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sᴛᴀʀᴛᴜᴘ ᴅᴀᴇᴍᴏɴ @startupdaemon
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16 PSYCHOLOGICAL BOOKS THAT WILL CHANGE THE WAY YOU READ

These books are brutal. They're not designed to be fun, although some of them are humorous. So if you're suicidal, tread lightly.

You asked for fiction. This list will shift your illusion of reality.
I spent my early life reading and haven't touched much fiction in years because addiction to action.

But people keep requesting books to read, and I wanted this list to be useful, so it's designed in a special way.
If you read through any of these books as the linear narrative of a Hollywood superhero movie, you will miss most of the action.

If you don't want to make an effort or are emotionally unstable, you should not waste your time with these readings.
These books will show you:

▶️ Psychological archetypes inside & out, so you can see basics without the pain of actual life.

▶️ The peak & decline of western (Faustian) civilization.

▶️ Glimpses of the Integral embodied in aperspectival art & seeing through time.
I've made an effort to organize the books in order of cognitive difficulty and brutality – from least to most.

YMMV.

Each of these books requires very slow reading, although you will likely be thirsty to rush forward.
1. I'll never authorize a biography because it had already published in 1840. I read this book in high school and it has haunted me ever since.

amazon.com/Hero-Our-Time-…
2. The book I fell in love with after reading most of Rushdie's work (up to that time). Together with Lermontov, it encapsulates perfectly the peak and crash of the old world.

amazon.com/Fury-Modern-Li…
3. Probably one of Stephen King's top 3 books, and a fusion of the modern and magical that you will witness ever more often. Incredibly concise and entertaining, published under a pseudonym in his earliest days.

amazon.com/Bachman-Books-…
4. The seed that would become Balzac's "Human Comedy" of archetypes and patterns of human dysfunction. Hint: gender roles. nihilism before it was a word, (almost) everybody dies, you name it.

amazon.com/Eugenie-Grande…
5. Anna Karenina was an assignment I picked up in high school. I ended up skipping homework – and some classes – for a few days because I could not stop devouring it.

See the unfolding of time written in within the first 200 pages or so.

amazon.com/Anna-Karenina-…
6. One of my favorite books of all time. I literally laughed myself to tears for almost half an hour while reading one of the latter chapters.

Masterpieces like this don't come often, and all of Kundera's work is magnificently insane.

amazon.com/Unbearable-Lig…
7. Zola is inexorable. His books are meticulously descriptive, yet function as complex systems grinding to dust any illusion of rationality and morality. Somehow he brings genetics into literature before modern civilization knew much about it.

amazon.com/Therese-Raquin…
8. Joyce's works venerated by snobs and critics pales before the intricacy of Dubliners.

If I wanted to show you how powerful simple words can be, I'd pick this. Personal psychology meets social dynamics meets timeless writing. Devastating.

amazon.com/Dubliners-Dove…
9. Boris Vian is an anuthor you need to know. Because insane. The Foam of Days is a "love story" but not quite. You will know when you attempt to read it. Hint: Boris was a polymath.

If you're not into romance, pick up "Spit on Your Graves".

amazon.com/Foam-Daze-Lecu…
10. When I read this book, I rushed to the library & checked out as many of Faulkner's works as they would let me. He is the ultimate reading material for anyone serious about meditation and Awareness because stream of inner monologue.

You will realize.

amazon.com/Sound-Fury-Cor…
11. JC isn't exactly known for light-hearted writing, "Heart of Darkness" and all.

This novel was first published in the US as "The Children of the Sea" not because PC, but for the publisher being concerned it wouldn't sell because black protagonist.

amazon.com/Nigger-Narciss…
12. Not for the faint at heart or impatient of mind. (I know Nassim Taleb and many of his fans will despise me for this magnificent book, and I don't care.)

amazon.com/Nausea-Directi…
13. Hardy is incredibly underrated, and this novel completely misunderstood by critics. It was censored and derided when published in 1891. Sexuality and brutality meet the decay of western civilization before that was a meme.

amazon.com/DUrbervilles-P…
14. All of my followers are Russian bots, so they will find this novel as Sublime as I did.

It's just the first tome of an intended trilogy that was never finished. Supposedly, Gogol burnt the manuscript of the 2nd volume just before kicking the bucket.

amazon.com/Dead-Souls-Nik…
15. Perhaps Camus' least known sizable work, this novel is RAW and PHYSICAL and HAWT, and like Gogol's unfinished. It breaks brains if read slowly and attentively.

amazon.com/First-Man-Albe…
16. The greatest novel ever written? Perhaps.

Not because of its monumental size, but because of its density and intensity. I should probably do a separate thread on HOW to read it correctly. Get the 1st volume & read slowly to see if you can handle it.

amazon.com/Search-Lost-Ti…
Proust may sound like he's going for long run-ons and unnecessary detail, but no. It all connects and there's even more context that you have to piece together yourself – it's that bad.

Sheer madness, and nothing like the shallowness of post-modern authorship.
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Black then white are all I see
In my infancy.
Red and yellow then came to be,
Reaching out to me,
Lets me see.

As below, so above and beyond,
I imagine
Drawn beyond the lines of reason.
Push the envelope,
Watch it bend.
Overthinking, overanalyzing separates the Body from the Mind,
Withering my intuition,
Missing opportunities and I must
Feed my will to feel my moment drawing way outside the lines.
Black then white are all I see
In my infancy.
Red and yellow then came to be,
Reaching out to me.
Lets me see

There is so much more and
Beckons me
To look through to these
Infinite possibilities.
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Have you heard the Good News?

IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT.
You may be one of millions who they hate their jobs more than they love the holidays.

Better pretend to like that uncle who molested you as a kid than face the terror of another day at work, isn’t it?

After all, you don’t have much of a choice.

Because it’s not your fault.
You may be lonely when you’re alone, but lonelier with “friends” & family.

You may have made some bad choices – or no choices at all.

You’ve set no standards, least of all on yourself.

But you know what?

It’s OK.

Because it’s not your fault.
Read 22 tweets
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ISTJs are obsessed with IQ because Introverted Thinking (the logic function) is their Shadow critic.
What he said.

No point making such a point to an undeveloped ESFP. They are blind to both semantics (Introverted Thinking trickster) and context (Extroverted Intuition demon).

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We have all seen people act the fool at airports, cinemas, in traffic, at hospitals etc. We have all heard them say that nonsensical, infantile, conceited irrational phrase "do you know who I am" when they are being corrected for doing the wrong things.
We have seen people who get up during a flight to open the overhead lockers while the seatbelt signs were on attack air hostesses for telling them to respect themselves and abide by the rules and regulations.
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1/ I’m very passionate about #books. Every opportunity I get I try to buy some more books for my #antilibrary. However, over the last year, I have changed how I read books. I’d like to share the short story and process in the following thread:
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NEW Analysis: Among people with employer coverage, nearly 1 in 5 inpatient admissions includes a claim from an out-of-network provider, putting them at risk for potentially high out-of-pocket costs. healthsystemtracker.org/brief/an-analy… @PetersonCHealth
Even when enrollees choose in-network facilities, a meaningful share of inpatient admissions result in the patient receiving a claim from an out-of-network provider.
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1/
 This is going to be #FUN

reuters.com/article/us-usa…
2/
 In 2009, when FBIDir Mueller, the bureau asked Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to spend millions of his own dollars funding an FBI-supervised operation to rescue a retired FBI agent, Robert Levinson, captured in Iran while working for the CIA in 2007

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via @SaraCarterDC

saraacarter.com/grassley-deman…
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#Suicidal? Remember. There's always time to die.
If you want to die, go do something you love now.
There will be time for death. Make time for love. ♡

Life is hard. It gets better. It gets worse. Wheel turns.
Find what makes you happy while you have this time.
Death will wait.
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The BBC Believes You Only Read 6 of These #Books...How many have you read? bit.ly/2F1jWvB Many have read "To Kill a Mockingbird", but how many have read Emile Zola's "Germinal"?
On a literary basis, at the very least, my @Twitter community rocks! Evidence - tweeted and otherwise - suggests my friends and followers here are "far above average", across many walks of life...
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