philosophy.

[Anonymous No.6783233]

Bump. help me be smart plz

[Anonymous No.6783247]

>>6783186

You can read all these books and still be an idiot.

you need to meet people. Books should be a tool to help you expand your mind, you need to get out and do physical shit to fill it

[Anonymous No.6783251]

>>6783233
You can't learn to be smart retard. Intellegence is some upbringing some application some genes. Now go back where you came from.

[Anonymous No.6783257]

I don't think anything can actually make you smarter but you'll seem smarter after reading those books.

[Anonymous No.6783261]

>>6783186
>philosophy
>making anybody smart
philosophy makes you stupider

[Anonymous No.6783264]

>>6783247

And you can still meet a bunch of people and still be an idiot. "Doing shit" doesn't amount to much if it's just meaningless action. Intelligence, wisdom, comes from experience and contemplation. At least that's what helps. There's really no grocery store list of things you need to do to be smart.

[Anonymous No.6783282]

Check out Thinking, Fast and Slow.

[Anonymous No.6783284]

>>6783186
Do you have a written list of these? Can't quite make them all out in the image

[Anonymous No.6783287]

>>6783186
>modern popular science
>making you smarter

hoooooo boy

if you want to actually learn to science, read a fucking textbook or two or take a course somewhere. Modern Popular Anything is going to teach you fuck all about anything.

[Anonymous No.6783294]

>Alan Watts

I genuinely get mad every time I see a college age bourgeoisie going around spouting watered down eastern mysticism

>DUUUDE dude weed lmao what if we're all just reddit blades of grass haha Gods just a security blanket xD

Fuck Alan watts and his legion of Berkeley snobs, what a pseudo intellectual

[Anonymous No.6783314]

P L A T O
L
A
T
O

[green !YOUlQWt3s6 No.6783342]

>>6783186
kek wheres harry potter

[Anonymous No.6783352]

[Anonymous No.6783359]

>>6783282
It won't make anybody smarter it just educates you on how the brain works. You read it.

[Anonymous No.6783369]

>>6783294
I like alan watts, especially the book age of "Wisdom of Insecurity". improved my outlook and life greatly.

[Anonymous No.6783503]

>>6783284
The Book by Alan Watts
Tao Te Ching
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
The Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri
The Decameron by Boccacio
Utopia by Thomas More
Maxims by La Rochefoucauld
On The Duty of Civil Obidience by Thoreau
The Prince by Machiavelli
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
The Sickness Unto Death by Kierkegaard
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
The Golden Bowl by Henry James
How The Mind Works by Stephen Pinker
V by Pynchon
La Chute by Camus
The Bible
The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche
Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche
Beneath the Wheel by Herman Hesse
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Wittgenstein
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
The Savage Detectives by Robert Bolano
Steppenwulf by Herman Hesse
Lolita by Nabokov
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
The Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb
The Magus by John Fowles
Eat, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
Strunk and White's The Elements of Style
Pale Fire by Nabokov

[Anonymous No.6783520]

>>6783284
>>6783503
Anti-Oedipus by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
The Critique of Pure Reason by Kant
The Analects of Confucius
Paradise Lost by John Milton
No Logo by Naomi Klein
The Confessions of St. Augustine
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes
Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce
The Voyage Through the Night by Celine
As I Lay Dying by William Faulker

[Anonymous No.6783522]

>>6783294
lol u mad

[Anonymous No.6783572]

What about happiness /lit/?

[Anonymous No.6783814]

>>6783572
jokes on u m8 I read all those and I'm still not happy

[Anonymous No.6783826]

>>6783186
>the god delusion
>smarter

kek

[Anonymous No.6783833]

>the god delusion

its not even a good argument for why you should be atheist

[Anonymous No.6783852]

>>6783247
There are plenty of people on this earth who do nothing but meet people and are still idiots. The concept is flawed and I see it fucking everywhere

[Anonymous No.6783915]

Depends, y no political books..
Anyways you forgot:
Mein Kampf
Count Of Monte Cristo
Any Hemingway book
...hungover, so out of ideas

[Anonymous No.6784084]

>>6783915
because political books don't make you smarter

[Anonymous No.6784093]

>The God Delusion

No, lol. Not at all.

J.L. Mackie - The Miracle of Theism for a serious, rigorous account of atheism.

[Anonymous No.6784225]

Intelligence is something you're more or less born with, it's wisdom and knowledge which you can either heighten or diminish.

[Anonymous No.6784254]

>>6783186

[Anonymous No.6784262]

>>6783915
shit taste: the post

[Anonymous No.6784264]

>>6783915
>count of monte cristo
I just finished reading this and I second this.
Absolutely fantastic book, so fulfilling when you finish it. Fantastic characters, writing, humor, suspense, romance, intrigue, etc. The perfect ending, also. 1000/10 will reread many times.

[Anonymous No.6784267]

>>6783186
>bible
>god delusion
cringed

[Anonymous No.6784275]

>>6784225
>blank_slate_theory.jpg

[Anonymous No.6784290]

Entry-level existentialism reads:

Nausea by Sartre
Being and Nothingness by Sartre
Either/Or by Kierkegaard
Myth of Sisyphus by Camus

[Anonymous No.6784299]

>>6784290
>Camus
>existentialism

[Anonymous No.6784300]

>>6784275
Intelligence is mostly genetic.

[Anonymous No.6784320]

>>6783186
>that crummy resolution

[Anonymous No.6784357]

I'd take Pale Fire off that list. It's a pretty bad, shitty book.

[Anonymous No.6784441]

>>6784264
Is the everyman's library edition good, does it leave anything out?

[Anonymous No.6784450]

>>6784300
Nice Bell Curve you've got there, it goes well with a glass of Israeli propaganda.

[Anonymous No.6784586]

>>6783247
>Le "Go Outside" Meme

Impale yourself on my dick

[Anonymous No.6784755]

>>6784586
how can you have a dick if youre a girl?

[Anonymous No.6784779]

>>6783186
>novels make you smart
also wine makes you live longer and eating dark chocolate every day detoxes your blood

[Anonymous No.6784922]

>>6783247
>" go out and meet people "
>implying people these days are worth my time
>implying that even if i did that one in a hundred that I'd suddenly become more knowledgeable
might as well say i need to hang around the gym and chat up girls. you fucking faggot.

[Anonymous No.6784937]

>>6784254
>tfw I just looked up cp because of this chart

[Anonymous No.6784997]

>>6784755
>criticizes the "go outside" meme
>is a girl
pick one

[Anonymous No.6785029]

Based anon includes Taleb

[Anonymous No.6785876]

>>6783572
All Catch 22 did was make me depressed.

[Anonymous No.6785905]

>>6784299
>i read the wikipedia page of camus

Why don't you go and actually read him, you fucking retard.

[Anonymous No.6785910]

>>6784997

>he thinks "go outside" is a meme

damn you are lost cause tier

[Anonymous No.6785990]

>>6785029
>muh experts
>don't need evidence when I have confirmation bias

[Anonymous No.6785992]

>>6783247
people don't like me though

i know you're right, and i've tried, but i just can't make it happen.

/lit/ is all i have

[Anonymous No.6785995]

>>6784225
>>6784300
>Stephen Pinker's on the list for you autist faggots

[Anonymous No.6786019]

First of all:
>no Ulysses
Because of this I am instantly skeptical of the list.

Second:
Putting the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Critique of Pure Reason in "middle-tier" philosophy is baffling to me. I mean, I'm not one to underestimate the capacities of the "Common Man" or whomever this is directed to, but that is some seriously tough shit right there, and should not be on the same list as, say, Aurelius's Meditations.

Third:
For similar reasons, I think the inclusion of Finnegans Wake (ESPECIALLY at the exclusion of Ulysses) is untenable. It is, like the Critique and the Tractatus, on another tier, apart from most all else on the list. In Search of Lost Time might also be a dubiously difficult inclusion, but I admit to not having read it, so I can't say that with any authority.

Many of the inclusions are good, but it needs some serious revisions to retain consistency in the difficulty of the books. Also, fucking include Ulysses. If that book doesn't "make you smarter," I'm not sure which one does.

[Anonymous No.6786021]

>>6783294
>invoking Reddit abuse in what otherwise claims to be a serious intellectual discussion

[Anonymous No.6786029]

Is this bait?
>Alan Watts
>Pinker
>Dawkins
>Naomi Klein
>Books that make you smarter

[Anonymous No.6786035]

>>6783186
Basic Calculus
Calculus for Engineers - John Perry
Advanced Calculus for Engineers - Hilderbrand
Real Analysis - Yeh

Enjoy Literashits. Guaranteed you will be 'smarter'.

In all seriousness though, every book will make you smarter but there are diminishing returns to reading the same type of book over and over.
If your goal is to become 'smart', it may require picking up a book not presented in the popular narrative form for the layman. It may mean a textbook (any category). Textbooks are designed to teach you things.

[Anonymous No.6786183]

>>6786019
I haven't read Ulysses, so I didn't put it on the list. Same for Wealth of Nations, Schopenhauer, Either/Or, Anti-Christ and a lot of so-called 'Eastern Philosophy' that lit gets butthurt about

[Anonymous No.6787407]

>>6784441

>Though a brilliant storyteller, Dumas was given to repetitions and redundancies; this slightly streamlined version of the original 1846 English translation speeds the narrative flow while retaining most of the rich pictorial descriptions and all the essential details of Dumas’s intricately plotted and thrilling masterpiece.

>Alexandre Dumas’s epic novel of justice, retribution, and self-discovery—one of the most enduringly popular adventure tales ever written—in a newly revised translation.

https://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/classics/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307271129

[Anonymous No.6787637]

>>6783572
>hoot

never read it, sort of recall the movie but it's been years. why is this on here

[Anonymous No.6787673]

anything and everything by robert anton wilson

will make you happier and smarter

[Anonymous No.6787880]

>>6784300
I love it when people who clearly know nothing about inheritance/genetics spout bs like this.

[Anonymous No.6787900]

>>6783186
The only book that 100% for sure will make you smarter if you read it seriously is an introduction to critical thinking.

[Anonymous No.6788080]

>>6787407
Thank you for replying. do you also know if the barnes & noble leatherbound collecters edition is just as good?

[Anonymous No.6788145]

>>6783186
Books don't make anyone smarter.

Some are good at letting people pretend they're smarter than others though.

[Anonymous No.6788238]

>>6783852
Because they don't reflect and/or read great literature. Ideally, you need at least a little bit of both.

[Anonymous No.6788385]

>Naomi fucking klein