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Ask HN: What book changed your life?
1 point by chistev 38 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments


The "Commodore 64 Programmers Reference Guide" got me hooked on computers. Without that book I my life surely would be very different.


So many... In different ways, but the one that changed me the most profoundly was "The mists of Avalon" by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

I read it as a depressed 15yr old, in a time when I read everything I could get my hands on. From cover to cover. Often doing nothing else but going to the bathroom, eating and sleeping from exhaustion once I started a book until it was finished.

This book was so bad that I gave myself rules so that I wouldn't waste another 900 pages of reading on something so utterly uninteresting.

It made me suspicious of text and stories in a way that nothing else has.

I'm still grateful for having read it, it did teach me something.

Thank you for reminding me <3


What are the rules? What did it teach you?


They have evolved to the general idea that it is always OK to just walk away :)

They started as: Books have to something interesting every 50 pages. And with interesting meaning something I want to know more about. Pretty low bar!




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