Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?

> Making friends with the wrong people can really mess up your life.

> And yet, I keep reading about this epidemic of loneliness...

Both things can be true at the same time, this is not a dichotomy.

At the same time, there's a old saying in my company that goes like "better alone than in bad company". Timeless wisdom, I guess.

On this matter, I was recently brought to pondering about the extinction of the so called "third place". The reasoning goes like this: people often used to have three places they attend the most: they home, their workplace, and the "third place".

The "third place" can be pretty much everything, and it's the place where socialising happen: for example, in many sitcoms it used to be some kind of bar/pub/restaurant: the McLaren's in HIMYM, "Arnold's" in Happy Days and another similar one whose name i can't remember in Friends. When I was a kid, it was a public park where we played soccer, and most kids just spent time there.

It seems this is going out of style or something?

Two things I noticed are:

- nowadays spending time in bars/pubs etc can get costly. Might be the general economic downturn, but it seems to be that going at the bar and having a beer or two used to be more accessible in the past (older folks are welcome to chime in and offer their perspective).

- pubs with larger university people tend to be more affordable, but the age band is quite restricted... Not formally, but somewhat implicitly.

> How is Wealth of Nations surprising for a modern reader?

Most people haven't read it, and tend to only reference things like "invisible hand", and skim/skip over a lot of Smith's 'moralizing'. His book before Wealth was after all The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments

If you don't want to read Ye Olde English, perhaps see Glory Liu's book Adam Smith’s America:

> Drawing on a trove of illuminating archival materials, Liu tells the story of how an unassuming Scottish philosopher captured the American imagination and played a leading role in shaping American economic and political ideas. She shows how Smith became known as the father of political economy in the nineteenth century and was firmly associated with free trade, and how, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the Chicago School of Economics transformed him into the preeminent theorist of self-interest and the miracle of free markets. Liu explores how a new generation of political theorists and public intellectuals has sought to recover Smith’s original intentions and restore his reputation as a moral philosopher.

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60015569-adam-smith-s-am...

Interview:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbQjDpUfJrs

She goes into the "Adam Smith Problem"; one paper on it:

> Adam Smith is best known for his economic theories that extoll the free market and individual self-interest. These ideas are the focus of Smith's second book, The Wealth of Nations. However, Smith also made large contributions to the fields of ethics and moral philosophy. Nearly 20 years prior to the publication of The Wealth of Nations, Smith first became a renowned moral philosopher when he published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith outlines the nature of morality. This morality, for Smith, places an emphasis upon sympathy and compassion, which are felt by imagining the plight of others through the impartial spectator. This impartial spectator is a mode of thinking that allows for one to adjudge the actions of others in relation to society's general attitudes toward that said action. Despite Smith's consummate rumination in both books, there seems to be a disconnect between Smith's moral philosophy, found within The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and his economic philosophy, found within The Wealth of Nations. How can Smith eulogize compassion and fellow feeling in one writing, while also holding that self-interest is necessary for the advancement of society in another? This disconnect is known as the Adam Smith Problem. The purpose of this project is to acknowledge the existence of The Adam Smith Problem by seeing it not as an attempt to undermine Smith's intellectual continuity, but as a challenge to reconcile the self-interested nature of humanity with higher moral standards accomplished through compassion. This reconciliation is accomplished through the notion of a liberal society in which an individual is both free to do anything that does not harm another and can expect society to maintain a higher set of moral standards through a justice system. Both wealth proliferation through self-interest and the upholding of higher values through compassion are predicates of this liberal society: the culmination of Smith's philosophy.

* https://quod.lib.umich.edu/u/umurj/16481002.0014.007/--adam-...

Great recommendation. I think the magic for me is that you begin to read a strange narrative of characters in 1920s Germany. It is a tall tale of alienation.

SPOLIER ALERT - Then, slowly, and in the end, convincingly, you come to know he is writing about you the reader. That is a miracle of writing and time and space.

P.S. I think Catcher in the Rye also does that, if you are late teen, but is a far inferior work, and does not bear reading if you are past 20.

I assume Hesse was familiar with Kafka and Freud.

GBG has that dream-like Kafkaesque frustration of having a concrete objective, but not be able to achieve it, even though it should be simple and tangible.

However, in GBG it is all meta: the game is unspecified, the objective is unspecified, the adorable miraculous winning play is unspecified. It is meta-Kafka, which is incredibly doubly frustrating...

SPOLIER ALERT: then, slowly, awkwardly, painfully, a realization creeps over you - GBG is life.

Really a tremendous literary achievement.

I agree - the comment tree has been baffling to me too, but rather amusing. I understand that some people disagree with your original post about using a particular book to sound people out, but I don't understand the harsh reactions to the method itself (it seems some were against the method rather than the book?). That kind of thing sounds to me like an interesting conversation starter or prompt!