What is the most unsettling book you ever read?

[Kyriakos]

By unsettling it could mean frightening, or having a dramatic effect on how you view the world, opening new roads of perception which can appear to be at the same time interesting, but also due to them being yet unexplored, causing alarm.

For me, apart from some anonymous in my memory work of Lovecraft, there was Notes from the Underground, by Dostoevsky, which made me think that one can construct a story in a very different manner, with very little depiction of action, mostly using psychological analysis.

 

[Tabster]

I have read some translated passages from hammer of the witches (the Malleus Maleficarum). Very unsettling indeed, far more than any fictional book.

 

[cardgame]

I haven't really had much experience with this thus far in life. I'd have to say The Crucible; really god damned scary when I imagine myself in one of their shoes.

 

[Traitorfish]

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, maybe. We're all well aware of the Holocaust, but the particularly casual, almost thoughtless nature of the Native American Genocide left something of an impact.

 

[Glassfan]

Some years ago, I read C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity and Bertrand Russel's' Why I am Not a Christian together, to compare and contrast. The richness of thought in contradictions over the same questions of faith and morals disturbed me then and still fascinates me today.

 

[holy king]

anything about neurology. the fact that it increasingly looks like what we perceive as free will is nothing but an "illusion" our brain's "software" incorporates after our brain's "hardware" has "acted" is pretty freaking unsettling.

 

[Bugfatty300]

One dark and cold night without any power I read a It's a Good Life by Jerome Bixby by candle light. That was the last time I remember getting "the fear" from reading something.

 

[Smellincoffee]

I have read some translated passages from hammer of the witches (the Malleus Maleficarum). Very unsettling indeed, far more than any fictional book.

Isn't that the...how-to for spotting and torturing people labeled as witches?

 

[Ozbenno]

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. Read it when I was 15 or so and it freaked me out somewhat.

 

[Agent327]

One dark and cold night without any power I read a It's a Good Life by Jerome Bixby by candle light.

Not advisable.

Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho

Alexander Tisma, The Use of Man

 

[Tabster]

Isn't that the...how-to for spotting and torturing people labeled as witches?

Yes, but its also worse than that, its full of double-think and its insidious and paranoid. it also tries to make its reader look for bad intentions in every action. 'Some witches don't know they're witches and they're the most dangerous kind'!!, that sort of thing.

In a dreadful way, its very modern despite having been written in the 16th century.

 

[Disgustipated]

the bible

*rimshot*

 

[Bugfatty300]

Not advisable.

That's why I choose a shot story.

But I had lots and lots of candles.

 

[Plotinus]

anything about neurology. the fact that it increasingly looks like what we perceive as free will is nothing but an "illusion" our brain's "software" incorporates after our brain's "hardware" has "acted" is pretty freaking unsettling.

You shouldn't be unsettled, then, since that fact is perfectly consistent with both of the major definitions of "free will" (compatibilist and incompatibilist). All it means is that we make our decisions before we are aware of making them, but it does not follow from that that we do not make them freely. Certainly there may be other reasons for not believing in free will - at least of the incompatibilist variety, in my view - but this is not among them.

 

[Turner]

War Day, by Whitely Strieber and James Kunetka, which takes place on the day of a limited nuclear exchange, and then five years afterwards as "they" travel the country getting peoples stories. A very depressing book, to me at least.

 

[CivCube]

The Inferno hit a weird spot, that's for sure. I think it was mostly from how self-assured and planned out hell is. It's rather similar to how real-life mental disorders function.

 

[Agent327]

the bible

Missed that one - should definitely be included, yes.

 

[Azale]

LOL THE BIBLE AMIRITE?

Oh wait, someone's already done that joke.

Probably "There Will Come Soft Rains" or any number of chapters from Martian Chronicles, or The Road. I just started reading the latter and it is already depressing me.

 

[holy king]

You shouldn't be unsettled, then, since that fact is perfectly consistent with both of the major definitions of "free will" (compatibilist and incompatibilist). All it means is that we make our decisions before we are aware of making them, but it does not follow from that that we do not make them freely. Certainly there may be other reasons for not believing in free will - at least of the incompatibilist variety, in my view - but this is not among them.

i dont see how something done involutarily by your consciousness can be categorized under free will.

you dont choose your heart to beat, after all.

 

[Plotinus]

i dont see how something done involutarily by your consciousness can be categorized under free will.

you dont choose your heart to beat, after all.

If it's done involuntarily, then it's not done freely. However, neuroscience hasn't shown that we make our decisions involuntarily. At most it's shown that we do not make them consciously. But that is not the same thing.

A heartbeat is both unconscious and involuntary, but that doesn't prove that anything that's unconscious must be involuntary.