New Notions 5 Reading Challenge

May 5, 2007 10:27 AM

New Notions 5 Reading Challenge "Not long ago, I was challenged to rethink some notions I had previously held near and dear to my heart. Wrestling with the issue and trying to make it fit within my worldview made me abandon some antiquated (for me) ideas and adopt new ones. It was that occurrence that led me to think up the New Notions 5 Reading Challenge."
posted by Amy NM (30 comments total)

I've been thinking about it for a few mins but I can't think of a single book that actually remade the way I view the world.

I need to stay in more.
posted by Firas at 10:40 AM on May 5, 2007

Some good books to pick:
Foucault--almost anything
Gordon Wood - The Radicalism of the American Revolution
Louis-Ferdinand Celine - Journey to the End of the Night
Debord - The Society of the Spectacle

That's what did it for me.
posted by nasreddin at 11:04 AM on May 5, 2007

Double on the Guy Debord - The Society of the Spectacle

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon - V.
Kenzaburo Oe - Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness
Peter Manson - Adjunct: An Undigest
Jean Genet - Our Lady of the Flowers

I get the feeling, however, that I'll have more fiction in my list than most.
posted by OrangeDrink at 11:23 AM on May 5, 2007

"On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill changed the world for me. Probably the single most important book I've ever read.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:26 AM on May 5, 2007

"My pet goat" did a lot for how I view the world, and I didn't even read it.
posted by DreamerFi at 11:48 AM on May 5, 2007 [1 favorite]

My changed-my-world list:

Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth
Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity and/or The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death
Steve Reich, Writings on Music
John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

An eclectic list to be sure, but they all share that they provided fundamentally different ways to conceive of basic aspects of the human experience. Those are the kinds of books that really knock me out.
posted by LooseFilter at 11:51 AM on May 5, 2007

Thich Nhat Hanh's translation/commentary of the Diamond Sutra.

Jay Garfield's translation of the Mulamadhyamikakarika.

Catch-22: "Jump!"

Riddley Walker.

The Blind Watchmaker.

(list compiled in haste)
posted by everichon at 11:52 AM on May 5, 2007

Selfish Gene
Godel, Escher, Bach
posted by DU at 11:53 AM on May 5, 2007

Wolin's Politics and Vision
Arendt's Human Condition
Blanchot's Writing of the Disaster
Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with our Families
Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others
posted by anotherpanacea at 12:06 PM on May 5, 2007

I was a severe libertarian until I read a couple of Ayn Rand books. They were so absurd they made me examine my assumptions resulting a philosophical 180.
posted by srboisvert at 12:06 PM on May 5, 2007

L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health
L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought
L. Ron Hubbard, How to Live though an Executive
L. Ron Hubbard, Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
Carolyn Keene and Macky Pamintuan, Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew in: Sleepover Sleuths
posted by thirteenkiller at 12:55 PM on May 5, 2007 [4 favorites]

Spinoza's Ethics

At least Book I.
posted by voltairemodern at 1:33 PM on May 5, 2007

So… is this a self-link or not?
posted by Firas at 3:11 PM on May 5, 2007

The Official Preppy Handbook
posted by well_balanced at 3:13 PM on May 5, 2007

Firas--definitely not. I don't know the person who started the challenge either. I did join the challenge.
posted by Amy NM at 3:40 PM on May 5, 2007

Ditto on Arendt's Human Condition
Ditto on Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations
Wright's Black Boy
Marcus Borg's The Heart of Christianity

I loved Catch-22, but the only notion of mine it really changed was my notion of how funny a book could possibly be and still be beautiful and important.

I like what Rilke says about how art changes us.
posted by sy at 4:10 PM on May 5, 2007

For the record, I don't deny that Spinoza and Celine and Joseph Campbell and Black Boy changed your lives -- but, as I read it, that's not the point of the challenge. I quote:

The challenge is to pick 5 books that you believe will challenge your thinking about any topic.

In other words, if you're a lefty, read a very persuasive book on the wisdom of political conservatism. If you're religious, read Richard Dawkins. In my case, I'm a teacher and I sometimes feel better after reading a book about the importance of standardized testing, which I generally hate. It's good to really walk in the shoes of your opponent now and then, in a good-faith effort to see as they see.
posted by argybarg at 4:29 PM on May 5, 2007

This is silly. Any book that would actually "challenge your thinking about any topic" in any essential, fundamental way should be so outside of your way experience/thinking that it could never occur to you to pick it in the first place.
posted by juv3nal at 4:30 PM on May 5, 2007 [2 favorites]

I thought the point was to share the books that have -already- changed our lives, trading suggestions? So I might pick up Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers and you might pick up Sontag?
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:56 PM on May 5, 2007

argybarg...I'm a teacher as well. What compelling defenses of standardized testing have you read?

Book that made me a teacher: Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks.

Actually, that's just the non-fiction book that made me a teacher once I was in college. The books I read in high school that made me an English teacher were As I Lay Dying and Invisible Man.
posted by HeroZero at 5:45 PM on May 5, 2007

but, as I read it, that's not the point of the challenge.

That's how I read the challenge, too--I wasn't listing the books I'm going to read, I was just sharing some that had done for me what this challenge intends to do (and I infer that most posters thus far are doing the same).

I would think this challenge has the most value for those who have never challenged themselves or the ideas, values, attitudes, or beliefs with which they were raised in any significant way.
posted by LooseFilter at 7:04 PM on May 5, 2007

(which is to say: most of the people I meet in the world. But not on the blue. Which is one of the reasons I come here.)
posted by LooseFilter at 7:05 PM on May 5, 2007

The funny thing is about the lefty/conservatism thing is that I've read both Locke and Burke, and ah, Burkean conservatism doesn't seem to be posed against liberalism to me. That is to say, liberalism is a values-based ideology, conservatism (or at least what I gleaned from Reflections on the Revolution) is more of a strategy. Fantastic writing in Reflections on the Revolution though, highly recommended. I really should get around to reading On Liberty.

Anyway, one book that totally changed my mind about fundamental issues of human nature is Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate. It's basically a long, wonderfully erudite series of musings on almost anything under the sun, but does a great job of refuting notions like The Blank Slate and The Noble Savage (it also takes on 'The Soul' in its Ghost In The Machine section but I didn't believe in souls anyway, so...) The reason I stomached (and learned from) it is that it doesn't say, "here's the reason the Blank Slate is a myth, and thus we need to change how we think of equality." It's more along the lines of... "The Blank Slate may be a myth. So what? Biology shouldn't determine politics."
posted by Firas at 7:13 PM on May 5, 2007

This is going to sound bizarre, but Nature Incorporated, an account of industrialization written from a nominally 'lefty' perspective, shifted me a bit to the right when it comes to public policy issues... I saw clearly the public policy choice with protectionism: that a water mill may make someone downstream poorer because his farm doesn't get the water it needs, but once water mills transform the area his--or at least his neighbour's--kids are going to be much better off financially than they otherwise would have been (the New England courts shared that bias for future prosperity; they decided most commons-style cases in the benefit of the industrializers.)

To be honest though, at least in the USA, any standard Econ 101 textbook will shift you a bit to the 'right'. So I suppose a book needn't be specialized and mindblowing to change one's views. (Easterly's The White Man's Burden is good but I suspect his Elusive Quest for Growth would make for even better reading, that's on my list.)
posted by Firas at 7:35 PM on May 5, 2007

On a different note, if you're a programmer, check out Joel Spolsky's reading list... some of the user-interface based books there totally changed the way I think of interaction design (the long and short of what I learned is that, on a computer, almost everything is painful. You personally shouldn't go adding to that pain.)
posted by Firas at 7:42 PM on May 5, 2007

Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita
The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter
The Society of the Spectacle by Guy DeBord

I'm pretty convinced these three books will utterly destroy anyone who reads them.
posted by Ictus at 8:44 PM on May 5, 2007 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the links to Mediated and The Rebel Sell, Ictus. I teach a media ethics class, and those two are going on the syllabus! (Debord was already there.) :-)
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:11 PM on May 5, 2007

For an almost certainly new perspective on international development and aid, there's Ferguson's classic The Anti-Politics Machine. A recent answer that provides a fascinating balance to Ferguson's position is Mosse's Cultivating Development.

(And, on Pinker)
posted by carmen at 6:44 AM on May 6, 2007

carmen, that New Yorker review is no response to Pinker. It sets up scarecrows of his positions, and then sums up by saying "Our genes, unfortunately, are even stupider than we are", which is exactly what Pinker says.
posted by Firas at 11:42 AM on May 6, 2007

On the off chance that anyone is wearing a tie:

The Art of Profitability
The Price Advantage
Differentiate or Die
The World is Flat
Crossing the Chasm
posted by rush at 12:47 PM on May 7, 2007