Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 231 posts

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

#121

Post by eob »

zzzmarcus wrote: post #87
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?

Sometimes a work is best appreciated as a meditation on a particular feeling, and the evolution thereof. Catch-22 was like that for me.

It is the same humor, told over and over, but at the beginning of the book you're laughing while at the end of the book you're crying because the humor in the situation has turned to horror at the inhumanity of it.

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

#123

Post by Kaizyn »

mahmud wrote: post #25

The Story of Civilization; 11 volumes of pure joy. Will and Ariel Durant will make you fall in love with mankind. The most humanist take on history I have read. I read them over 6 years and I still live under the Durants' spell. Exquisite and delightful read. Muqadimat Ibn Khaldun. History, Sociology, Political Science, Scientific Empiricism, Theology, Superstition, Gossip, Leadership, Trivia .. it's everything. It f…

Albert Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples cites Ibn Khaldun and covers much the same territory of Islamic history. A read I would highly recomment to anyone.

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

#127

Post by trominos »

gnaritas wrote: post #111
KC8ZKF wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I first read it years ago, 1979 or 1980. It was the first time I ever thought about how math related to music, art and nature. I had never heard of recursion or self-reference, never programmed a machine to do anything, never thought about how it could be done, or why I might want to do it. So the book opened up new worlds for me. It changed the way I think.

How do you think you'd rate it today, already knowing about all those things? It's sitting on my table in my to read stack but I haven't managed to get to it yet.

My (potentially unpopular) feeling about GEB is that it's a book that explores some very interesting areas but that doesn't say all that much of interest itself. Reading it I felt like different sections could be put into two categories: (good and somewhat romantic) exposition about something interesting, and observations that seem profound until you think about them and realize that they're stupid (e.g. Hofstadter spends some time discussing how a Bach piece that ends up one semitone higher than it starts [and can therefore be repeated to form an infinite ascension] embodies self-referentiality and that this is the critical component of self-awareness, and that therefore the two are connected; of course, this is all just more-or-less meaningless fluff).

So I'd say skip it.

Post reply on HN