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Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?

#481

Post by giraffe_lady »

test1235 wrote: post #347
binarynate wrote: post #298

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. It's a great read, and I learned a lot about the early years of the US. It's also the book that Lin-Manuel Miranda used as a reference for the musical, so I watched the musical for the first time after reading the book, and it blew me away.

>Lin-Manuel Miranda used as a reference for the musical I have to admit - this is a mention of a topic I would not have expected to see on this site in a million years, but yes, this musical is fantastically entertaining, even with a complete ignorance of American history.

At least in the US, which is overrepresented here, it's one of the most visible and successful pieces of middlebrow art in living memory. Why would you not expect to see it mentioned here.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?

#482

Post by JackFr »

muzani wrote: post #54
surajs wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you need limitations to be creative", who sold you that? this whole genre of "adversity builds character" type of advice is a backwards rationalisation at its purest. no, adversity does not build character but merely reveals it, just as limitations don't make you creative, rather creativity forces you to find newer ruts. also, you lost me at aristotle ;)

"who sold you that?" Specifically, David Mamet and Aaron Sorkin, who directly tells everyone to read Poetics. But also anyone who engages in poetry and lyrics; the whole idea of poetry is adding limits and seeing what you can do with it. Think of it like chords in music, or moves on a game. If you play tennis and anyone can just kick or throw the ball, that's not very fun.

Shakespeare’s sonnets. Shakespeare’s plays. Hell, everything ever written in iambic pentameter.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?

#483

Post by meowzero »

Being a new parent, I've read a lot of parenting books this year. One of my favorites was No Drama Discipline.

Having grown up in an authoritarian, Asian, tiger-parenting style, this book opened my eyes on a more gentler, warmer way to handle kids. I hope I can practice the methods in the book.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?

#484

Post by breckenedge »

“The First Salute” by Barbara Tuchman, her last book. It’s a deep dive into the politics, personalities and execution of the American revolution. The author is adept at finding the crucial stupid choices that lead to strategic collapse, often driven by pettiness and blindly following orthodoxy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/03945533...

Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?

#485

Post by walleeee »

cushychicken wrote: post #426
walleeee wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The light of his world filled his empty hands" is one of my favorite lines ever

Le Guin's prose is incredible. Her writing style exemplifies St. Exupery's quote about perfection being "...when there is nothing left to take away."

Agreed! Super spare in the best way

Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?

#486

Post by giraffe_lady »

DantesKite wrote: post #303
rtkaratekid wrote: post #184

“Crime and Punishment” was by far the best book I’ve read this year. Not that I necessarily agree with all the ideas presented by the author, but I found it to be written so well that I couldn’t put it down. Really didn’t expect that for classical literature.

I don't mean this in a cynical way, but how come you didn't expect a literary classic to be well-written?

I think a lot of americans enter adulthood only exposed to "classics" as older english-language works. The prose and especially dialog in those doesn't flow naturally to contemporary english speakers so feels a little difficult or stilted. Familiarity with it needs to be earned before making confident aesthetic judgements.

For the russian classics the translation trend for decades has been a little more terse and less ornate sentence-by-sentence. Which I think flows naturally and makes it feel more modern to contemporary english speakers. This often surprises people! But the russian classics can be a more fun, modern-feeling read than the english ones.

It's one of the advantages of translated works. They can be continually retranslated into the target language as its vernacular and cadence changes. Same-language works are stuck forever with the dialect of the time, and "paraphrases" into modern vernacular are met with much more skepticism than new translations are.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?

#487

Post by agotterer »

jkhdigital wrote: post #456

White Guilt , by Shelby Steele. Gave me the conceptual tools to actually understand the political dynamics of racism in the US, rather than mere activist propaganda (as offered by other, similarly titled books). Plus it’s really well-written, and enjoyable to read.

I would also recommend The Color of Law. Its about how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation. The content can be a little dry at time, but lots of interesting data and history.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?

#489

Post by ryanar »

meowzero wrote: post #483

Being a new parent, I've read a lot of parenting books this year. One of my favorites was No Drama Discipline. Having grown up in an authoritarian, Asian, tiger-parenting style, this book opened my eyes on a more gentler, warmer way to handle kids. I hope I can practice the methods in the book.

I read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother two years ago. Though the book has a bit of controversy around it, I really enjoyed seeing what Asian tiger-parenting looks like, and how it blew up in her face with her second daughter and how she had to adapt to a more American style of parenting. One of the interesting dilemmas was that when doing tiger-parenting in America, your children will eventually notice that their friends have parents who are way easier on them and that can lead to defying and undermining of authority. Whereas in China, because many parents adopt this style it is seen as normal.

Thanks for recommending No Drama Discipline, that sounds like a good read!

Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?

#490

Post by SuoDuanDao »

interpenetrate wrote: post #320
jeremiahbuckley wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have always seen greek tragedy as the precursor technology to the scientific method. If you didn’t know how the world worked you would advance confidently on a determined path, protected by the gods. If the gods turned their face from you…tragedy. But to me that’s another way of describing hypothesis and (failed) experiments. But before the scientific method was established, failure was related to the god’s scorn.…

> And, related, Christian forgiveness was critical technological advance to making scientific failures acceptable. So did it just take 1,600 years for that critical advance to express itself, or something? I judge Greek technology (and all technology is the result of scientific failures) to be greater than Medieval technology. Maybe you mean a "Protestant forgiveness?"

I would think it took 1600 years between a small group of weirdos intuiting that forgiveness was an important, perhaps even a key, virtue and society being organised in such a way as to actually be capable of expressing it in the realm of technology.
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