Why did I love this book?
To fathom the mystery of consciousness, one needs to be ready to violate the entrenched convictions of conventional mindscience and let your mind roam freely over more inventive and limber perspectives.
Such as the literary inventions of Jorge Borges. His short stories/essays (it’s never really clear which category is more appropriate) are all wildly creative and astute models of sentience. I learned more about consciousness from “The Library of Babel,” “Tlön," Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and “The Lottery of Babylon” than I did from any neuroscience text.
4 authors picked Collected Fictions as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
All of Borges' dazzling fictions have been freshly translated and gathered for the first time into a single volume - from his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through the immensely influential collections Ficciones and the The Aleph, to his final and never before translated work from the 1980s, Shakespeare's Memory.