Wow, 50 years, so old.

It strikes me as a pretty decent list. The books on here I've read (maybe 30%) are worthy of recommendation.

People always get offended by lists, I've noticed.

I have had the exact same experience, and I would also add CS Lewis Mere Christianity and The Great Divorce to the list.

A Conflict of Visions is a good one. Thomas Sowell is a true intellectual. Sure, he has strong biases, but I believe those developed out of his intense study of the facts, rather than being implanted in him before he started thinking for himself, which is sadly the case for many so-called intellectuals nowadays.

If you could recommend only one of the others, which would it be?

I'm from the opposite world, the US, where religion, education, and the state have been at nontrivial risk of becoming the same things, depending on where in the country you live.

Needless to say, those are all very different reads after experiencing an attempted ethnonationalist theocracy as a member of a non-dominant group. I'm not against religion, but I don't care for Christian apologism or its blindness to its effects; like political centrism, it seems to unify towards incumbent power and authoritarianism, only entrenching factionalization and incompatibility.

Debunking Howard Zinn⁽¹⁾ doesn’t get nearly enough “publicity” (for lack of a better word), especially considering how much A People’s History of the United States is “pushed”.

⁽¹⁾ https://www.regnery.com/9781684511525/debunking-howard-zinn/

Understanding our past and knowing we did some pretty fucked up shit isn't hating the west, its dealing with it and learning from it. I think you would agree that how Germany has dealt with their past is good compared to sweeping it under the rug and saying that while Hitler did some bad stuff he had some good points.

This "the West and Christianity" thing may reinforce dichotomies that we do not need (East vs West), while glossing over essential distinctions (Christianity vs its Abrahamic roots).

Yes, much is good about Christianity, and yes, it caught on in the West -- but it originated in the Near East, and Ethiopians and Keralites had it first (and still do). Moreover, prior to the Islamic conquests, it was widespread in the countries that we now think of as Muslim. So, while it is central to the culture of Europe, it is also a bit of an adopted alien -- and it is not unique to Europe.

Second, many Protestant readings of Christianity embrace the Old Testament, while underemphasizing the break from Old Testament practices and thought that it represented. You would think that Protestant culture would be more immune to this, because it emphasizes literacy and directly reading the book. But somehow that has led to an uncritical understanding of the Old Testament, instead of to a more Gnostic repudiation. Paul is best in this regard.

Because it is precisely Christianity's reformist elements that made it good. Its universalism. Its New Covenant.

Anyway.

I do appreciate your CK Chesterton references. Some of those are also among my favorites. I very much enjoyed The Man Who was Thursday, one of his works of fiction, a sort of novel -- which, I will only say, subverts expectations, and turns out to be more than a bit philosophical!

Before looking at the list, two of the books that came to my mind as possible candidates were Permutation City by Greg Egan, and Glasshouse by Charles Stross. Permutation City made the list, and I definitely endorse it.

Glasshouse is not on the list, but I definitely think it's worth a read.

Neuromancer is on the list and it may be my personal favorite novel (if not #1 on my list, it's very close).

A couple of Murakami novels were on the list here. I've read several of his novels and would basically make a blanket statement "read anything by Murakami".

Same happens to me, and if I am not interested I can not focus on reading it.

Iain M Banks use of weapon is both an incredibly good book and a portal to the culture series , in which almost all books are just as good.

Tor Nørretranders' The User Illusion was a great read, hereby warmly recommended. One of the principal ideas was that our senses take in many orders of magnitude more of data than we are able to be conscious of. I believe he estimated something like 10 Mbps taken in and 80? baud being aware of — something like that, I should read it again sometime.

Neuromancer and Snow Crash are usually recommended here.

Many are just classics (and not mindfuck in my opinion).

Hesse is good in general.

Kafka is good in a weird fucked up way and to be recommended after one had to deal with the legal system for example.

Castaneda is interesting fantasy, but many took it literal and a real cult evolved around his books (with him included as the Guru).

Peter Caroll is interesting, if you like the occult.

And Robert Anton Wilsons Illuminatus! is the bible of conspiracy theories.

(But a really good book and deserving of the mindfuck category, I think it popularized the term mindfuck)

The page links to another page where the term is described, but also refutations that it's used in a different connotation.

It's on there... you just can't remember seeing it.

qntm recently wrote that he will do a "remastered" version 2 of the book next year v1 will remain freely accessible as it is now). Can't wait to reread it :)

I think I've read about a quarter of the list, and only a couple of the ones I've read fit that title to me. I wish the list contained a line explaining why...

That one definitely fits definition perfectly. Still can't forget that idea, brr. Scary.

Also, New Inquisition by Robert Anton Wilson. A huge treatise on epistemology and philosophy of Science and much more "mindfucker" than his fiction.

I started reading his latest book released in English this month, pretty interesting so far.

I’m not. Every attempt to fix the site has failed due to the incredibly fucked up use of turn of the century style PHP.

Zinn is extra credit for people that actually know history. He says it right in the preface, it's one-sided, it's the history that is generally left out of your textbooks. You guys have your panties in a bunch over anything that challenges your hierarchical worldview.

I appreciate that Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead is in the same list. It's a sort of balance, expounding on the converse ideology. You can play mindfuck ping pong between the two. Cheers for the author's open mind, without which mindfuckery is at best foreplay.

There are other blokes who mindfucked the world and penned down some of their ideas who similarly, and maybe for similar reasons did not make the list. There's Mao Tse-Tung's 'Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung' and other works published in his name [1], countless works 'by' Joseph Stalin [2], Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' and other works in his name [3] just to mention a few. All of these had great impact on the world and inspired countless people just like the collected works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. I suspect this is not the type of inspiration the authors of the list are looking for, hence their omission.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4797485.Mao_Zedong

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/138332.Joseph_Stalin

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/30691.Adolf_Hitler