Hacker News Books

"The Fault in Our Stars" by John Green,

"P.S. I Love You" by Cecelia Ahern,

"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee,

It is amusing what happens when you make games that are "realistic" in a way which isn't fun for players but is like real life, and get to see how the player base reacts.

Depression Quest springs to mind. Or way the book the protagonist of The Fault In Our Stars loves cuts off abruptly once the main character dies, which upsets her to no end.

> Not quite

Goodreads is kind of a weird space which shows that the popular vote is kind of useless. It’s hard to find a good book based on ratings. Everything seems to be either 4+ stars or garbage. The Fault in our Stars probably has a better rating than print copies of Hamlet. Actually, all classics seem to hover around 3.68 stars. Never 2. In fact, I don’t think any books published in the history of the world have a rating less than 3.

Anyways, the language you google in heavily affects recommendations. Searching in general is not a useful way to find anything cool. It’s much better to happen upon a good source of reviews or criticism which align with whatever gets your rocks off and settle for curated entertainment/art.

I didn't mind it at all, and I actually kinda liked the ending of Diamond Age in the way it subverted expectations of typical story telling. By the end of Diamond Age a lot of the questions you have in the earlier parts have been answered (what has happened to people, how they've developed, etc.) And a lot of story arcs have also blossomed and/or run their courses. The story itself is about Nell's coming of age and fulfillment of her potential. By the end it's obvious she's achieved both, and I liked that the novel didn't coddle the reader with a typical over the top happy ending where everyone achieves closure, most of the good people live, and every story line is tucked into bed carefully with a glass of warm milk by the bedside. I'm an adult, I don't need that all the time. The real world doesn't work that way, and real stories don't work that way.

One of the dividing lines I have personally for "good" versus "bad" art is whether or not it blooms or withers upon further thought. Diamond Age, I would say, definitely rewards the reader for further thought, because it's a deep and fascinating world with interesting characters and stories. True, the ending of the book doesn't provide complete closure, but to be honest if you want that you can have it just by making up your own ending. That's part of the fun of that book, is that it leaves it open for you to fill in the blanks afterward, and seemingly things looked like they might have worked out alright for Nell.

One of the best books at getting across the concept of not needing complete closure at the end of a book is The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, though that book primes the reader for it whereas Diamond Age doesn't.

As a Chinese person who grew up with the works of Jin Yong and Tolkien, I bristle a little bit at this comment.

For one, I think the marketing term is really used to explain Jin Yong's scope and impact, rather than a flat comparison of genre. In this sense, Jin Yong is, to Chinese literature, as impactful Tolkein is to Western literature.

It is a tradition within Chinese literature to prefer setting your work within our history. Romance of the Three Kingdoms is perhaps the most well-known in this vein. So to be critical of "creativity" here, is, I think a little bit short-sighted. It's like saying a Ken Burns documentary lacks the creativity of The Avengers, because magic powers and superheroes don't exist in the prior. Or trying to compare a book about the personal relationships of a cancer patient (I'm thinking "The Fault In Our Stars" specifically here) to the Harry Potter series. They are just fundamentally different things where creativity is executed in different ways. Who is to say that it is not equally powerful or creative to create characters that are deeply relatable, like Jin Yong's? In my opinion, his characters tended to ask morally difficult questions more often than Tolkein's.

Jin Yong wrote stories that were rooted in Chinese tradition, but his impact among young Chinese minds is greater than what even I can describe in a Hacker News comment. He wrote books that were about strength of self, moral character, freedom, and defiance in a time when the Chinese government strictly punished all of these things. I confess that I know nothing about Tolkein's backstory or history, but I can plainly see his impact. I think it is reasonable to say that Jin Yong's impact is as important and wide spread as Tolkein's.

> It's like saying a Ken Burns documentary lacks the creativity of The Avengers, because magic powers and superheroes don't exist in the prior. Or trying to compare a book about the personal relationships of a cancer patient (I'm thinking "The Fault In Our Stars" specifically here) to the Harry Potter series.

It sounds like the most obvious eng-lit analogy to Jin Yong in this respect would be T.H. White https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._H._White . White is possibly better regarded than Tolkien overall, though he's a bit less well-known. OTOH White tends to shy away from descriptions of fighting and supernatural conflict to a much greater extent than Tolkien, so maybe Jin Yong (whom I don't know at all) is more like Tolkien in that respect.