Ask Lemmy

DSM-V

Anything by Douglas Adams, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, music history textbooks, Samurai Jack slash fiction, public restroom graffiti, HVAC technical manuals, and the comment sections on porn sites.

Iceberg Slim [aka Robert Beck] was widely read in the Black community and almost completely unknown outside of it. He inspired many Black artists, and both Ice-T and Ice Cube named themselves in his honor.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR)

Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle might not explain it, but could add valuable context.

"They're not rocks Marie!!"

...ok, maybe some of them are, but they're really cool!

All volumes of the Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers. My brain is mostly just useless trivia.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series and the John Dies at the End series

both 10/10s mixing gut wrenching existentialism and laugh out loud comedy

tbh I probably wouldn't say I'm into comedy writing in general but those two and Terry Pratchett are the only writers to ever make me bust out laughing in response to words on a page

• The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan
• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain
• Thinking in Systems: A Primer, by Donella H. Meadows and Diana Wright
• Getting to Where You Are, by Steven Harrison
• Journey Without Goal, by Chögyam Trungpa

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain, and The Codex Borgia.

The anarchist-faq will get you most of the way there, and the K-On manga will fill in the gaps.

Every single comment shown in my profile.

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camut. Absurdism/it philosophically examines whether one should commit suicide.

The Stranger - Albert Camus

My life is so complicated, you'd need an entire "wikipedia-styled" article of me.

If I had one, it'd probably be one of the craziest stories... well like not like any acheivements or anything, but more like depression and trauma. I'm gonna seem so broken that you'd not wanna be friends. People are gonna be like: "oh that's that person, wow" then walk away since nobody want to hang out since nobody want to get afflicted/infected with my sadness.

I mean, I reflect on my past and I visualize the scene in "3rd person" and I look like a scared kitten hiding in the corner, except I'm not a cute kitten, but rather looks like a mini-tiger. That was what I was like in school.

I'm kinda just deciding on leaving an autobiography/journal, in case I kms in the future. I wonder how my parentd would react. Maybe leaving something behind would finally get them to understand what I've been through from my PoV. Maybe they'd live a better life without me being around. Idk.

Realm of the elderlings, I mess my own life up through anxiety and overthinking, reading about fitz doing it makes me feel better about myself

Gentleman bastards, spurts of false confidence carry me through my days lol

The State and Revolution by V. I. Lenin. It honestly isn't a long read

• The Green Futures of Tycho
• When The Tripods Came
• The Girl From Isis
• Kindred Spirits by Mark Anthony

Books I read in school that spoke to me.

• The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker
• The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brian

I have PTSD and a dark sense of humor about it.

To scrap the surface: Babel.

The description of what it means to be an expat, away from your culture, cut much deeper than it had reasons to. And it’s a great action/fantasy book

As a kid one of my favourite passages to read was about a girl who saw her twin get ran over by a car and killed. I don't remember anything else about that book... but I would devour anything sad and traumatic and upsetting. I would absorb those emotions and live those lives, and it would be like a daily catharsis to read something horrifying and cry it out.

listen to all jethro tull till you can recognize every song and figure out the two bad albums.

The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, Volume 1: The Earth Will Shake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Historical_Illuminatus_Chronicles

Not as much a book, but the documentary Dominion. If someone can watch that and not understand reasons for going vegan if not choosing to do so themselves, I seriously question their moral compass.

Anna Karenina and Promise at Dawn

Adorno’s Negative Dialectics

Maybe these don't explain me, but they hit hard at forming my views of my fellow apes:

American politics

How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind

Which is also explained, among a shitload of other behavior, in

What is the Monkeysphere?

So MUCH of what we see around us is explained in those two articles. I've had responses that neither is a complete view, not all behavior, bla, bla, bla. Yeah, I know. But if you want to understand humans, especially why so many seem bugfuck evil, there's a lot of bang for the buck in there. (Be patient with the Monkeysphere article, old and the formatting is hosed, but I trust you'll get it.)

In order:

How to Read a Book

https://www.logicalfallacies.org/

Waking Up

"Crime and Punishment". Doing something amoral only to find out I have morals.

Killed by a Traffic Engineer by Wes Marshall.

The Critique of Pure Reason.

Codex Seraphinianus.

Some pages may take two-three reads before understanding fully.