An interview with you

[tyrannosaurus vex]

God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens

Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock (I know he's a hack but whatever)

Lots of Stuff by Stephen King

The Devil's Notebook by Anton Szandor LaVey

edit: The Power of Myth with Joseph Campbell (not technically a book, but I say it still counts)

And others

[AFK]

Edit: I'm 15, by the way.

I'm 14.

Ok, next question: what are your favorite non-discordian books? (for instance, don't put any RAW thing or principia, cause this is obvious =D)

I think I'm in the extreme minority on this board in that I really don't read much, outside of work that is.  However, there is one book that I read almost religiously every year: 

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

[LMNO]

Gaiman
Pratchett
Palanuk (you know which guy I'm spelling wrong.  The Fight Club dude)
Will Self
Phil K Dick

[Cain]

Edit: I'm 15, by the way.

I'm 14.

Ok, next question: what are your favorite non-discordian books? (for instance, don't put any RAW thing or principia, cause this is obvious =D)

The Iliad
The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene
The 36 Strategies by T'ai Kung
Theatre and Cruelty by Antonin Artaud
The Book of 5 Rings by Musashi
The Will to Power - Nietzsche (Kaufmann translation)
Billion Dollar Bunko by Simon Lovell
Camus - The Rebel
Black Swan - Taleb Nicholas Nassem

I should probably stop there, before I get carried away

[Cain]

Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock (I know he's a hack but whatever)

I dunno, Underworld by him is pretty good so far (about 200 pages in).

[That One Guy]

William Gibson, Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa Overdrive
All Terry Pratchett
Philip K. Dick, Man in the High Castle, Ubik, Valis especially, but all his stuff is great
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age - this one is my absolute favorite Stephenson book, but any and all of them are excellent
Bruce Sterling, A Good Old Fashioned Future - a collection of short stories, which I think he does better than novels
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle - my all-time favorite book, I think. I'm a huge Vonnegut fan and love all his books, but Cat's Cradle is far and away my favorite
Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land - Stranger is great, but Moon is one of those books that influenced me quite a bit. Professor de la Paz's Rational Anarchy philosophy especially has been a huge influence on me.
Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul, all the Hitchhiker books

I'm certainly forgetting a whole bunch of great stuff (I'm a big old-school sci fi [Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov, etc.] fan as well) but the ones above are certainly all in the running for all-time favorites.

[Triple Zero]

cain didn't you forget that black swan book?

my favourite books .. i don't think it's very important or interesting for the interview, or is it?

i read the (complete/ultimate) hitchhiker's guide 6 or 7 times, i guess that must make it my most favourite book ever. but mostly because it's quick easy light reading, cause sometimes you just don't need all the heavy stuff.

apart from that, there are some technical books. "Goedel Escher Bach" pretty much blew my mind. mostly the chapter about Goedel's incompleteness theorem btw, the other stuff i pretty much figured out on my own already. it convinced me that when you get right down to the roots, science is not inherently more "valid" than other worldviews (re the GUT/GOD bit i put in the thread in apple talk).
apart from that, there's
- "Pattern Classification" by Duda, Hart & Stork. a really good reference book on the more numerical-oriented artificial intelligence algorithms.
- "Algorithmics: the Spirit of Computing" by Harel. contains basic need-to-know stuff about sorting algorithms, linked lists, trees, shortest-path algorithms, probabilistic prime-finding. also it contains a totally out-of-context bible quote at the beginning and end of each chapter. my favourite is Exodus 26:4 "And thou shalt make loops"
- "PPK on Javascript" by Peter Paul Koch, currently IMO the best book about writing standards-enabled semantic HTML, proper CSS and Javascript "the right way".

and some dutch stuff:
- "het allerslechtste van Spekkie Big", the most brilliant cartoon ever written.
- "wat & hoe in het hongaars", because really, nothing enables you to have more fun with hungarian people than to actually try and speak their language .. from a book.
- anything by Gummbah, or Kamagurka & Herr Seele, and "Het Stomme Beertje" : more brilliant cartoons

[Cain]

cain didn't you forget that black swan book?

no..... 

[Cramulus]

These are good questions!

And I'm not surprised that I share a lot of my favorite books with many of the other posters here.

an incomplete list of books which are really important to me:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
The Power of Myth, an interview with Joseph Campbell
Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The 48 Laws of Power
The Invisibles (okay, it's a comic book, AND the author is Discordian, but I'm counting it anyway)

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

The Teachings of Don Juan (but only if you realize he's fucking with Castanada's head... if he actually existed...)
Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse V, Breakfast Of Champions
Kilgore Trout (LOL) - Venus on The Half Shell
Douglas Adams - Hitchhikers Guide Series, Dirk Gently Series
Gaiman - Agree with the above recommendations

The Very First True Discordian I ever read (and personal friend of Our Beloved Emperor) Mark Twain - The Adam Family papers, Letters From the Earth, All of his Short Stories, The Mysterious Stranger, Tom Sawyer, The Innocents Abroad, anything else written by the lunatic ever.

Joseph Campbell - The Hero With A Thousand Faces (and the Interview mentioned above, available on YouTube!)

Heinlein - Everything mentioned above

Prachett  - All the stuff mentioned above

Douglas Hofstadter - Gödel Escher Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid  and The Mind's I

PKD - Lots of Stuff

[Peterson Silva]

I looove Douglas Adams books, although I have never read Dirk Gently. I'd like to.

Next question: what do you think it's the most important aim of discordianism: only get people to be free in this society of slavery or try to change the society? Know what I mean?

[LMNO]

The most important aim of Discordianism is LAIL.

[Cramulus]

I think culture & society is too big and confused and complex to be changed by individuals anymore. By watching the news, one might get the impression that individuals are doing the work, but they're just drones for things which 'really' exist - movements, memetic structures, the rise and fall of ideas, the collective emotions of the populous...

in terms of how Discordians can change society - the Rev WHN summed this up well at the BIP Wiki...

You can change parts of [the machine]. But, realistically, you can't overcome or change the whole of it. Some may be optimistic and think if you continuously change little parts here and there that the cumulative effect will be whole scale change.

So with that in mind, the game plan seems to be to get individuals to Think For Themselves. And if we do it enough, we'll be living in a more self-conscious machine.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I looove Douglas Adams books, although I have never read Dirk Gently. I'd like to.

Next question: what do you think it's the most important aim of discordianism: only get people to be free in this society of slavery or try to change the society? Know what I mean?

The most important aim of Discordianism, as far as I can tell... seems to be personal. Taking command of one's own brain, recognizing that our interpretation of reality is only an interpretation of reality. Sometimes, Discordians seem to focus on how fucked other people's perception of reality appears and they forget that their perception is just as prone to error. We can learn all sorts of stuff about neurology, psychology, philosophy and science... we can have The Knowledge of a Sage. However, if we lose the Wisdom of a Child (But why? Because children's wisdom is always questioning the answers. But why? Well, because they don't know the answers. But Why? AGHHAGHH!!!!) then will we be enlightened, or just smart? It's easy to think we found the answers, but maybe that's only because we stop asking "But Why?"

As for other people... It seems like a good time and lots of fun to try to wake them up, but I think the main aim of Discordianism (if one exists) is to affect change in the Discordian.

Of course, that's just my opinion.

[LMNO]

True, true... "think for yourself, schmuck" seems to be one of the biggest points to make.


Also Rat, "A conclusion is simply where you stopped thinking" seems to apply to your post.