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Ask HN: Which book would you pick to re-read for the rest of your life?

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Re: Ask HN: Which book would you pick to re-read for the rest of your life?

#171

Post by throwawaaaaay17 »

pgoat wrote: post #35

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace: It includes so many sides of life: terrible misery and humor, both spicy and tender, sometimes simple, sometimes absurd, then politics, society, love, cynicism, - and poetry. And it predicted, by the way, shockingly many developments of today's (American) society. And the language, of course, is opulent and wild, it won't get boring any time soon.

pgoat - lol

Kind of a miserable book to reread a lot. The author killed himself, the one person I know of who figured it all out also killed himself

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend

Re: Ask HN: Which book would you pick to re-read for the rest of your life?

#172

Post by markus_zhang »

lcuff wrote: post #43

James Clavell's Shogun: The contrast between the Japanese and European cultures in 1600 are delicious, the characters and plot both well developed. I've read it at least a dozen times over four decades. As I age, I find I experience it very differently.

I read "The Noble House" and was fascinated by his writing. I'll probably read the rest of the Asian sagas.

Re: Ask HN: Which book would you pick to re-read for the rest of your life?

#174

Post by JonChesterfield »

Excession. Iain Banks.

The culture series explores a universe where machine intelligence has obsoleted mankind, mostly through the perspective of individual people interacting with earlier stage societies.

Excession explores that higher intelligence interacting with a power they cannot comprehend.

I read that each vacation as a reminder of where I want tech to end up.

Re: Ask HN: Which book would you pick to re-read for the rest of your life?

#177

Post by Kenneth39 »

Regardless of taste preferences, it seems most logical to take with you some massive franchise. At least because there is more action, more characters, and therefore more room for thought.

But as for me, I would prefer Erich Maria Remarque's Three Comrades. It's simple, it's short, but it has so much life in it.

Re: Ask HN: Which book would you pick to re-read for the rest of your life?

#179

Post by jesterson »

mikelevins wrote: post #170
jesterson wrote: post #148

Tao Te Ching. Keeps me in balance, probably had reread it countless times.

I stumbled across it when I was about twelve and made a habit of reading it fairly frequently for the following fifteen years or so. In my mid twenties I was in a graduate psychology program at a Buddhist college and one of my instructors was a Chinese Buddhist nun. She said that she knew of the Tao Te Ching, but had not read it, so I brought her a copy with the text in Chinese, as well as in English translation. On…

Quite interesting, thank you for sharing it.

> the answers were correct, of course, but they weren't useful unless you first did the work needed to correctly understand the corresponding questions.

That's a beautiful way to put it. Actually explains why some people find the books useless - they just didn't experience questions at the stage of their lives.

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