> Strangly, Neal Stephenson's " Cryptonomicon" ... The idea that something so profoundly good can exist for people like us, convinced me to read only very high quality literature of all kinds and sci-fi of only the highest kind. Also made me give up watching TV/web series to a large degree. I don’t compromise with the quality of entertainment that I consume anymore. I consume only the best and most desired things.

I have a hard time with this. Earlier i used stuff like imdb and goodreads to determine and then i realized i don't like more than half of what i consume. Later i started asking what my friends liked, and consumed as per their recommendations, had a similar experience but this time around whenever i didn't like something, i complained to my friend and we had long discussions about it sometimes spanning multiple days. i found this approach better even if it sometimes meant consuming the trend of the week. After doing that for an year or two i started doing to consume/save-for-later anything that remotely looked interesting. These days I'm still following that approach. i still come across a lot of cheap makes but i think these help me to judge what's good and what's not. I mostly bring up this argument as i strongly believe "best" is subjective And going by all time classics or other people's recommendations you may miss out a chance to discover for yourself what is truly best for you. This was a straw man argument. Ignore it if it doesn't apply to you. But i'm curious on how you determine what makes "highest kind" and "best" before consuming it.

> "Mastery" by Leonard Gordon

I couldn't find this book.