These are the five books that changed the way I think.

                                                                                                                                    The first one is Timothy Leary’s Start Your Own Religion.

 It’s a small book, but up until then, I had never read or even heard anything quite like it. I honestly don’t remember where I got it. I got it somewhere. I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter.

What mattered was the basic idea I took from it. That you should try to understand things in your own way. That may not sound especially radical now, but it seemed unique to me at the time. Even then, the book felt dated. I didn’t necessarily agree with Leary or think exactly the way he did. It was more like, Oh. This is interesting. You’re allowed to think about things this way. I don’t think that possibility had ever occurred to me before I read it. 

The second book is Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising.

I don’t know, man. Up until that point, I hadn’t thought about any of this stuff either. The book is partly about expanding your personality or maybe expanding your idea of what a personality can be through different experiences and ways of looking at the world. And I was like, Whoa.

None of this had occurred to me before. I had never heard anyone talk about the mind that way.

I think I found Robert Anton Wilson through something connected to the Church of the SubGenius. The SubGenius started with these guys around Dallas in the 1980s doing this strange mixture of satire, religion, performance, and whatever else they were doing. It eventually became much bigger than that. There were also anarchists and other strange groups circling around the same territory, but that gets into a whole other thing. 

Anyway, somewhere in all of that, I found Robert Anton Wilson. Then I read Prometheus Rising, and once again, it was like. Whoa. You can think this way too.

The third book that really stirred me up was Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Massage.

This one was crazy because I think I found it sitting on a bench while I was waiting for a bus. Nobody else was around, and nobody seemed to be coming back for it, so I thought, Well, I guess I’m taking this. I picked it up and started looking through it on the bus ride home.

The main idea was that the medium itself changes whatever passes through it. McLuhan’s basic idea is that every new medium reshapes how we see, think, relate to one another, and experience time and space. I thought about that idea a lot, probably more than almost anything else in the book.

But every time I felt like I was about to understand it, I would reach this strange point where the thought just became, a question mark I’m not even sure this one was worth thinking about as much as I did, but it stayed in my head. Maybe that was the whole point.

The fourth book is Albert Camus’s The Stranger.

When I read this one, I got this feeling like, no. No more fooling around. You need to do something differently.

I’m not completely sure why. Maybe I missed the point of the book entirely. But it made me feel that if I just kept acting the way I had been acting pretending things were working out when they clearly weren’t then they were going to continue not working out.

That sounds obvious when I say it now, but something about the book made it feel serious.

I can’t put my finger on exactly how The Stranger changed me. I don’t know whether it gave me an idea, a warning, or just a certain feeling that stayed with me. But after I read it, things seemed more serious than they had before.

It felt like there were consequences now.

The fifth book which I probably should have mentioned first is Miguel de Cervantes’s The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha.

Before this book, I didn’t like reading. I just thought, Man, this isn’t for me. I wasn’t interested in stories. Books were something other people did. I didn’t do books.

Then I read Don Quixote, and it was the first time I thought, Oh, this is great. This is actually worth sitting here and reading.

I don’t know exactly how to describe it. The best way I can put it is that if Don Quixote were made into a movie today, it would feel like an unintentional stoner comedy. It is absolutely hilarious. I laughed my ass off.

I don’t even know how funny Cervantes intended it to be, but I thought it was one of the funniest things I had ever read. It’s sad too, of course. The whole thing has this sadness underneath it. But it’s still hilarious. Genuinely hilarious. I read it again every couple of years.

So, if you haven’t read Don Quixote and you like comedy, I highly recommend it. It’s the book that made me realize I could actually love reading.