
The Books We Talk About (and Those We Don’t) - benbreen
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/oct/01/books-we-talk-about/
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zem
one of the most interesting points, though the writer didn't spend much time
on it, was how the serialised nature of some of the famous older novels meant
everyone was much more likely to be reading them at the same time, and how
serialised television fiction plays the same role today. i'd add to that novel
series like harry potter - it wasn't just that the first book was wildly
popular, but that as the series progressed it swept up more and more fans who
were waiting together for the next book. standalone novels don't have that
sort of forcing function, and it doesn't seem to work for multiple books by
the same author (e.g. no one talked about dan brown's novels after 'the da
vinci code')

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officemonkey
Two thoughts:

1\. Certain standalone authors had that strength. Stephen King certainly did
in the 80s-90s.

2\. I think this is why certain fiction series tend to have very strong
followings. Regardless of the HBO Series, people were hungry for "Dance with
Dragons" when it came out.

The internet certainly helps with TV series. Much of the popularity of "LOST"
was the skillful manipulation of that popularity by the production. Compare
"LOST" with "Heroes" (poor quality rapidly squandered popularity) and
"Firefly" (utter failure to leverage the growing fandom.)

~~~
goldfeld
Also, related to series you have a few film directors who command some of that
strength. Tarantino comes to mind, though it's an interesting example because
there's a sort of common universe underlying the movies. However as you go
more niche/cult you'll probably find small communities who wait dearly on the
author's next work, be it a film or a book.

~~~
zem
and don't forget webcomics! they're an episodic medium with, in some cases, a
surprisingly strong following.

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gbog
A side effect of using books to explore the shared ground between people is
that it needs to start with some name dropping, which I have felt is really
disliked by Americans in general. As a French, I see name dropping as a quick
way to find which books can be talked about with some people you don't know
well, but it is perceived as snobbish and may trigger some inferiority
complex. Not sure why: it is ok to not read books, it is ok to not have read
Proust or Celine, it is ok to be very picky. Having different tastes and
cultural background is what makes discussion interesting (but it helps if some
common ground can be found).

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theswan
Tangentially - I consistently find myself wanting to discuss a book I've read,
but unable to do so for lack of others who're in the same position.

Are there places on the internet for good discussion around individual books?

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m52go
Would you pay for this? Like a couple of bucks per discussion or something?

I've thought about the same thing before but can't figure out how economics
would work. Everyone expects things to be _free free free_ nowadays.

I think it could grow into something really cool where you could have authors
& other respected thought-leaders participate and have very deep, insightful
conversations.

~~~
zem
i think, psychologically, i wouldn't value something i had to pay for. i'd
feel more like a "consumer" than a participant. (and from an economic
standpoint, the users would be generating a lot of the value but capturing
none of it)

~~~
m52go
How does paying for a service hinder you from capturing its value?

Do you not value your house or car because you have to pay for it?

~~~
zem
it's just a psychological thing. i'm sure different people have different
psychologies around it. (and yes, i'd probably value my house more if i were
not paying rent on it)

as for capturing value, i'm referring specifically to the monetary aspect of
things - assuming the company adds value by providing the platform and gets
paid for it and the users add value by providing the content but do not get
paid for it, the explicit introduction of money into the ecosystem has
introduced a situation where one party is seen to be asymmetrically rewarded
for the overall success of the ecosystem.

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prevailrob
I for one would like to see IRC based book clubs flourish. Real time
conversation without being limited to 140 characters

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goronbjorn
Maybe I've read too many Paul Graham essays, but this felt like a book-centric
explanation of "Make something people want".

~~~
Ianvdl
It rather seems like "Make something people like to argue about", which I
guess leads to the same thing in the end.

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fakeanon
NSFW.

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graycat
So the title starts "The books ...", and reading the article shows that by
_books_ they mean just fictional novels. but, the books we talk about on HN
have included:

Knuth, _The Art of Computer Programming_.

Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein,
_Introduction to Algorithms_.

Jeffrey D. Ullman, _Principles of Database Systems_.

Jacques Neveu, _Mathematical Foundations of the Calculus of Probability_.

David G. Luenberger, _Optimization by Vector Space Methods_.

Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, _The C Programming Language_.

Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne, _Algorithms_.

Sorry, _NYR_ , my house, nearly every room, is awash in books in mathematics,
science, engineering, music, none of which would be of interest to the _NYR_ ,
and a few others but likely less than 2% are fictional novels.

So, the claim of the title "the books we talk about" appears not to apply very
well to HN and the same or much less so to me. That is, the title is
presumptive.

Why do I say this? Maybe not everyone at HN will agree with me, but in grades
1-12 and the first two years of college, I felt force fed like a Strasbourg
goose with books that were fiction. It wasn't until the last two years of
college that I got to concentrate on what I really cared about, _non-fiction_
, that is, science, mathematics, engineering, etc.

So I remain torqued: For years and years I was force fed with I didn't want
and largely blocked from what I did want.

And, now that I have more understanding of _fiction_ , I have to conclude,
with this force feeding and blocking, some of my best years for learning were
seriously wasted. Thus, I'm torqued.

I have to be reminded of C. P. Snow, _The Two Cultures_ and find, (with irony)
with that favorite word of the literary set, irony, a post in the culture of
engineering, math, and science by the culture of fictional novels, _belle
lettre_ , literary art, etc.

~~~
skybrian
The original article was about books people discuss with friends in real life,
not online. How many of these books do you actually talk about?

Although it's commonly recommended, I can't remember ever actually talking
with someone else who's also read *The C Programming Language" about the
contents of that book, though if they're a programmer we might discuss
something about C if it comes up.

~~~
graycat
By _talking about_ , I was including on HN, and all of those books so qualify.

For K&R, sure, I've talked about it, yes, orally. E.g., for that book, what's
with the _idiosyncratic syntax_? And why the case of x+++++y? And some cases
of declare statements can be real puzzles that can need talking about -- there
is even a sparse, too sparse, discussion in the book. And to talk, should
mention why the language was designed to run in about 8 K bytes on a DEC
machine (helps explain y =+ x). And, in one discussion, I got led to where in
K&R actually can find the actual memory allocation technique used by MALLOC
and FREE. We should talk about what we are paying now, when we use C (or
really C++ which was originally just a preprocessor to C), due to the original
8 KB constraint when now main memory goes for about $10/GB and motherboards
commonly support 32 GB of ECC main memory. So, yes, we do still talk about C
and K&R.

C stands to be around for a long time, and I'm sure that students new to
programming will do a lot of talking about K&R. While in college, they may do
the talking in person at some social gatherings.

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skybrian
More generally we could come up with other kinds of conversation starters:

Games: Minecraft

Products: anything from Apple, new Windows releases

Among programmers, programming languages are a pretty reliable topic.

