Harry Potter; Tales of Pirx the Pilot (Stanislaw Lem)
If you haven't read "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", you're in for a treat: http://hpmor.com/
Ask HN: What literature do you read?
11–20 of 92 posts
Re: Ask HN: What literature do you read?
#12Judas Unchained
Re: Ask HN: What literature do you read?
#13I recently started Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. From what I understand, in the US the book is viewed as a must-read for students, but it's much less known here in Europe.
Re: Ask HN: What literature do you read?
#14Kafka. Catch 22. Orwell. Hemingway. Plato. But mostly pathology these days.
Re: Ask HN: What literature do you read?
#15Re: Ask HN: What literature do you read?
#16H.P. Lovecraft :)
Re: Ask HN: What literature do you read?
#17How about David Foster Wallace? Also China Miéville and Haruki Murakami.
Re: Ask HN: What literature do you read?
#18The Crying of Lot 49 -- Thomas Pynchon
Re: Ask HN: What literature do you read?
#19I recently started Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. From what I understand, in the US the book is viewed as a must-read for students, but it's much less known here in Europe.
I don't think that one is really read in schools. We did read an Ayn Rand book in my high school (in Texas), but it was Anthem, a much shorter novella, with a more general theme of future-utopia-is-actuallly-dystopia, ending with a paean to individualism. It bears some similarities to a more recent book, The Giver, which is also popular as young-adult literature.
I haven't read her other books, but from a literary perspective, Anthem has the same problem that I gather her other works have, just in miniature: there is a core of an actual novel there and it's starting to build an interesting world and characters, but then at some point it degenerates into a pages-and-pages-long non-fiction essay in Ayn Rand's voice pasted into the book, with a pretty flimsy excuse for what these pages of text are doing in a novel (I think in Anthem it's the character thinking out loud or something).
Re: Ask HN: What literature do you read?
#20I've been chewing through some Neil Stephenson books lately. I think a lot of his earlier work was somewhat prescient (in terms of general themes) and some of his newer work bring up some interesting societal points especially about the role of government with regards to technology. Another theme that I feel is particularly relevant lately is the bifurcation of the technically skilled (or even aware) and the technically unskilled. He puts up an interesting split in Anathema which wittingly or not might well represent a lot of the current hacker/tech-elite discussion in society at large. Anathema is well worth a read and Cryptonomicon is just plain fun (perhaps more relevant lately than it was in its own time).