

Ask HN: What are some good books? - youngbenny

Looking for good books to read. Any recommendations? I liked these:<p><i>Everything and More</i>, David Foster Wallace<p><i>Gödel, Escher, Bach</i>, Douglas Hofstadter<p><i>Collected Fictions</i>, Jorge Luis Borges<p><i>In Praise of Idleness</i>, Bertrand Russell<p><i>Antifragile</i>, Nassim Taleb<p><i>The Long Way</i>, Bernard Moitessier<p><i>Deceit, Desire, and the Novel</i>, Rene Girard<p><i>The Wu-Tang Manual</i>, RZA<p><i>Meditations</i>, Marcus Aurelius<p><i>Essays</i>, Michel de Montaigne<p><i>We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live</i>, Joan Didion
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bloodorange
"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
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

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cenazoic
* _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.)

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Casseres
_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.

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maxerickson
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.

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

~~~
gruseom
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
Pessoa created his own worlds. Reminds me of Henry Darger. Check out IN THE
REALMS OF THE UNREAL if you haven't seen it
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSzzirIP0No>.

~~~
gruseom
Thanks; I've run across his stuff tangentially a few times but not seen that
film.

You might like Gormenghast:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gormenghast_(series)>

Wyndham Lewis's novels, especially the Human Comedy that he wrote at the end
of his life, are something I've always been meaning to get to. It's hard to
tell if they're meaningful or impenetrable.

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JackGibbs
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

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

~~~
brudgers
He wrote a significant portion while a POW.

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youngbenny
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.

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cju
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
_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.

------
japhyr
_The Abstract Wild_ , Jack Turner

Honest and challenging, without being sentimental.

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cadalac
_Heaven is real but so is Hell_ by Vassula Ryden

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jolenzy
Take anything from Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

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

~~~
gruseom
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.

------
eli_gottlieb
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
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
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 the English 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.

~~~
youngbenny
Appreciate it, this will keep me busy :)

