Ask HN: Life Changing Books?
English:<p>Do you consider having a new layer in your thinking process &quot;life changing&quot;? Then, I would say-<p>1. Deep Work and So Good They Can&#x27;t Ignore You by Cal Newport. He goes against famous ideas such as &quot;follow your passion&quot; and provides you with alternative actionable advice.<p>2. Black Swan by N. Nicholas Taleb. It makes you aware of unhinged &quot;platonistic thinking&quot; where stuff are &quot;explained&quot; looking back. And people expect to use these explanations in future. I also learned about <i>silent evidence</i> which is, of course, a type of survivorship bias and sampling bias. Whenever, I see a straigh-forward &quot;explanation&quot;, alarm goes off inside mind- &#x27;this is too simplistic, and thus oversimplified, and not entirely correct&#x27;.<p>3. Made to Stick by Cheap Heath and Dan Heath: this book explains why some ideas stick and why some don&#x27;t. From this book, you also learn how to make ideas stick. You start to see the world in a different way.<p>4. Godel, Escher, Bach: others have already mentioned it. It is life changing. I am still reading it.<p>5. Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen: Indian past is generally seen as a golden age heavily tied to religion and faith. Sen, in an articulated, smooth, and scholarly way provides evidence in contrary. The past of India is also an age of reason, athiesm, debate, faithlessness, unorthodoxy, and opposing of religions. Sanskrit is the first language to have athiestic text, maybe.<p>Bengali:<p>I used to feel very bad about my ethnic identity, and felt ashamed about it. (I was 14&#x2F;15.)<p>Then I read the book <i>&quot;Those Times&quot;</i> by Sunil Ganguly. It is a novel based on history and historical figures, the Bengali renaissance, the feminist movements of Bengal.<p>This was the first time I ever felt confident about my ethnic identity, and fount a history I could take pride in. Totally changed me. It was like finally having soil under my feet for the first time in my life.<p>Bouddha Dharma by Haraprasad Shastri: This is a history of Buddhism in Bengal region.<p>--------<p>These are just some of many. I am in my early 20s and I have read 250 books till now, and all read in recent years were carefully chosen. Many had meaningful impact in my life.