Books That Changed People
Not a canon — a tally. What Hacker News named when asked which books changed the way they think.
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Asked in“What's one book that changed your life?”Hacker News · 2018 · 214 points · 176 comments ↗“What books changed the way you think about almost everything?”Hacker News · 2019 · 2,009 points · 1,165 comments ↗
| Marked | # | Said by | Author | Title | Look up · source | Save to my list | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 001 | 4× | Mikhail Bulgakov | The Master and Margarita | ★ Goodreads · 2018 · 2019 | |||
| 002 | 3× | Ayn Rand | Atlas Shrugged | ★ Goodreads · 2018 · 2019 | |||
| 003 | 3× | Dale Carnegie | How to Win Friends and Influence People | ★ Goodreads · 2018 · 2019 | |||
| 004 | 3× | Daniel Kahneman | Thinking, Fast and Slow | ★ Goodreads · 2018 · 2019 | |||
| 005 | 2× | Jordan Peterson | 12 Rules for Life | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 006 | 2× | George Orwell | 1984 | ★ Goodreads · 2018 · 2019 | |||
| 007 | 2× | James P. Carse | Finite and Infinite Games | ★ Goodreads · 2018 · 2019 | |||
| 008 | 2× | Jared Diamond | Guns, Germs and Steel | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 009 | 2× | Don Norman | The Design of Everyday Things | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 010 | 2× | W. Timothy Gallwey | The Inner Game of Tennis | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 011 | 2× | Robert M. Pirsig | Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance | ★ Goodreads · 2018 · 2019 | |||
| 012 | 1× | John Kennedy Toole | A Confederacy of Dunces | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 013 | 1× | William B. Irvine | A Guide to the Good Life | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 014 | 1× | Christopher Alexander | A Pattern Language | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 015 | 1× | Deleuze & Guattari | A Thousand Plateaus | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 016 | 1× | Betty Smith | A Tree Grows in Brooklyn | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 017 | 1× | William Faulkner | Absalom, Absalom! | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 018 | 1× | James Allen | As a Man Thinketh | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 019 | 1× | Malcolm Gladwell | Blink | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 020 | 1× | Christopher McDougall | Born to Run | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 021 | 1× | Robert Coram | Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 022 | 1× | Stephen Hawking | Brief Answers to the Big Questions | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 023 | 1× | Robert Anton Wilson | Cosmic Trigger | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 024 | 1× | William Gibson | Count Zero | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 025 | 1× | Fyodor Dostoevsky | Crime and Punishment | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 026 | 1× | Immanuel Kant | Critique of Pure Reason | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 027 | 1× | Ray Bradbury | Dandelion Wine | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 028 | 1× | Arthur Koestler | Darkness at Noon | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 029 | 1× | Stone, Patton & Heen | Difficult Conversations | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 030 | 1× | Philip K. Dick | Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 031 | 1× | Frank Herbert | Dune | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 032 | 1× | Henry Hazlitt | Economics in One Lesson | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 033 | 1× | Tara Westover | Educated | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 034 | 1× | Orson Scott Card | Ender's Game | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 035 | 1× | Eric Wolf | Europe and the People Without History | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 036 | 1× | Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi | Flow | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 037 | 1× | Daniel Keyes | Flowers for Algernon | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 038 | 1× | Lawrence Lessig | Free Culture | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 039 | 1× | Steven Pressfield | Gates of Fire | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 040 | 1× | 37signals | Getting Real | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 041 | 1× | Kevin Mitnick | Ghost in the Wires | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 042 | 1× | Douglas Hofstadter | Gödel, Escher, Bach | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 043 | 1× | Eliezer Yudkowsky | Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 044 | 1× | Terry Pratchett | Hogfather | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 045 | 1× | Darrell Huff | How to Lie with Statistics | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 046 | 1× | David Foster Wallace | Infinite Jest | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 047 | 1× | Jon Krakauer | Into the Wild | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 048 | 1× | Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein | Introduction to Algorithms | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 049 | 1× | Rudyard Kipling | Kim | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 050 | 1× | John Crowley | Little, Big | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 051 | 1× | John Doerr | Measure What Matters | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 052 | 1× | Marcus Aurelius | Meditations | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 053 | 1× | George Eliot | Middlemarch | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 054 | 1× | Carol Dweck | Mindset | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 055 | 1× | Robert Jackall | Moral Mazes | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 056 | 1× | Kevin Kelly | New Rules for the New Economy | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 057 | 1× | Marshall Rosenberg | Nonviolent Communication | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 058 | 1× | John Stuart Mill | On Liberty | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 059 | 1× | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 060 | 1× | Buckminster Fuller | Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 061 | 1× | Malcolm Gladwell | Outliers | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 062 | 1× | Peter Singer | Practical Ethics | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 063 | 1× | Ray Dalio | Principles | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 064 | 1× | E.T. Jaynes | Probability Theory: The Logic of Science | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 065 | 1× | Robert Anton Wilson | Prometheus Rising | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 066 | 1× | Susan Cain | Quiet | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 067 | 1× | Yuval Noah Harari | Sapiens | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 068 | 1× | Hermann Hesse | Siddhartha | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 069 | 1× | Kurt Vonnegut | Slaughterhouse-Five | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 070 | 1× | Terry Pratchett | Small Gods | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 071 | 1× | Paulo Coelho | The Alchemist | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 072 | 1× | Erich Fromm | The Art of Loving | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 073 | 1× | Baltasar Gracián | The Art of Worldly Wisdom | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 074 | 1× | Fyodor Dostoevsky | The Brothers Karamazov | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 075 | 1× | Czesław Miłosz | The Captive Mind | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 076 | 1× | J.D. Salinger | The Catcher in the Rye | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 077 | 1× | Allen Carr | The Easy Way to Stop Smoking | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 078 | 1× | Murray Rothbard | The Ethics of Liberty | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 079 | 1× | Richard Dawkins | The Extended Phenotype | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 080 | 1× | Ayn Rand | The Fountainhead | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 081 | 1× | Hermann Hesse | The Glass Bead Game | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 082 | 1× | Jeannette Walls | The Glass Castle | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 083 | 1× | Douglas Adams | The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 084 | 1× | Shea & Wilson | The Illuminatus! Trilogy | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 085 | 1× | Alan Watts | The Joyous Cosmology | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 086 | 1× | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | The Little Prince | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 087 | 1× | Chris Anderson | The Long Tail | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 088 | 1× | Carlo Rovelli | The Order of Time | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 089 | 1× | Aaron Brown | The Poker Face of Wall Street | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 090 | 1× | Robert Caro | The Power Broker | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 091 | 1× | Richard Dawkins | The Selfish Gene | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 092 | 1× | Gene Wolfe | The Shadow of the Torturer | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 093 | 1× | Kurt Vonnegut | The Sirens of Titan | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 094 | 1× | Nathaniel Branden | The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 095 | 1× | Pohl & Kornbluth | The Space Merchants | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 096 | 1× | Daniel Quinn | The Story of B | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 097 | 1× | Benjamin Hoff | The Tao of Pooh | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 098 | 1× | Liu Cixin | The Three-Body Problem | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 099 | 1× | Tim Harford | The Undercover Economist | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 100 | 1× | Steven Pressfield | The War of Art | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 101 | 1× | Harper Lee | To Kill a Mockingbird | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 102 | 1× | Henry David Thoreau | Walden | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 103 | 1× | Leo Tolstoy | War and Peace | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 104 | 1× | Eric Berne | What Do You Say After You Say Hello? | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 105 | 1× | Bertrand Russell | Why I Am Not a Christian | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 106 | 1× | Ian Morris | Why the West Rules - For Now | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 107 | 1× | Gary Taubes | Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 108 | 1× | Matthew Walker | Why We Sleep | ★ Goodreads · 2019 | |||
| 109 | 1× | Mooji | Writing on Water | ★ Goodreads · 2018 | |||
| 110 | 1× | Shunryu Suzuki | Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind | ★ Goodreads · 2018 |
How this was counted. Counted by distinct commenter, so someone listing forty books adds one mention to each rather than forty votes. These questions were open-ended rather than “name one”, which is why the tail is thick with single mentions.