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Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?

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Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?

#351

Post by teekert »

throwqwerty wrote: post #332
adaisadais wrote: post #251

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. My best friend in 7th grade had older siblings and they had all read Ender’s Game. He read it and told me I had to read it. Being the impressionable 7th grader (2006-7) that I was I gladly obliged. I found the book to be deeply fascinating. It opened my eyes to ‘new’ technology like ‘ansible’ (can communicate anywhere in the universe instantaneously) and really opened up my imaginati…

whenever someone mentions ender's game in a positive light i worry about that person https://web.archive.org/web/20070206121131/http://www4.ncsu.... tldr; orson scott card is a bigot and ender's game is nazi apologia. if you don't want to read the above it's been written about in numerous places (google "ender's game book fascism").

To me Ender's Game is about how it is almost impossible to not start to love something you know deeply. He couldn't both understand and wipe out the buggers, because understanding them meant seeing their beauty, so he had to be tricked. This touched me deeply.

Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?

#352

Post by pengaru »

cookie_monsta wrote: post #234
notjustanymike wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Player Piano is a great read for that as well

Anything by Vonnegut is worth a look

There are a bunch of short earlier works when he was writing for something like Women's Home Journal to pay the bills that one wouldn't go wrong skipping IMHO.

Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?

#353

Post by 0-_-0 »

bpanon wrote: post #305
0-_-0 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never thought of it like that before, that reading sci-fi at an early age opens up your imagination to what's possible, in your life and in the world. It definitely had that effect on me now that I think about it.

Bezos and Musk also were heavy sci-fi readers in their youth.

And now both are building rockets!

Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?

#354

Post by criddell »

Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. It's the first book I read that left me awestruck with an author's ability to write beautiful, meaningful prose about wonderful characters doing fascinating things. Up until that point I knew some writers were very efficient with their words, but Ondaatje's words held so much beauty.

I'm tempted to read it again to see if the impact is the same now that I'm 25 years older.

Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?

#355

Post by adamsea »

throwqwerty wrote: post #332
adaisadais wrote: post #251

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. My best friend in 7th grade had older siblings and they had all read Ender’s Game. He read it and told me I had to read it. Being the impressionable 7th grader (2006-7) that I was I gladly obliged. I found the book to be deeply fascinating. It opened my eyes to ‘new’ technology like ‘ansible’ (can communicate anywhere in the universe instantaneously) and really opened up my imaginati…

whenever someone mentions ender's game in a positive light i worry about that person https://web.archive.org/web/20070206121131/http://www4.ncsu.... tldr; orson scott card is a bigot and ender's game is nazi apologia. if you don't want to read the above it's been written about in numerous places (google "ender's game book fascism").

I agree. However as someone who read Enders Game as a kid but didn’t know any better I get some folks emotional attachment. I have fond memories though if I read it now there’s a good chance I’d hate it.

Yet I’d recommend those folks who are now adults and cite it as their most influential piece of fiction to go out and read more fiction! :).

Just to be snobby I’ll throw out Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Beautiful and contemplative.

Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?

#356

Post by mordae »

metroholografix wrote: post #224
Jkol wrote: post #103

Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, aka Three Body Problem. Explored existential topics in a way I've never encountered anywhere else. I truly believe that decades from now this series will be viewed as the LOTR of our time. I've recently been reading the Foundation series, and have found the concept of The Mule character to be incredibly eye opening. I can't say directly it's had a positive impact on my life but it…

I found all 3 books to be vastly overrated and mediocre at best. I would bet money that in 10 years, few will even remember them. The translation doesn't help, but the issues with the books go beyond it. It's obvious that Cixin Liu is not a good writer. The characters in TBP are cardboard cutouts and his pacing and framing of ideas awful. I feel that there is merit in his imagination but it'd be better presented in a…

Oh my god, Stanisław Lem.

I have read Summa Technologiae and everything is in there. And I mean everything. I have yet to see any new horizons for humanity he hasn't covered back in the sixties.

For me the single most distressing idea is that we might want to limit the speed of research in order to be able to integrate it, because the exponential growth would otherwise beat humanity's ability to adapt, leading to very turbulent situations.

Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?

#357

Post by DubiousPusher »

The collected short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Particularly: "The Library of Babel", "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and "The Immortal".

Italo Calvino's, "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller".

Melville's "Moby Dick" (I do not think this is a good book but it had a significant impact.)

Cormac McCarthy's, "Blood Meridian".

Together these works revealed a vanity in traditional intellectualism that is propped upon a facade of 19th century values which are easy to idolize. These works also made me keenly aware of the folly of of reactionary anti-intlectualism (which is easy to fall into once the shine has come off the collegiate apple). I know a lot of my contemporary peers did not need this same transition of values but I very much did.

It has become my life's philosophy to revel in the power of intellectual activity to reveal and rejoice in the beauty and complexity of life but to shun any intellectualism that will not connect itself to life in a fundamental way.

Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?

#358

Post by ctchocula »

kidintech wrote: post #41
bsenftner wrote: post #6

The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse, it probably one of the easiest Nobel Literature winners to read.

YMMV. I'm a big Hesse fan, and I tried reading The Glass Bead Game twice; couldn't get past 30-40% of it in either try, it was just too boring.

Same here. I was surprised, because Siddhartha was very easy reading, but I couldn't get past 60% of The Glass Bead Game either, because it was so dry.

Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?

#359

Post by yamoriyamori »

marnett wrote: post #185

Re-reading Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle after being in Silicon Valley after a while really illuminated the character-type I found myself surrounded by: emotionally detached geniuses absentmindedly ruining the world. His style of storytelling is just great. He leaves so much off the page with his short style that at the end you get that feeling you’ve experienced something profound that can’t quiet be put into words.

Sirens of Titan, and will echo Cat's Cradle.

In hindsight, it was such an odd realization to me, after being forced to read Slaughterhouse Five (and hated it) in high school, but then independently discovering and loving his other sci-fi/Absurdity heavy novels and how refreshing they were. And I might have missed them completely if I had been too stubborn.

Re: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?

#360

Post by pengaru »

sdedovic wrote: post #21

- Anna Karenina: Tolstoy knows people better than they know themselves - Brave New World: Aldous Huxley is a genius and a wordsmith - Dune: a sci-fi masterpiece, highly recommended to anyone into sci-fi - Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: not purely fiction but an amazing book I will surely re-read during my lifetime

Zen is worth a read to acquire a label for gumption traps alone. But I must admit I've probably never actually read the entire thing, whenever chapters went deep into Phaedrus land I probably skipped a few pages here and there.
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