One of three Milan Kunderas: The Joke, The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Life is Elsewhere. Take your pick; I favor The Joke particularly now that we know Kundera was ratting for the Communists. Jeron Lanier's You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto despite the fact that I disagree with almost every point he makes. Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational. Conrad Lorenz's On Agression or for those who need Austrian psychology broken down in bite-sized pieces and delivered to the through the artifice of a talking ape, Ishmael by Daniel Quinn or for those who wish to discount everything Conrad Lorenz had to say and replace the talking ape with Anthony Hopkins, Instinct the movie. Thank You For Arguing by Jay Heinrichs.
You had me at "talking ape", frankly. Is that Kafka inspired? And I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being a while ago and it's definitely one of those books that just pops into mind randomly every now and again so will look at the others for sure. Also, interesting that you chose a book that you strongly disagree with - can you really consider a book to be good if you think its points are invalid?
I would argue it's because Daniel Quinn is a fucktard. Jeron Lanier is worth reading because the subjects he discusses have not been brought up by many people before and because his viewpoints are reasoned. That I arrived at different conclusions is far less important than the fact that it provoked me to examine the situation myself. Among his arguments: - Music died with the invention of rap - cultural fetishism will preserve artisan profits in an age of file sharing - file structure and file hierarchy have doomed the human applicability of computing. - Futurists' belief in the Singularity is perfectly parallel to Fundamentalists' belief in the Rapture - MIDI is the worst.thing.evar - VR will save you if only you aren't so selfish and stupidTo the narrator's surprise, he finds that the gorilla, calling himself Ishmael, can communicate telepathically. At first baffled by this, the man learns the story of how the gorilla came to be here and soon accepts Ishmael as his teacher, regularly returning to Ishmael's office throughout the plot. The novel continues from this point mainly as a Socratic dialogue between Ishmael and his new student as they hash out what Ishmael refers to as "how things came to be this way" for mankind.
Thank you for arguing was good, I read it on your recommendation. I read Ishmael years ago and recall really liking it quite a lot. Good recommendations.