NOG by Rudolph Wurlitzer. That book twists your brain halfway into another dimension and I can’t even really say why.
On the darker side - I read Night, This Way to the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen and The Street of Crocodiles all in a row. Two holocaust memories and a book of beautiful short stories by a guy who died in a concentration camp. I recommend them all, but please, space them out.
On the one hand, I can’t say it gets much better. On the other hand, it’s absolutely worth finishing.
Maybe I can handle it one chapter at a time.
But I feel like I’ve gotten the point now. The history I was taught and grew up believing isn’t the history that happened.
Required reading for my history class in high school
I was forced to read “House of Stairs” in High School. It was for a “mandatory reading class” that I had to take when I transferred schools because the new one did not teach Latin. We had to follow along to someone reading it aloud. Ruined my reading speed for years.
All of Ayn Rand screwed me up until I went to work. That cured that.
The Illuminatus Trilogy andd the Principia Discordia screwed me up in a good way.
There was a book about the Holocaust written by a Nazi that messed me up pretty hard. Speers?
And, of course, The Book of Mormon. But I got over that and it does make coffee drinks so much better.
I saw the movie when i was a kid and thought it was bleak, depressing but quite good. I read the book in my late teens or early 20’s and thought it pretty good… and bleak and depressing. I am quite curious why it’s a book that seems to be universally forced on young US students, pretty much everyone that i know that hates it is because it was required reading.
That’s genuinely amazing and slightly encouraging. I was gonna say Zinn should be required reading in all HS history classes, but it seemed almost unimaginable to me that any public school teacher would avoid being canned for putting it on the lesson plan.
Were you teaching it or taking it? Either way, cool instructor. How was the discussion?
When I was 13 or 14, I read a book about the history of torture. I don’t know how I got my hands on it, and I don’t know who wrote it or even why I read it, but I regretted doing it. I was both repulsed and intrigued at the same time, and when I’d finished it, I felt like I was a completely different person than I was when I started it. I guess I lost my innocence reading that book, and it was a kind of crummy way for it to happen. These days, it would probably be considered pretty tame, but in the pre-internet days, for a pretty sheltered kid like I was, it totally blew my mind that people could do that stuff to other people.
I’d read it by second grade. Never did me any harm.
Heh, heh, heh…
Hiroshima by John Hersey
No idea where I picked up this paperback in 7th or 8th grade.
The combination of this and seeing “The Day After” on network tv made me mute for at least a week and I should probably stop thinking about it right now.
THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS.
And Principals of Organic Chemistry. Mental mixology.
Interesting they mention House of Stairs. I never read it, but I did read a couple of Sleator’s other books. I will say that The Green Futures of Tycho might have been the first book to convince me that time travel was probably pretty much always a nightmare scenario. Weird and creepy works might have gave me a twinge of fear, but always intrigued me and never ruined my mental state.
The only things I can think of that really messed me up (made me feel really wretched and kind of out of my mind for a short time) were movies depicting sexual assault and degradation (Salo and Caligula).
The closest books really got was just oppressive or tragic works moderately depressing me for a day or two. Usually “the classics” or stuff we were forced to read (1984, Brave New World, The Pearl, Death Be Not Proud come to mind).
For bleak nonfiction, try Dirty Wars - The World Is A Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill. So depressing that I had to put it down every few pages and read something else for a week each time.
For fiction, I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison.
I had never seen this XKCD, which is even more appropriate considering(1).
I read both Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land after a little prompting from a science fiction loving English teacher I had in high school. I can’t say that I fully groked either work at the time. I also can’t say that either fucked me up mentally, but I certainly was in an altered mental state about just what science fiction was and could be. The same teacher also pointed me at Brin’s The Postman, Stewart’s Earth Abides and King’s The Stand… for which I am eternally appreciative.
Literally every book I have read has messed with my mind. Here are a few:
Hunger by Knut Hamsun. Too real. Anything by John Irving. Too cold.
Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite. The only book about a serial killer that made me feel like I had to take a long shower after reading it.
