The Books That Permanently Altered How I See Reality

ELI5 / TLDR

Some books leave a residue. You finish them and the room looks slightly off, like the furniture got rearranged while you weren’t looking. Hana Clio walks through three books that did this to her permanently: Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance (which made ordinary hotels and parking lots feel like portals), Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience (which made her distrust her own version of events), and Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (which explained why the internet keeps choosing fake stories over visible facts). The thread tying them together: good books don’t hand you answers. They tamper with how you perceive.

The Full Story

Reading as a controlled disturbance

The video opens with a hypothesis rather than a recommendation. What if the point of reading isn’t lessons or relatable experiences, but a temporary glitch in perception?

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.

She traces the feeling back to a childhood book about a photographer documenting old buildings stranded inside modern Beijing. Staring at the photos long enough produced a strange sensation about time. Finish the book, look up, and the environment had shifted a little. She is careful to note this might just be feelings. But feelings, she argues, are the engine. We absorb what we feel something about. So what she hunts for in a book is strangeness, absurdity, a particular and slightly unhinged worldview. Not comfort. Even a dry neuroscience textbook can do it, she says, if it leaves you feeling weird about the world afterward.

Murakami, and a detour into cancel culture

The first named book is Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance. She grew up on his work, has read nearly all of it, and prefers the original to the English translation. Before getting to the book itself, she pauses on something that annoys her: the consensus that forms around a writer once he goes mainstream. People try to cancel Murakami for how his characters describe women, which she finds both inaccurate and beside the point.

As if a writer should only create characters who are decent and inoffensive… Characters that don’t trigger anyone.

Her argument is structural, not defensive. Fiction exists because one person saw things in a peculiar way and built a room you could briefly stand inside. Sand that down for mass comfort and you get less imaginative stories. By that logic, she notes, half the canon should never have existed: Dostoevsky’s murderers and fanatics, Nabokov narrating from inside a predator’s head.

Back to the book. The protagonist drifts through a hotel with no goal, desireless and oddly patient, as if waiting for something he can’t name. When strange things start happening, he absorbs them without resistance.

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.

What stuck with her permanently is Murakami’s trick of smuggling dream logic into the most ordinary places: corridors, elevators, parking lots, highways. After years of reading him, those places stopped looking ordinary. The book rewired something. The gap between “this is normal” and “this is something else” never announces itself loudly. It stays quiet, and you have to meet it patiently.

Zeno’s Conscience, and the unreliable narrator in your own skull

The second book is Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo, an Italian novel from 1923. You spend the entire book trapped inside one man’s head, which she calls both hilarious and disturbing. Zeno keeps a diary because his psychoanalyst told him to, and he is terrible at self-examination. He spends the whole book trying to quit smoking, marking each cigarette as his last, then lighting another. There is a running, dated list of last cigarettes.

The point isn’t the smoking. It’s that Zeno lies constantly, mostly to himself, while building elaborate philosophical justifications for everything he does. You watch the gap open in real time between what he tells himself and what is actually happening.

Maybe this is just what consciousness does, the constant self-narration, the justification, the deception, the small private distortions we apply to our own experience to keep up with this certain image we have about ourselves.

If a book makes you slightly suspicious of your own thinking, I would say that’s a great book to read.

The aftereffect was personal. Reading it in a coffee shop, she started writing down her own experiences to test how reliable a narrator she’d be. A seagull then landed on her table to steal her food, so she let the seagull narrate instead. The result, she reports, was very strange.

Baudrillard, and the copy that ate the original

The third book is nonfiction and the most famous: Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, written in 1981, before the internet. She argues it describes the internet more accurately than most things written since. The central idea is the simulacrum: a copy that has so completely replaced the real thing that the original stops working as a reference point. Draw a map of a territory and the map becomes the territory. Show someone the real landscape underneath and they get confused, or don’t believe you.

She reads the famous passage about pretending versus simulating. To pretend to be sick is a lie that leaves reality intact, because somewhere both you and the observer know you’re not sick. But simulate an illness convincingly enough that your body produces real symptoms, a real fever, and the line between fake and real dissolves. There’s no original sickness to point back to.

Simulation is producing a reality of its own that starts to compete and eventually replace the original.

Her clearest example comes from her own channel, which she says started in politics and earned her death threats. There are events where raw footage exists online, visible to anyone, yet people reliably choose the false narrative anyway. The label of the event has replaced the facts of the event as public truth. She’s careful to say this isn’t simply tribalism or an echo chamber or an information problem. Amplified by algorithms, it becomes something stranger: a rejection of physical reality itself. The copy is so dominant it makes the original feel false. She points readers toward more recent sociology that has extended the concept.

The twist at the end

She started with a question about whether the perceptual shift is temporary. Having thought it through, she’s no longer sure it is. Murakami permanently changed how she sees ordinary spaces. Zeno made her permanently suspicious of her own narration. Baudrillard handed her hyperreality, and you can’t un-see it. She closes by saying she’s currently obsessed with books on consciousness and will recommend more once she finishes them.

Key Takeaways

The value of a book may be perceptual rather than informational: not what it tells you, but how it leaves you seeing the room afterward.
Great fiction asks questions instead of supplying answers; demanding that characters be decent and inoffensive produces less imaginative work.
Dance Dance Dance embeds dream-logic into mundane spaces, permanently altering how she sees corridors, elevators, and parking lots.
Zeno’s Conscience dramatizes consciousness as constant self-narration and self-deception; a good book makes you suspicious of your own thinking.
Simulacra and Simulation: a copy can so fully replace the real that the original feels false. Simulation differs from lying because it produces its own real effects.
Her thesis: these perceptual shifts may not be temporary at all. Some books rewire you for good.

Claude’s Take

This is a quiet, well-made personal essay disguised as a book-recommendation video. The framing device, reading as a “temporary disturbance” that turns out not to be temporary, is genuinely elegant, and the three picks are well-chosen because they all illustrate the same idea from different angles: fiction that warps the outside world, fiction that warps the inside, and nonfiction that explains why the warp is now a civilizational condition.

The Baudrillard section is where she’s strongest and weakest at once. The pretending-versus-simulating exegesis is accurate and clearly explained, which is no small thing for a notoriously slippery text. But the leap to “people ignore raw footage and choose the false narrative” is doing a lot of rhetorical work without much specificity. The vague gestures at “current political events” and a “Minneapolis shooting” let the listener fill in whichever side they already blame, which is a little ironic given the subject. That’s a hazard of the genre, not a fatal flaw.

The cancel-culture digression is the weakest stretch, partly because it’s a well-worn argument and partly because the strongest version of her point (fiction needs morally messy characters) doesn’t actually need the culture-war framing to land. Dostoevsky and Nabokov make the case on their own.

Scoring it a 7. Thoughtful, literate, and the recommendations are excellent, especially Svevo, who is underread in English. It loses points for the political examples being more assertion than argument, and for leaning on a tired controversy when the literary observations were doing fine without it. If you came for the books, you’ll leave with a good reading list.