What are some great mind-blowing books ?

Vonnegut said he was inspired to write the book after working as a PR representative for General Electric, where he met scientists who were indifferent to the consequences of their discoveries.

Orson Scott Card creates a militarized science fiction universe in "Ender's Game." After two battles with insect-like aliens called "Buggers," Earth is weakened.

"Brave New World" takes its name from a speech in Shakespeare's "The Tempest," in which a girl brought up in isolation comes into contact with strange, new people for the first time.

Along those lines, Bernard Marx is confronted with a strange, new world view when he leaves the World State in London and visits the Savage Reservation in New Mexico. Set in a future that measures time "After Ford," paying homage to the great forefather of the assembly line, Bernard has to navigate changing the World State or leaving it.

Charles Gordon, a man with an intellectual disability, is chosen at the beginning of "Flowers for Algernon" to participate in an experiment to boost his intelligence.

An experimental surgery to that end has already been tried on a lab mouse called "Algernon," and the scientists are eager to try it on a human. The story unfolds in a series of progress reports that Charlie writes about his life.

Choices don't exist in the dystopian world created by Lois Lowry in "The Giver." Every member of the society has an assigned role. But when one boy, Jonas, turns 12, he's chosen for special training with the Giver, the only person in the community who holds memories of true pain and pleasure.

The story revolves around the deep-rooted conflict between the free-spirited Randle McMurphy and the totalitarian Nurse Ratched. While McMurphy initially got himself thrown into the mental ward because he thought it would be more comfortable than serving a jail sentence on a work farm, he quickly realizes the power Nurse Ratched wields.

Mark Danielewski's "House of Leaves" begins like most horror movies: A young family moves into an old house in the country. But then things get weird. They discover their house measures wider on the inside than the outside. This seemingly inconsequential detail obsesses the family to the point of terrible consequences.

Stephen Hawking, one of the most famous physicists of our time, has made a career out of explaining outer space to the masses. In a seminal piece of science writing, Hawking uses plain language to discuss black holes, quarks, antimatter and the Big Bang.

Chuck Palahniuk wrote one of fiction's most celebrated endings for his debut novel, "Fight Club." The story opens with the disconsolate narrator leaving his job after an unexpected encounter with a man called Tyler Durden. Durden holds secret boxing matches in the basements of bars, which fascinates the normally tame narrator.

Margaret Atwood tracks the descent of freedom, particularly women's freedom, in her dystopian novel "The Handmaid's Tale." In the beginning, Offred lives with her husband and daughter, has a job and can spend her own money.

In a sleepy Alabama town, Scout Finch and her brother Jem spend their days daring each other to knock on the door of their reclusive neighbor Boo Radley. But they're quickly faced with the adult world when their lawyer father Atticus takes a case defending a local Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" chronicles the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo in Colombia. The story intertwines with the history of the Buendía family, who founded the town. The family experiences seven generations of misfortunes thanks to their misguided perception of the town they founded.

"Candide" is a satirical romp through France during the Age of Enlightenment in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The eponymous hero grows up in the bucolic countryside where optimism is the order of the day. But a misadventure thrusts Candide from his comfortable home to confront the darker sides of humanity.

"The Brothers Karamazov" is the last novel published by famed Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. He spent two years writing the book that follows the three sons of an unhappy man, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov.

Dmitri, Fyodor's oldest son, quarrels with his father about an inheritance that was left to him by his mother. Dmitri's brothers join the fray to help settle the quarrel, and they all end up realizing there's more in their family to fight about than money.

Nakata, an aging veteran who never recovered from his wartime injuries, is drawn to Kafka, a teenage runaway, in Haruki Murakami's 2002 novel "Kafka on the Shore."

Stephen King creates a post-apocalyptic world in "The Stand." The book follows an escaped patient from a biological testing facility. He's carrying a strain of super-flu that could ravage 99% of the world's population.

"Catch-22," Joseph Heller's classic tale of the loss of faith amid the rise of bureaucratic power, takes place in World War II-era Italy. The Bombadier Yossarian is asked to repeatedly increase the number of missions he has to complete, even after it becomes clear that the Allies have won.

Isaac Asimov starts his seven-volume "Foundation" series at the decline of the Galactic Empire, which has reigned for 12,000 years. As the empire falls, Hari Seldon, the inventor of a new science known as psychohistory, can see a future of ignorance and warfare that will last 30,000 years.

To save the world's intelligence, Seldon forms what he calls "the Foundation," on a planet at the far edge of the galaxy. The empire's best scientists and scholars congregate in the Foundation, but corrupt warlords also rise up in the power vacuum.

Mark Haddon helped educate children with autism before publishing "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." That explains how beautifully he captures the voice of the novel's teenage narrator Christopher John Francis Boone, who makes it his mission to solve the the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog.

"All Quiet on the Western Front" follows World War I from a young German soldier's point of view. Nineteen-year-old Paul Bäumer enlists in the army with several of his friends and fights on the French front of the war. They quickly learn the brutality of trench warfare and their ideals of nationalism and patriotism come into question.

Khaled Hosseini writes about an unlikely friendship between a wealthy man's son and the son of a servant in "The Kite Runner." The book opens with Amir recalling his childhood in a well-to-do household in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he grew up alongside Hassan, the son of his father's servant and an ethnic minority known as Hazaras.