The Books That Permanently Altered How I See Reality Hana Clio

TITLE: The Books That Permanently Altered How I See Reality CHANNEL: Hana Clio DATE: 2026-05-20 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Have you ever read a book so fascinating, you know, when you finally finish, the space around you actually felt a little different? You know, is it possible that your perception has been temporarily altered because of it? And now you’re forming a slightly different relationship with your surrounding. Maybe that’s what reading is actually for. It’s to create a temporary disturbance in how you perceive the world you’re sitting in. Since I was a kid, I didn’t find the outside world of people interesting at that time. So, I created a very solitary space for myself, you know, where I preferred to just quietly think and read. And books always brought me comfort. I’m sure many people can relate to this. It’s very common. So, there was this bookstore I used to escape to during school. I remember one afternoon I picked up a book about a photographer who spent his life photographing ancient structures that had survived inside modern cities, you know, old buildings from another century stuck between new streets and development in this gigantic busy city, Beijing in China. So, the book had text and photos, and I remember the feeling of the photographs. Also, it’s also the way they were photographed. So, after staring at them for a long time, you get this very strange sensation about time. So, when I finished reading the book, I remember I had this feeling as if I was somewhere else temporarily and then brought back here. You know, the the environment changed a little for some reason. Or I could just be in an episode of mental problems. But, of course, these are just feelings, right? The reason why I talk about feelings is because I feel a lot of our motivation towards things come from emotions, right? How we feel about something. We are very motivated by how things feel. How we feel about something is going to affect how we perceive things and absorb things. Um and that is something I usually look for in a book is to have this temporary disturbance in how I perceive things. I’m not really looking for universally relatable experiences or lessons or even answers. I think great books, they ask questions more than providing answers. So, usually what pulls me is some type of a strangeness or absurdity. Right? Uh of course, this is more toward uh fictions. Non-fiction is a bit different um approach when you read them. I’m also drawn to books that carry very particular type of worldview, something that boldly challenges society norms. So, I do appreciate books that get into very um bizarre territories. And that strange sensation as if your environment has changed a little after you coming out of the book. I don’t know about you, but interesting enough, uh maybe a lot of people can relate to this. Even dry academic writing can produce that effect. You know, I could pick up something on I don’t know, introduction to neuroscience, maybe written in the most uh boring way imaginable, but still come out of it, you know, feeling kind of uh weird about the world as if I had I had a briefly entered some other places. I don’t know why books can do that to me very easily. You know, it probably does for a lot of people as well. Um I remember when I was reading this book uh long time ago, fiction, it also gave me that strange feeling as if I was somewhere else temporarily. As if my surrounding had shifted and changed during reading. So, the book was Dance Dance Dance by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. I read a few times a long time ago. It was at different points in my life and I always had this same sensation. I grew up reading a lot of Murakami’s books. I’ve read almost everything he wrote because once something reaches a mass audience, the conversation around it tends to change into, I don’t know, something I find less interesting. Uh, you know, you you sometimes you get this very unimaginative interpretations from people. You know, uh, some people they do tend to force a very rigid worldview on things. You sometimes you get this uninteresting consensus around some fictional stories. That’s what I find very bizarre about our current culture that cancel culture can work its way into pretty much anything and apparently has found its way into fiction, too, right? People sitting around trying to cancel a writer over how a fictional character thinks. The specific complaint being that his characters describe women in ways that are misogynistic, which is not even accurate. I I don’t really agree with this kind of interpretation. Sometimes what I find very baffling about cancel culture is that as if a writer should only create characters who are decent and inoffensive, right? Char- characters that don’t trigger anyone. They’re acceptable enough for the audience or wide enough audience can comfortably relate to. So, think about what that does to fiction, right? You end up with stories probably way less imaginative. Uh, and that’s not fun or provocative to read. The moment something deeply private and individual reaches mass popularity, everyone’s going to force their own, you know, moral dilemma and try to press try to press that onto the work. And then a piece of art becomes a space for people to locate their resentment, right? I mean, that does make things a little bit boring, I think. So, fiction to me exists because, you know, one person had a very specific and peculiar way of seeing things. And then they put that into form of storytelling, you know, so people could temporarily inhabit. And that makes it interesting and worth reading. Plus, by the logic of cancel culture, right? A significant portion of the greatest books ever written should have never existed. Dostoevsky’s characters are murderers and ideological fanatics, you know, Nabokov wrote an entire novel from inside the mind of predator. So, this whole discussion doesn’t really make sense to me. Now, circle back to Murakami’s book. So, his narrators are sometimes pretty strange and can be uncomfortable, sometimes morally inconsistent. But, so are many great books. But, then again, reading fictions are completely individual experiences. It’s very subjective things. So, the reason I mentioned this book, Dance Dance Dance by Murakami, is because I just had such a fun time reading it. And I will say I’m not fond of the English translation. I didn’t read them in English, but either way, it’s a it’s a it’s a really fun to read. So, in this book, Dance Dance Dance, the protagonist, you know, spends a lot of time simply wandering inside a hotel that he is staying. He doesn’t have a clear purpose or destination. It’s like he is waiting for something even though he doesn’t quite know what that is. And at the same time, he appears to be quite uh desireless and weirdly patient with nothing to do all day in this hotel. And then when strange things do start happening, and they do, right? He very bizarrely absorbs them without resistance. It’s like he adapts to the absurdity and the mystery of life very effortlessly for some reason. There’s no dramatic confrontation with the absurd. He just adapts as if some part of him already knew this was how reality worked underneath the surface. As if the hotel had opened a door that was always there in him. Then more and more strange things happen, eventually leading him to this dream-like parallel reality. And it’s like through him we’re having this dream-like experience that feels real and not real at the same time. And things appear to be unrealistic, but somehow feel very strangely familiar. And there’s this very melancholic feeling running through the entire novel as well. For example, the entire novel started with “I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel. In these dreams, I’m there, implicated in some kind of ongoing circumstance. All indications are that I belong to this dream continuity. The Dolphin Hotel is distorted, much too narrow. It seems more like a long covered bridge, a bridge stretching endlessly through time. And there I am in the middle of it. Someone else is there, too, crying.” So, as absurd as everything in this novel, but somehow it feels like accurate depiction of something real, you know, a layer of experience that hard to describe. I don’t know about the English version, but the version I read, words with suggestive meaning maybe give you some kind of feeling subconsciously, they’re highlighted with dots underneath them, and I really like that about his books. I know this Murakami’s characters don’t usually function or react emotionally like um normal people, and that’s already fascinating to me. Also, the writer has this ability to embed dream-like surrealism into the most ordinary spaces, like hotel corridors, elevators, parking lots, highways. You know, after reading Murakami for so many years, I kind of don’t view these ordinary places as ordinary anymore. Uh that’s the magic of his books, I think. It’s like they have permanently rewired something in how I perceive these mundane places. He writes that constant uncertainty about whether what you’re experiencing is ordinary or something else entirely. So, the gap between the two. And the strange thing is that this gap never announces itself dramatically. It’s kind of a quiet, and which means you have to meet it on its own terms and be patient. And you have to let go some of the usual expectations. Whether any of this can bring some kind of meaning or profundity, it’s entirely up to you, right, to be honest. Uh I mean, that’s the charm of fiction. Another book also did that for me a long time ago. It’s uh called Zeno’s Conscience. It’s by a Italian writer. It’s a novel written in 1923. So, I I read this a long time ago, too. For some reason, I’ve been thinking about it lately. So, Zeno’s Conscience is a novel where you are essentially trapped inside one man’s head for the entire duration of the book, which can be disturbing or extremely funny. But, it’s not a particularly comfortable place to be, I think. Zeno is writing a diary cuz his psychoanalyst asked him to. So, this is a man attempting to understand himself through self-examination, and not really doing a good job at it. He’s trying to quit smoking throughout the entire book, and he never does. He marks, uh you know, every cigarette as his last one, but he always ends up lighting another one, and it’s just endless. There’s a running list of last cigarettes with dates attached to them, which is kind of uh funny. So, the problem with Zeno is that he is a very unreliable narrator. He lies constantly, mostly to himself. And through all of it, he’s constructing these elaborate, you know, philosophical justifications for everything he does. The interesting thing about being stuck in his head is that you start to wonder how different his self-deception is from your own. But what makes this book strange and worth reading is being inside a consciousness that is constantly constructing a version of events or interprets everything in a way that happens to you know, make him look reasonable. And you watch this happening in real time from the inside, which means you can see the gap between what he tells himself and what is actually happening, which can be hilarious and disturbing at the same time. So, through the character Zeno, you kind of get to recognize that maybe this is just what consciousness does, the constant self-narration, the justification, right, the deception, the small private distortions we apply to our own experience to keep up with this certain image we have about ourselves in our mind. So, if a book makes you slightly suspicious of your own thinking, I would say that’s a great book to read. I remember reading this book in the corner of some coffee shop. I started to think how reliable I would be if I had to narrate my own experiences. So, I started to write things down, and I was attempting, you know, the the self-examination part. Then I had a seagull came on my table trying to eat the food in my plate. So, instead of me narrating my own life, I ended up letting the seagull do it for me, and the result was very strange. So, now I have talked about two books kind of inside fictional consciousness, watching, you know, perception distorts, that kind of stuff. But the next book I’m going to talk about, that’s nonfiction, and it’s kind of about what reality actually is. So, the book is a very famous. It’s called Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard. So, he wrote this in 1981, before the internet ever existed. Yet, it describes the internet more accurately. But, this book was way before the current landscape of political fragmentation, before all these internet subcultures factions, right? But, when you read it, it doesn’t feel like an older book, to be honest. Much of it can apply very profoundly to the current reality. So, the central idea of the book is this simulacrum. It means that there is this copy that has replaced the real thing so completely that the original that the original kind of doesn’t exist as a reference point anymore. So, when you create a map for a territory, for example, instead of representing the territory, the map has become the territory and ended placing it. And no one really believes you, or they get very confused if you try to show the real landscape underneath. So, I have applied this concept many times before when I was talking about internet subcultures and current political factions. And the most disturbing example I’ve encountered is this one. I’ve talked about it before. As some of you know, I actually started my channel mostly talking about politics and getting death threats because of it, and which is ridiculous and hilarious at the same time.

[gasps] Right now, there are events in our current political are just so absurd and and going to the direction so far from reality and facts. It’s so bizarre to witness. There are circumstances you can see the evidence online, which means you can see the actual footage of something, like raw evidence. Yet, when people watch it, right, they choose the most false narrative in the end anyways. So, in this case, the labels of the events had replaced the actual facts of the events in terms of public truth. So, it’s like this, despite visible trustworthy evidence, other narratives that serve particular agendas have replaced the facts and become the accepted version of events. I know that has happened a lot of times in the past, too, but this gets it amplified to degree that has never seen before with in this internet subculture, right? And how the And the way the algorithm works. A lot of times with technology, you can’t really call this type of situation like information problem anymore, you know, or just tribalism, echo chamber. It’s not really like that anymore, you know, there’s something else here. It’s a rejection of physical reality a lot a lot of times. So, the simulacrum, the which means the copy functioning exactly as the writer described, you know, the copy is so dominant, it makes the original feel false. And the the book and the book kind of writes like a puzzle. Let’s just read this part from the book. To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending. Whoever feigns an illness can simply can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness producing himself some of the symptoms. Therefore, pretending or dissimulating leaves the principle of reality intact. The difference is always clear. It is simply masked, where simulation threatens the difference between the true and the false, the real and the imaginary. So, he’s kind of saying that when you pretend to be sick, you know you’re not sick. The person watching you knows somewhere that you’re not. You might not be sick. So, the reality is just reality. The difference between the real and the fake is still there, just hidden. I like how he writes like a maze, right? Much like our reality, it’s an ambiguous maze filled with ambiguity. And sometimes in the most horrible way possible. But, if you pretend to be sick in a way that actually creates real symptoms in your body, let’s say, and something more disturbing happens, right? The symptoms are real. The fever is real. Your body is truly reacting. So, where’s the line between pretending and actually being sick now? That line is gone. You can’t point to a clear original sickness anymore, and that pretending is copying. So, simulation is much more radical than pretending. Pretending is like a lie. Simulation is producing a reality of its own that starts to compete and eventually replace the original. And now simulation has become the truth. So, for simulation, there are real effects, real suspicion, real fear, a real shift how you perceive things. By the time when you make a real judgment on something, you know, it’s not neutral anymore. The simulation has already changed how you perceive what you’re seeing. I’ve talked about this back then when I was talking about ICE operations and Minneapolis shooting. But, we kind of know this was going to happen all along with, you know, this strange political fragmentation going on because of algorithm, how we receive information nowadays, right? How algorithm works. But, of course, this book is kind of old. Since then, there have been updated versions of these concepts and social studies as our reality is getting more complicated and ambiguous by the day. There are plenty of studies on the subject. I’ve read I’ve read some of them, all very fascinating stuff, especially around this whole social media thing. So, just search simulacrum, you will find many updated extended applications of these concepts in sociology. So, I started this video with a question, right? Whether whether reading a book can temporarily alter your perception and leave you forming a slightly different relationship with your surrounding and reality. But having thought about it, I don’t know if this effect is actually temporary. Uh like when I reading Murakami’s fiction, right? It’s kind of rewired something in how I see ordinary spaces like I mentioned before. You know, they don’t feel the same as they did before. So, and then the other book I mentioned, Zeno’s Conscience, and his character kind of made me suspicious of my own narration of events in my life. And then the simulacrum and the simulation, he’s talking about hyperreality, which is a very interesting concept. So, this this video is just me casually recommending some books that I’ve been thinking about them lately. I’m reading some other books, I can recommend them too once I finish reading them. Uh a lot of them are the subjects on consciousness. That’s something I’m uh kind of obsessed with right now. I can cover more I can have more conversations around those books in the future.