I was talking to my friend about wanting to start reading more, and they mentioned they found a book on diagnosing ailments using clairvoyance. I found that intriguing. So I'm looking for books that feature crackpot theories, wholly flawed premises, and/or insane reasoning. The more unintelligible and complex, the better.
by Dependent-Track208
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When A Soulmate Says No by Amanda Trenfield kind of fits, it’s a memoir but gets into all kinds of wild theories about twin flames and rebirthing ceremonies and wacky stuff like that
I extremely don’t recommend this (it’s the single book I have marked as “stopped” instead of just letting it lapse to come back to later), but you’re actively looking for gibberish pseudoscience, Power vs Force by David Hawkins is complete and utter irredeemable trash.
Anything by Graham Hancock
I have an archaeology degree and here are some of the worst “nonfiction” books in that field:
Atlantis and The Silver City by Peter Daughtrey. Had to write an essay about it for an archaeology class focusing on with conspiracy theories and hoaxes in college.
Chariot of The Gods by Erich von Däniken is the bane of archaeologists everywhere, responsible for popularizing the ancient alien style conspiracies.
Fingerprints of The Gods by Graham Hancock is another terrible, and unfortunately very popular one. Milo Rossi is a content creator on Youtube with a series dedicated to debunking a television show Hancock recently made, for context about why Hancock’s work is so bad.
*Peace Feels Like This*, by John Lott.
Most of a review I wrote elsewhere:
>If you redefine “peace” to mean “whatever exists”, then yes, peace is easy. If you redefine peace as the not-feeling of being really truly deeply asleep, then peace is easy. If you redefine reality to be a seamless box about which nothing meaningful can be said, then yes, problems disappear. If you want to look at life through the eyes of an infant, then yes, everything is simple and undifferentiated.
The peace that Lott offers is the peace of a blade of grass in a field. It makes no judgements, no conceptualizations, has no feeling of past or future. (And this is true whether the blade of grass lives a long and healthy life (not that it would know it) or whether you mow it down this afternoon.)
Lott does hit on some truths. […]
But most of it is crap, and it’s self-contradictory crap at that. If you can’t change what is, then why did Lott even write the book? Presumably, “he” wants to “help” “us”. But in his world, there is no “he”, there is no “help”, and there is no “us”. And “want” is problematic, too, since there is nothing to have the feeling of wanting, and there’s nothing to have it about. It’s all just undifferentiated reality.
So, to sum up: If you like it, great. I thought it was pretty terrible.
(All that said, it was a nicely thought-provoking book[…]. Most of the thoughts were annoyed, ’tis true, but oh well. 🙂