"The Ruler of the World" by Alexander Belyaev talks about the future where everyone can be controlled by radio waves.
Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?
281–290 of 599 posts
Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?
#282The Hannibal Lector series. I’ve found the world building Thomas Harris did to have a lot of parallels to real life (especially now).
Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?
#283Who has time for books nowadays? Some lovely tales so short u can read'em over coffee:
- Asimov's Profession, his best short story IMHO
- Mimsy Were the Borogoves - just reread it, it's as great as it was when I was a teen!
- Flowers to Algernon is sad, but a must
- Everything from Lem's Cyberiad
- Everything from Borjes` Fictions
Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?
#284I'm surprised that anybody talks about Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann). It's an incredible book. It changed my life (really).
Ah, I'm of two minds about this, because I felt like there maybe 30-50 pages of amazing, incredibly deep discussions, but then so many hundreds of pages where it felt like nothing was going on and I was just masochistically slogging through it. I actually feel this about quite a number of classics, especially those considered more "novels of ideas" (The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace come to mind). But even more so with Magic Mountain. I think Mann was trolling people when he said one has to read it a second time to "get" it. ;)
Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
The burgin and o’connor translation is by far the most excellent english version. chapter end-notes that tell you all the soviet jokes you missed.
Any familiarity with the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation? It's the only one available at my library, but if the Burgin/O'Connor translation is truly superior I'll just get it on Amazon.
my russian relatives and peers swear up and down that the burgin is the only one that’s even close to accurate in tone. So it’s the only one i've read.
there’s a kindle version too.
Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?
#286- Qur'an
- The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?
#287Brothers Karamotzov by Dostoevsky. Helped me see the relationship between suffering and happiness, between pain and pleasure. Made me realize that government is an exercise in making the best of a bad thing, given that so few people can handle power. Taught me ways that government can goad or torture people into submission. Confirmed my opinion that pseudointellectuals can fool quite a sizable audience. If this author spent so many years in the salt mines, I wonder how much of Russia's brain trust was decimated.
Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?
#288Hunter x Hunter by Yoshihiro Togashi - I recently started reading manga again and had heard about the series. It's an amazing feat of visual storytelling, jumping genres all the time, an incredible and vast world, and complex characters you can't help but love or hate. On the surface it looks fun and lighthearted but that facade is quickly thrown out to explore mature themes, ultimately culminating in an exploration…
Glad to see another manga fan. One Piece, Monster and of course HxH have all impacted me. For books, most people have already mentioned Dune, HHGTTG and The Culture series, so I'll have to add Flowers for Algernon.
Monster is magnificent. It’s a psychological thriller set in pre-unification Germany that tells the story of how a talented Japanese neurosurgeon deals with the repercussions of saving one human life over another. It’s a study of morality, human nature, and the origin of evil.
The anime is a bit dated now, but still holds up. Planning to rewatch it soon!
Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?
#289Dubliners by James Joyce
A collection of short stories united by the fact that characters have epiphanies.
Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just finished reading this and found it incredible how one book could reveal so much of myself to myself.
What did it reveal? I found it to be the most overrated book I've encountered so far. I'm positively inclined towards Buddhism but it was just cheap mysticism whenever it was time to say something meaningful. A trope of Hesse's in general...
> A trope of Hesse's in general...
Though I did enjoy Siddhartha, you touch on a point I agree with: Hesse recycles many of the same themes in all of his works, and Siddhartha just takes those themes a different geographic setting (which was intentional - Hesse's relationship with Germany had deteriorated, and he felt that any book set in Germany would be seen as commentary on the country). It seems that Siddhartha is often read in isolation from his other works and thus seen as primarily a commentary on Buddhism. While Hesse was very familiar with India (his grandfather had been a missionary there, and Hesse had traveled there), and he certainly had an affinity for the Indian spirituality that comes through in the book, the primary themes are very similar to the themes in Narcissus and Goldmund, Demian, Beneath the Wheel, Peter Camenzind, and of course the Glass Bead Game.
I'm a huge fan of Hesse and have read almost all of his works, and I think Siddhartha is quite a good one, but it's not a book about Buddhism; it's a coming of age tale with a protagonist navigating the tension between intellectual learning and experiential learning, and finding happiness from within. Which could describe many of Hesse's works...