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

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

#621

Post by binarin »

The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan - spent the most time reading it and got the most value from it. This book series is my device for the language learning. It was translated into Russian so painfully slow I've just forced myself to read it in English, learning the vocabulary and grammar on the way. Later I did it intentionally with Dutch, and now I'm going to do the same with Spanish.

It's so big you can reread it as many times as you want and still be surprised by the details you no longer remember. In the end I've read it 2 times in Russian, 3 times in English and 1 time in Dutch - and I'm not going to stop.

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

#622

Post by melody_calling »

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell.

Taught me everything I needed to know about being a painter.

Perhaps not the 'best' book ever, but certainly one of the most impactful for me as a common-or-garden 18-year-old realising for the first time that our political and economic systems aren't some sort of almighty edict and could be critiqued.

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

#623

Post by makeworld »

bradleyy wrote: post #597
tb_technical wrote: post #142

"The best book I've ever read was Atlas Shrugged in 8th grade. Changed my life." Not because I remember anything about it, or believe anything it espouses, or even like it all that much, but because it's a useful filter for obnoxious people in meatspace. If someone I don't know too well asks me what my favorite book is, I say Atlas Shrugged. If they react inappropriately, I'll be cordial and treat them with respect,…

I just have to say, "A Canticle for Leibowitz" shook me for a really, really long time afterwards. I'm not saying it's a bad book, it's quite thought provoking, but I took about 99 points of psychic damage from it.

Why is that?

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

#625

Post by tb_technical »

bee_rider wrote: post #547
swasheck wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my feeling is that it's a "badge" book and by that i mean, you wear it as a badge in order to signal your fluency in pro/anti objectivism conversations. conversations about it remind me of my post-high school experiences with peers while discussing movies. people always chose apocalypse now, the crying game, or the usual suspects as the "best movie in recent memory" and the reasoning was generally because they wanted…

IMO a piece of fiction works better as a “badge” in this sense if it can be defended as a really good work of art in-and-of itself, without the message behind it. Part of the game is that being the one to obviously introduce ideology into the discussion is a bad opening move. Like what if the other party doesn’t take the political bait and starts talking about train sex or whatever?

If someone starts talking about train sex, the ensuing conversation is going to be an absolute riot

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

#626

Post by llamaimperative »

lolinder wrote: post #478
llamaimperative wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about "tests with an obviously high risk of systematic, invisible false negatives are bad"

Is it a false negative if the point of the test is to filter out people who will immediately assume that anyone who likes Atlas Shrugged is someone that they don't want to know better? It's not a filter I would choose to use, I'm just saying that OP isn't providing a failure case—the filter is still doing its job there.

Yeah I guess if their filter is literally "will this person stop talking to me if I like Atlas Shrugged" and not actually something like "will this person engage in respectful disagreement with me."

Of course the first test is useless, so I suspect they're trying and failing to produce the second test.

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

#627

Post by hermitcrab »

bwb wrote: post #562
hermitcrab wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also does a very good history podcast, 'Empire': https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/empire/id1639561921

Ah good to hear, I just downloaded some episodes last month and need to get on that :) And bought his new book! Do you have a fav of his?

I haven't read any of his books, yet. But I probably will.

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

#628

Post by imglorp »

mindcrime wrote: post #376
brcmthrowaway wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do people read Neuromancer its just technobabble

A lot of the appeal is aesthetic / stylistic. Yes it's "hard to read" compared to more "traditional" works, but it has its own unique appeal... an appeal that resonates with some people and not-so-much with others.

Another part is that Gibson was the first to put together cyberpunk as a genre and an aesthetic and a little dystopian futurism. It was truly the first that spawned a number of now familiar ideas like AIs battling firewall and attack and VR as a UX method.

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

#629

Post by giraffe_lady »

heyjamesknight wrote: post #410
cactacea wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The best book I've ever read was Atlas Shrugged in 8th grade. Changed my life." "huh, ok" > Really, I'm just looking for people who won't jump down my throat on a faux pas. I think you're dismissing the people such as myself that would note you as an idiot without comment and move on wanting nothing to do with you. Edit: tests and trick questions with people you just met is an ineffective way to navigate the world…

> I think you're dismissing the people such as myself that would note you as an idiot without comment and move on wanting nothing to do with you. Sounds to me like you failed the test.

Yeah you gotta go around assuming that anyone might lie to you about their favorite book in order to use your reaction to determine something about your personality. This behavior is normal and good.

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

#630

Post by dvaun »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #442
allturtles wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These threads often end up, with everyone trying to prove they are literary scholars I see a wide variety of answers ITT. Some are very "literary" fiction e.g. Ulysses , others are lighter fare like Harry Potter , there's also a wide variety of non-fiction works from self-help to electronics manuals to philosophy. Have you considered that other people might actually have different tastes than you, and aren't trying…

C'mon. This is HN. People are trying to posture and prove all kinds of things. Of course folks have different tastes (I'm the redneck engineer, in my family. Most of my other siblings think James Joyce is da thang , but they are also into posturing). But it also intimidates folks into not sharing some really good stuff.

> People are trying to posture and prove all kinds of things.

I would hope that it’s a mixture of personalities posting here, rather than a subset of people who are following some personal agenda.

This crowd is hopefully mature enough to avoid this type of behavior.

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