Ask HN: What are some good books?

15 points by youngbenny 13 years ago | 29 comments

Looking for good books to read. Any recommendations? I liked these:

Everything and More, David Foster Wallace

Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter

Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges

In Praise of Idleness, Bertrand Russell

Antifragile, Nassim Taleb

The Long Way, Bernard Moitessier

Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Rene Girard

The Wu-Tang Manual, RZA

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

Essays, Michel de Montaigne

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, Joan Didion

bloodorange 13 years ago |

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" - Lewis Carroll

"Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There" - Lewis Carroll

"Dracula" - Bram Stoker

"Frankenstein" - Mary Shelly

"On Education" - Bertrand Russell

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy" - Douglas Adams

"Animal Farm" - George Orwell

"1984" - George Orwell

"Lord of The Flies" - William Golding

"Brave New World" - Aldous Huxley

"Gulliver's Travels" - Jonathan Swift

"The Selfish Gene" - Richard Dawkins

bloodorange 13 years ago | |

Adding more:

Siddhartha - Hermen Hesse

Narcissus and Goldmund - Herman Hesse

The Glass Bead Game - Herman Hesse

The Consolations of Philosophy - Alain de Botton

A Brief History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson

Politics and The English Lanaguage (essay) - George Orwell

A Modest Proposal (essay) - Jonathan Swift

youngbenny 13 years ago | |

Thanks, that's a great list. Reminds me to read some classic fiction again.

thoughtcriminal 13 years ago | |

I read Frankenstein recently and its pretty intense. Recommended.

Probably the most exhilarating read for me in a long while has been "The Secret Race" by Tyler Hamiliton. But don't take my word on it, read the reviews.

cenazoic 13 years ago |

* The Quincunx, Charles Palliser (historical fiction: "Those for whom this...will be a special treat are those who enjoy solving word or logic puzzles. To be enjoyed to its fullest, this is a book that benefits from active participation on the part of the reader."

* Playing at the World, Jon Peterson ("Explore the conceptual origins of wargames and role-playing games in this unprecedented history of simulating the real and the impossible.")

* The Years of Lyndon Johnson (v1-4, 5 in production), Robert Caro. (If you ever wanted to see how political power actually works in the US, you can't beat this biography of LBJ, which reads like a (very long) novel.)

Casseres 13 years ago |

The Unincorporated Man by Dani Kollin & Eytan Kollin. It's a sci-fi set a couple hundred years in the future where everyone is incorporated at birth. Just like you can own shares in a company, you can own shares of another person. It's my second favorite novel. It has some interesting ideas.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Don't let the movie fool you. The book is very good. It was at one point it was on the suggested reading list for the United States Marine Corps.

maxerickson 13 years ago |

Nobody has suggested Umberto Eco yet.I would try The Island of the Day Before or Baudolino before Foucault's Pendulum.

Alistair Reynolds is space opera done nicely (if you want to look in that direction). Chasm City stands on its own, but there are some similar works there.

Twain fits in with some of your other comments.

meerita 13 years ago | |

Good author. A bit, elitist in their prose and a bit rude with the reader. He makes you read a lot before getting a bit of emotion. In Il nome della rosa he does a masterful work, to me.

I really liked Patricia Highsmith with the sequels of Mr. Ripley. I also love the french book write Jean-Christophe Grangé with their beloved black novel books. Love the all of them.

youngbenny 13 years ago | |

Thanks for the suggestion on Eco. I picked up a few books by Fernando Pessoa too.

gruseom 13 years ago | | |

Wait, how'd you get to Pessoa from there?!

Pessoa is fascinating. I believe it was he who wrote:

  Poets pretend
  They pretend so well
  They even pretend
  They suffer what they suffer.

... something that lodged itself in my brain years ago and never left. Pessoa wrote under countless pseudonyms. He is like Kierkegaard in that respect. You might like Fear and Trembling, in fact, based on your list.

youngbenny 13 years ago |

Has anyone read Information: The New Language of Science by Hans Christian von Baeyer?

I just read Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. It's an interesting study of how metaphors unconsciously drive thinking and perception.

brudgers 13 years ago |

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy.

Philosphical Investigations, Ludwig Witgenstein.

The Analects.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Ableson and Sussman.

The Hamet and The Town and The Mansion, William Faulkner.

youngbenny 13 years ago | |

Wittgenstein is tough reading. Amazing that he conceived of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in the trenches of WW1 (literally).

brudgers 13 years ago | | |

He wrote a significant portion while a POW.

IanChiles 13 years ago | |

I'd also add Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury - it's excellent, despite being a bit tough to understand

cju 13 years ago |

If you liked DFW and Borges, you may like Matt Ruff (especialy "Set this House in Order", "The Mirage" and "Fool on the Hill"). It's not as complex but the style is similar and really enjoyable.

steve_g 13 years ago |

Silverlock by John Myers Myers - a fantasy novel written in 1949 with hundreds (maybe thousands) of allusions to mythology, history, and classic literature. It's a lot of fun.

JackGibbs 13 years ago |

Some authors and a rec or two for each.

DFW - Infinite Jest

Pynchon - Really anything, but in particular Against the Day, V, and Gravity's Rainbow.

Rushdie - Shame and Satanic Verses, a lot of good other ones.

Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

Gaddis - JR, hence my name.

Heller - Catch-22

eli_gottlieb 13 years ago |

Nobody has listed "Anything by Terry Pratchett" yet?

Of course, it very much depends what you like. Your list contains a lot more nonfiction than I usually read in book form, for instance.

youngbenny 13 years ago | |

Yeah, I read a lot more non-fiction than fiction. I'm trying to discover good fiction to read. Open to suggestions on anything.

gruseom 13 years ago | | |

It depends on what you like. Flannery O'Connor's fiction is extraordinary. I bet you'd like Nabokov based on what you've said so far; I like his earlier Russian novels best (which have excellent English translations), like The Defense, for example. If you want to go whole hog into postmodernism then try Pynchon or Gaddis.

The 19th century Russians from Gogol to Chekhov are pretty much can't-lose. Turgenev's Fathers and Sons is beautiful and captures the spirit of youth.

Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier is a short masterpiece. The Great Gatsby is as good as its reputation says. Read Dickens if you want the essence of the English language and character. Read Kafka for the strangest articulation of modernity. Bruno Schulz is more whimsical. Borges is another whom your list suggests you should try.

If you really want to go down a rabbit hole, find Martin Seymour-Smith's Guide to Modern World Literature and browse through it to blow your mind. It covers everything and seems impossible, except it exists so it can't be.

japhyr 13 years ago |

The Abstract Wild, Jack Turner

Honest and challenging, without being sentimental.

cadalac 13 years ago |

Heaven is real but so is Hell by Vassula Ryden

jolenzy 13 years ago |

Take anything from Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

youngbenny 13 years ago | |

Dostoyevsky is a great. Still haven't read The Brothers Karamazov.

gruseom 13 years ago | | |

Don't miss The Double. This was the book that Dostoevsky wrote after his early rock-star debut. It was widely hated at the time, and Dostoevsky found himself in the doghouse as quickly as he had been celebrated before, but it's fabulous—much better than that initial book and one of the best things he ever wrote.