Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books. • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books.

#81

Post by spudlyo » Mon, Oct 12, 2009, 4:20 AM UTC

Burning Chrome, William Gibson

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Re: Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books.

#82

Post by defen » Mon, Oct 12, 2009, 4:26 AM UTC

Tough to pick just two. For now I would say:

War And Peace (Pevear & Volokhonsky translation)

Dune

Re: Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books.

#83

Post by chickamade » Mon, Oct 12, 2009, 4:31 AM UTC

The Analects of Confucius

Re: Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books.

#84

Post by jeremyw » Mon, Oct 12, 2009, 4:39 AM UTC

unalone wrote: post #14

House of Leaves - What literature should be. Innovative both in design and in prose. It's very long but you can finish it in a maddening evening, it's hilarious, it's terrifying. Along with Steven King's It , one of two books to give me nightmares. Incredibly complex. It's a puzzle I still haven't fully solved. I consider it the first modern-era novel, and expect others will come like it. When I wrote a novel a year…

Unalone's enjoyment of Finnegans Wake notwithstanding, deciphering the footnotes and expository ultimately doesn't have the upside that learning the English of Shakespeare and Chaucer do.

I'd suggest readers try Joyce's wonderful short stories, then making an assault on Ulysses. Nabokov, a Joyce admirer, called Wake, "that petrified superpun."

Re: Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books.

#85

Post by vital101 » Mon, Oct 12, 2009, 4:44 AM UTC

Atlas Shrugged American Gods

Re: Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books.

#86

Post by akeefer » Mon, Oct 12, 2009, 4:54 AM UTC

The Windup Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami

Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson

. . . and really, basically anything else by either of them.

Re: Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books.

#87

Post by zzzmarcus » Mon, Oct 12, 2009, 5:02 AM UTC

fogus wrote: post #19

"House of Leaves" by Mark Z Danielewski and Catch-22 by Josepf Heller

Catch-22? That book drove me absolutely insane. I think I could appreciate the point but after awhile it was like the same joke(?) about the absurdity of the world being told 222 times in a row.

What makes you list it as one of your top two?

Re: Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books.

#88

Post by kirubakaran » Mon, Oct 12, 2009, 5:04 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #36

My Family and Other Animals Medieval Technology and Social Change

'Civilisation ~Kenneth Clark' comes #3 or later?

Re: Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books.

#89

Post by StevenHodson » Mon, Oct 12, 2009, 5:07 AM UTC

Time Enough for Love - Robert Heinlein, Small is Beautiful - E.F. Schumacher

Re: Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books.

#90

Post by sjs382 » Mon, Oct 12, 2009, 5:08 AM UTC

The Last of the Savages by Jay McInerney Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis