Hacker News Books

I love this thread. I've been a long time HN lurker, but only fairly recently did I create an account and start contributing.

See the honesty and emotion on these comments really makes me feel I'm hanging out with a good bunch of people. It's so refreshing compared to the toxic communities of the other large social sites.

I'm a cryer. I cry a lot, I'm also clinically depressed with social anxiety, which makes social interaction difficult, so my emotional are mostly on the surface anyway. Crying for me is the best form of emotional release. I cry at the big ending in films, I cry at the end of amazing books (The Green Mile totally destroyed me, I was in business class on a plane at the time, blubbering my eyes out...).

On balance though, I also get very angry often. I guess you can't have one without the other...

For me - I prefer fiction audiobooks over non-fiction. Non-fiction often requires re-reading certain paragraphs or flicking between sections to refresh my memory on certain points. But with a good fiction book I can just relax and let the words wash over me and get lost in the story.

My favourite book on Audible is The Green Mile by Stephen King read by Frank Muller. It's an experience that can't be matched by a physical book. The narration is top notch and you feel really invested in the story.

A bit off-topic but as an aspiring author I’m blown away by serial writers, after reading Stephen King talk about it in his intro to the Green Mile, which was serialised.

Today, we could write an entire draft novel and discover major plot holes and smooth them out before a single paragraph makes its way into the public eye.

Serial writers have effectively written in stone, and cast their words out to the world. They have to hope they haven’t inadvertently painted themselves into a corner.

> Meanwhile, there is tremendous potential for abuse and fraud by those giving out the basic jobs. A long running program whose criteria for success is "employ a lot of people at marginally useful things" is a large pile of money just waiting to be spent on making improvements that especially benefit the connected few.

A point well-illustrated, in fiction, in The Green Mile.

Even if you just consider the film classics based on his books (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Shining), he'll have staying power as people will find his books through the films.

Then there's the cultural impact he's had. Stranger Things was basically a Stephen King novel and even directly name-dropped him.