Mind-altering books you would recommend?

[Aus_Snow]

Read a book at any time that really spun your head, changed the way you looked at life, the universe, or maybe everything? Shocked you, terrified you? I don't necessarily mean in a horror/terror type of way, there.

I'm looking for that kind of book, at the moment. I've pretty much had it with pleasant, easy reading for a little while.

Any suggestions?

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

The ones that really knocked my socks off were in no particular order:

Gene Wolf's Book of the New Sun. The hardest book (series) to read that I've ever read. That's a compliment.
George R. Stewart's Earth Abides. Written in 1949, an ode to death of modern of man.
Ayn Rand's Anthem. Written in 1938, a dystopia taking collectivist ideology to the absurd extreme.
Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. Written in the 1920s in Bolshevik Russia, it is said that Orwell wrote 1984 after reading an underground copy of this story, and that Aldus Huxley was influenced by it when he wrote Brave New World. It is the first modern dystopia.

If you want to read a book you'd swear the authors were on drugs when writing some of it, check out the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

 

[RedShirtNo5]

Orson Scott Card, Worthing Cronicle

Clifford Simak, City

 

[trancejeremy]

Candide by Voltaire

Valis by Philip K Dick (the first half or so is actually a true story more or less)

 

[Fiery James]

Just the regulars: 1984, Lord of the Flies, and Catcher in the Rye, but some of that may have been due to the stage in life I read them at.

- James

 

[Umbran]

The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

The Principia Discordia by Malaclypse The Younger and Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

Lamb by Chrisopher Moore

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

 

[EricNoah]

The sci fi of Stephen Baxter ... some of it looks so far into the future it simply boggles the mind.

 

[Iku Rex]

This is mostly (I made some changes) copied from a post I made in a "what five books should everyone read" thread lost in the ENBoards meltdown, recovered through google. Technically they all have the potential to be "mind altering", though not necessarily radically so.

Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
It's not a bad story (though she could have used a good editor), but the main attraction is the ideas and philosophy laid out in the book. Even if you don't agree with all her opinions - and you probably won't - you can learn a lot by explaining to yourself why you don't agree. Rand is big on why.

The Uplift Series (David Brin)
It didn't strike me as all that brilliant when I first read it, but I find the ideas from these books regarding "uplift", intelligent life and interspecies cooperation coming back to me both in RL and while reading SF. (When I heard recently that African gorillas may be closer to extinction than previously believed my first though was "what lost potential that would be!".)

Dune (Frank Herbert)
A good book and it's ideas about prophesies in particular have stuck with me. It also has some interesting ideas about "power". (I'm not sure if I want to recommend the entire series, but as I recall I generally enjoyed the other books too.)

"The Culture books" (Iain M. Banks)
Ok, not really a series as such, but still related to each other. Again, interesting ideas and philosophical musings, involving "value/importance", freedom and AIs.

Flim Flam (James Randi) (Non-fiction)
Introduced me to the idea that maybe it's all bunk. Highly recommended.

 

[Tetsubo]

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales

 

[Cthulhudrew]

Off the top of my head:

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (as much as I liked Atlas Shrugged, I found this to be much more personal; sort of a practical guide to objectivism, as opposed to the thesis that was Atlas).

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

and, mostly, the Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny (the whole Corwin pentad).