Reddit reviews The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge

Okay, the issue I have with reddit's recommendations of literature is that it's so limited. The community has a number of blind spots; literature is one of them. You'll get the best of the fantasy/sci-fi genres, the Orwell-Vonnegut group, some science books and little else. Nothing from before the 20th century, nothing by an author that didn't write in English. It's depressing, because it's ignoring the other 99% of great literature.

Here's what I did. I read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian author. It's short (just over 200 pages), but good. Then I read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. That was harder to get through because I wasn't used to the length (over 400 pages), but the payoff was worth it.

But then there's the issue of how much you're interested in going into literature deeply. If you have any thoughts like "I wouldn't want to read something that wasn't written in English" or "I don't want to read anything ancient," that's fine; but don't go into these things with preconceptions, because more often than not when I decide to read an classic I'm satisfied that it deserved its classic status.

If you ever get interested in reading literature at very serious level, use this list. It's the top 100 books as recommended by authors. It's very good in that it's spread across every age, from almost every great nation. Every one is a classic in the truest sense of the word. You may not like one once you've read it, but you'll probably see why it's a classic.

For some non-fiction that's worth reading, two come to mind. There's The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky, the founder of the A.I. program at MIT. He essentially deconstructed the various mental processes that human beings use in their conscious and unconscious ways of thinking. It's invaluable to gaining insights into what sorts of ways your mind actually works. (And it was recommended by Asimov too, you fanboys.) It's subdivided into chapters, with each chapter composed of numerous essays no greater than a page in length. It's filled with useful diagrams and relevant quotes. It's great.

The other is The Social Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckmann, two sociologists. It's surprisingly short and readable for an academic book. Read some of the reviews for it.

I've never read Games People Play, and psychology is not my area of expertise. But, to answer your question, that is not it.

You could read a number of different pop-psych books and each will give you a different perspective. The human psyche is extremely complex, and social interaction is even more complex. It can/should never be boiled down to one idea that supposedly explains the majority of human interaction. Be sure not to take books like this too seriously: Most people do not consider themselves to be "playing a game" whenever they are interacting with others.

My education is not in psychology, but if you are looking for further reading I can recommend some of my favorite books from my undergrad sociology education: (IMO any understanding of human interaction must have both a sociological and psychological component)

Invitation to Sociology by Peter L Berger

Sociological Insight by Randall Collins

The Social Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckmann

These were required reading in a 4000-level class, but this particular professor also assigns them to his 1000-level intro-soc class (which is why he doesn't teach intro soc often). They can be dense, but they are very interesting and definitely worth reading if you are at all interested in sociology.

edit: I don't want to hate on a book I have never read too much, so I will say this: Whenever you read a psych/soc book, especially if it is written for a wide audience, remember to take everything you read with a grain of salt. You may find truth, but you may also find a very smart author who is too caught up in his own work to see the limitations of his theories.

my paper back was $3.50 it is published by basic books and it is offered on audible in a talking book format style let me look at amazon and i will just send the link to the book on amazon .... good luck

OK Here is the link :

The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385058985/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_V15xCbZG3CT55

Please be sure to read the reviews at that page of this book.

Oh I see, you don’t understand that gender and sex are two different things. The concept of gender expression is probably meaningless to you, and yet you probably couldn’t be bothered to learn what it means, so you wouldn’t understand that the reason why a person’s gender expression is expected to match a person’s sex is because it (knowing who the “men” and who the “women” are) makes it easier for men to oppress women. You also don’t understand that gender is a social construct, and I’m guessing you don’t understand what a social construct is either. You’re definitely not aware that what you just said was both sexist and transphobic, because to you masc and femme are indistinguishable from the bodies that perform them, which is why men never cry and women don’t play sports. I’m guessing “male” in that scenario is someone with a penis, so you obviously don’t understand how human reproduction works, and are probably not considering the problem hermaphroditism poses to the gender/sex dichotomy like the fact that some children are surgically altered to be given a penis or a “pussy” at birth because they are born with ambiguous genitalia. Never mind the fact that genitalia has little to do with attraction because it’s kept under clothes(edit: although I acknowledge genital attraction is a thing). You clearly don’t understand that biological sex is different to identify anyway due to the complexity of genes for example people born XXY or XYY, but none of that matters because you’re a troll.

Yeah man, I've been meaning to get into hardcore sociology for a while now. I have been looking at this book specifically which might be of interest to you or others: link.

This is definitely the book The Social Construction of Reality
http://www.amazon.com/Social-Construction-Reality-Sociology-Knowledge/dp/0385058985

I could give out a huge rant about how what you perceive and attack as "pc culture" is merely the effect of miss-application of long-standing academic arguments, but what's the point? I'm not going to change your view, and nobody else will see this thanks to the "grr SJWs" crowd and their downvotes. The TL,DR is basically "you are fighting with people just as ignorant on the matter as you are".

The idea that gave birth to current american "PC culture" is that "language creates reality", but the way (american) modern leftist college students (and tumblr-like crowds) use it is nowhere near useful. If you are really interested in that kind of subject, I reccomend you to read The Social Construction of Reality. It's not directly related to the subject, but it touches on the basis of many useful concepts to board the subject without 4chan-level arguments.