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Not a complete list, but maybe an amusing one β
great list. Liber AL vel Legis is pretty wild
Cultboy got hella laid, but ended up a junkie though. As an aging dude I'd rather have Bob H's end times than Al C's.
for sure. orgies interrupt my nap time these days!
The law is a decent rule to attempt in oneβs life.
Illuminatus is the most potent and interesting paradigm-shifting book I've ever read. It's like an epistemological shotgun blast, guerilla ontology indeed. Anything by R. A. Wilson is advisable, but this one really shakes you loose of your preconceptions and opens the door to new perspectives.
Illuminatus! is the political weirdness of the post-JFK-assassination period; extrapolated into a psychedelic occult fantasy; as interpreted by two white male porno writers; who were on some combination of weed, acid, plastic nude martinis, and coke for most of it.
It is very much a product of a specific time period and social situation.
I've probably re-read it more than any other book.
Wilson went on to write some good stuff, and some utter bullshit, and he's very clear on the fact that he's not telling you which part is the good stuff and which part is the utter bullshit.
I definitely have.
Honestly I don't think he wrote any utter bullshit, as such. Anything that could be described as such, was basically intended as such, with the explicit purpose of making you a specific kind of confused. In that sense, the bullshit itself was deeply profound, in a sense.
Everything is true, and false, and meaningless. I think really grokking that, which requires the intermingling of nonsensical-sounding profundity with profound-sounding nonsense, underlies an elusive sort of dynamic enlightenment.
But what the fuck do I know?
Some people need to hear that everything is a little bit bullshit.
Some people need to hear that some things are a lot more bullshit than others.
RAW was a lot better at the first than the second.
Some people huff their own farts, metaphysically speaking.
The second is a pit stop on the way the the first, which itself is a pit stop to yet higher realizations. Some people need to figure things out for themselves, they just haven't started asking the right questions yet. RAW excelled at assaulting you with more questions than you were really prepared to answer, and giving you the opportunity to try to figure out what he was really trying to say, without ever really giving you a solid answer. That's why re-reads are so satisfying: every time you read it, you've changed enough to dramatically redefine which parts are bullshit.
If you need to be told which things are more bullshit than others, you're not quite there yet. But it can still get you there, with enough iterations.
Stranger in a Strange Land is so good.
Meanwhile, it's the only book I actively hate. I feel like it stole a fantastic name with a story that was too "I'm 14 and I am smart".
I probably would have loved it when I was 14.
Maybe I read it at age 17 and didn't much care for it.
I thought the martians were genocidal self-righteous assholes who I hoped the earth would nuke. The whole idea of thinking right meant doing things right and magically didn't sit with me for a second. You can just look around, all these really dumb animals and plants managing just fine. You don't need to know hydrodynamics to be a fish. And if magical thinking worked no way evolution wouldn't have exploited the hell out of it.
Still it was kinda cool to see a novel that merged sci-fi, the Gnostic Gospel of Judas, and Joseph Smith in one setting.
If anyone here liked that book go read the Gospel of Judas and have your mind blown.
How did you like godel Escher Bach? Have it on my bookshelf, intending to read it eventually after my current stack.
Very, very worth a read or ten.
It's dated, but it's still essential in connecting math & CS with art & literature. Hofstadter was in a great place to connect disparate fields that touch on related patterns.
His AI theories seem to have come out mostly as dead ends, but that might still change.