The sad thing about being "stupid" is being unable to put your predicament into compelling writing.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...

Wild by Cheryl Strayed - not strictly fiction but it could be read as such. Opened my mind to areas of society I wasn't aware of.

* Flowers for Algernon

* Going Rogue: Spells, Swords, & Stealth

* Split the Party: Spells, Swords, & Stealth

* NPCs

* Children of Time

* Death's End

* The Shining

* IT

* All 7+1 books of The Dark Tower

1. Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
because it's so beautifully written and made me experience a flood of emotions.

2. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Again, a very touching, charming book about a little kid's world(universe?) view, told through his adventures.

Non-fiction:

1. The subtle art of not giving a F*ck - Mark Manson
Opened my eyes to what I was possibly doing wrong with my life.

2. Radical Acceptance - Tara Brach
Still currently reading it, but I wish I'd found it earlier.

"The Outsiders" by S.E. Hinton

The sooner you realize your limits the better. The issue with most of us is that we don't push hard enough to understand what those limits are. As you've seen, you've worked hard and now know your limit.

But frankly, what's the issue? You're not good enough to pass a leetcode interview? Guess out, most people writing software aren't able to either. If all you do is compare yourself to the Wayne Gretzky's and LeBron James you're always going to feel inadequate. Ask them why they are so good and they will tell you that it's hard work and dedication. Because it's more fulfilling to say that than to say "yes, it is those things but heck, I'm just naturally good also".

Read "Flowers for Algernon" for some perspective. Personally, I always remind myself that the intelligence I do have is a gift because there are those with no fault of their own that are far worse.

If you don't enjoy programming or just want to do something different, be honest with yourself.

Your conclusion is right - The is reality not everyone is lucky enough to be intellectually gifted to succeed and not all hard work pays off.

But the issue is you've boxed what success means you to so much that it's suffocating you.

Most of us writing software are failures if we use passing a Google interview as a metric.

This reminds me of the Jewish tradition, where men is punished when he eats from the Tree of Knowledge. The more you know, more easily you find anguish.

"Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes deals with this subject in a splendid way (won the Nebula Award for best novel in 1966).

The tao says: therefore the sage, in exercise of his government, empties their minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills and strength their bones. Which is simple advice: don't think too much. Don't take everything so seriously.

It took me a life to learn that intelligence is not wisdom. The world is full of uneducated wises and intelligent fools.

Are you really smart? Pray for wisdom, not intelligence.

Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes)

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (Paul Zindel)

The Things They Carried (Tim O' Brien)

This Side of Paradise (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury)
Essentially a children's sci-fi novel, but it doesn't read that way.

A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway)

Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates)

On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
*One of my personal favorites, but most people either love or hate it, so maybe save this towards the end.

On my own reading list:

Speedboat (Renata Adler)

Money (Martin Amis)

Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

The reason for those is just that I can't imagine ever being bored reading them.

Maybe also Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes) for being a really creative concept (the way the story is told) and for being a wonderful example on how interesting modest sci-fi can be without resorting to "LAZERZ!!!".

Edit: Another contestant: Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Physicists. Grim yet humorful. I generally really like Dürrenmatt's dark endings.

Edit 2: And another one: Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann, specifically for how well he got me to understand Gauss' weird reactions and motives without going into his work at all. Before I've read it, I would have sworn that a book that tries to present one of the greatest mathematicians would need loads of math in it.

Would you rather be a brain without a body or a body without a brain?

For a heartrending story about the role intelligence plays in shaping personality, read Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

Flowers For Algernon never interested me much, but learning now that it was originally a short story, I’ll put it on my list.

Here is a neat pdf of Asimov’s The Last Question, for those who are into that sort of thing: https://docdro.id/GQfVN6o

- The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter by Meg Jay

- The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over by Jack Schafer

- Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales

- The Passion Trap: How to Right an Unbalanced Relationship by Dean C. Delis и Cassandra Phillips

- The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity by Steven Strogatz

- Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

- The Minds of Billy Milligan by Daniel Keyes

* (Lot's of machine learning books to list: PRML, All of Stats, Deep Learning, etc.)

* Active Portfolio Management - Kahn, Grinold

* Thinking, fast and slow - Kahneman

* Protein Power (the Eades') / Why we get fat (Taubes)

* Why we sleep (Walker)

* Deep Work / So Good They Can't Ignore You (Newport)

* Flowers for Algernon (Keyes)

* Getting to Yes (Fisher)

  East of Eden - John Steinbeck
  Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
  The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
  Cannery Row - John Steinbeck
  Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor E. Frankl
  Deep Work - Cal Newport
  The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint
  The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - Mark Manson
  Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
  Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person - Hugh Prather
  Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom
  I Heart Logs: Event Data, Stream Processing, and Data Integration - Jay Kreps
  Kafka: The Definitive Guide - Neha Narkhede
  Effective Java - Joshua Bloch
  Algorithms - Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne

1) Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. This book is an emotional roller coaster. After reading it, you will better understand what life is like for the mentally challenged.

2) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. You will get a glimpse into the life of Russian aristocracy in the 19th century. More importantly, you will learn about love and human relationships.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera showed me another perspective of love I had never considered. Gave me insight into vulnerability.

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes showed me how by looking through the world via a lens of intellect, you can often miss the point.

The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God by Etgar Keret a collection of some of my favourite short stories. Highly recommend.

at the rate of one fucking chapter a week

I always remember Flowers for Algernon, a book which we read as part of English class. I devoured it in about 2-3 days and it was definitely the first book to ever make me cry. Like, that book is fucking incredible. I told the teacher next day - who (wisely) said I shouldn't share this with fellow students lest I get mocked.

4 weeks later we're being asked questions about the motivations of characters. Or what do we think the author meant by this paragraph. All in chapter 4.

I couldn't remember, I didn't care. The book had a profound interest on me and nobody else was actually reading it. Just micro-analysing all possible joy out of it. Ugh.

There's also the classic "Flowers for Algernon" from 1958.[1] I'd strongly recommend reading the short story (and avoid the book, unless you want to witness the ruining of a great story that was best left alone).

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_algernon

* Neutrino Overdrive — One day in the 1950s, in the desert of California where the drag racers line up facing the Christmas lights, a new challenger appears. He is tall with a large forehead and olive colored skin. He wants to race.

* Breakfast at Tiffany's — technically a novella, but reads really fast. Different than the movie and better (in my opinion)

* Flowers for Algernon — One of the classics

* Country of the Blind — in the country of the blind, the one eyed man is king

* The Last Question — this is reposted so much on HN and Reddit that if you haven't seen it, yet, just wait a week :)

* The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever — Just wow. Actually a lot of the stories in Carbide Tipped Pens are really good. It is a good collection.

* The Nostalgianauts — It is easier to find this in audio than as a short story. It is in some collection somewhere

This is "sort of" the plot of the classic sci-fi novel (and short story) Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes: The main character who starts out below average intelligence, gets a treatment that causes his intelligence to shoot through the roof to well above normal levels, but then he is forced to face that it is only temporary.

Read it first when I was 16, at the recommendation of my literature teacher in high school. For the past... - darn, this was long ago! - ...more than 20 years, I've read it at least once a year, and intend to do that for as long as I can read.

That book changed me, like nothing else since.

* Persepolis, first version

* Dark Angel, by David Klass

I've just started reading "Flowers for Algernon", I guess this can also be a good birthday present. I think gifting books is something very difficult, in my experience I never wanted to get books for present.