1. Fear, Thich Nhat Hanh, helps you cope with anything

2. The Stranger, Camus, Nihilism/Stoicism

3. The old man and the sea, Hemmingway

Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea - a gorgeous tale that brings to life the beauty of struggle and suffering.

Surprisingly the various plot lines are somewhat more nuanced than this description!

It’s like describing The Old Man And The Sea as “a book about a fishing trip”.

You'll finish it in an evening. I didn't get how it impacted me at first, but I knew that I was deeply affected by it.

It was what made me internalise the idea that struggle doesn't necessarily lead to external reward.

Almost 30,000 frames, painted by hand on glass, producing probably some of the most visually striking animation you are likely to see.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnZD6RBt9S0

I'm reading Greer's "Less" today, the most recent winner, and it is really pretty great.

If you haven't read Hemingway, "The Old Man and the Sea" is a pretty good starting point.

If you are into post-apocalyptic fiction at all, you need to read McCarthy's "The Road"

(Note, if you want Steinbeck - personally, I liked 'Of Mice and Men' a lot more than "The Grapes of Wrath" but both are good. Just saying I don't always side with the committee)

I mean, we can argue all day about what the best book is, but everything on that list is going to be both very good and usually quite accessible; you will note that Joyce is conspicuously absent, and a few of these are assigned reading in high school.

If you want to read stuff before that (and get free books from gutenberg!) I recommend you check out Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad. Both are excellent. "The end of his tether" is my favorite Conrad. "Roughing it" is my favorite Twain.

Letters to a Young Contrarian - Christopher Hitchens

The Old Man and the Sea - Hemmingway

Both gave me an appreciation of the writers that led me to read more of their work which ultimately made changes in my life. With Hitchens his work on religion had a profound impact on my world view, with Hemmingway it gave me an appreciation for good writing and story.

That would depend on what sort of writer you were and what sort of ideas you are trying to share (and, I guess, your audience). Most famously, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is written in a such a way that an 12 year old could read it and understand the plot.

re: ""The handwritten cards show that in 1925, decades before he wrote his novel The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway was borrowing Joshua Slocum’s memoir, Sailing Alone Around the World.""

A bit off topic, but Joshua Slocum’s book "Sailing Alone Around the World" sort-of changed my life after I read it when I was about 10. His writing was so good, I felt like I was sailing with him. I never did long distance cruising, but I owned capable sailboats for 24 years and sailed between SF and northern Mexico a fair amount.

Not off topic, reading good books is transformative and too many people in modern times substitute social media and generally reading crap on the web, "news", etc. Anyway, I enjoyed the reading lists in the article and am passing the article on to friends and family.

I read it as a teenager.

Googled it now because of your comment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea

Only now did I get to know this about it - from the Wikipedia article:

[ The Old Man and the Sea is a short novel written by the American author Ernest Hemingway in 1951 in Cuba, and published in 1952.[1] It was the last major work of fiction by Hemingway that was published during his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it tells the story of Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba.[2]

In 1953, The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to their awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954.[2] ]

I occasionally look through the business books section of a bookshop while waiting for my train home from work, and I'm always struck by the intellectual emptiness and embarrassing obsession with the latest fad of most of these books. I wonder how this sector of the book market got like this?

The Old Man and the Sea. People either love or hate this book, but it had a profound impact on me.

The Moral Animal, by Robert Wright. Made me consider how much of human behavior can be explained through evolutionary biology.

The Truth, by Neil Strauss. Incredibly vulnerable memoir that will make you reflect on your own relationships and what you want out of them.

In general, I think that you can learn much more from classic fiction than any new business book. Books that have been read & discussed for the past 50+ years have much more staying power and timelessness than a TED talk that led to a publishing deal.

Farmers have moderately high suicide rates: isolation, hard work, long hours, and the inability to just stop, as you state.

I read your account - and have read many others like it - and immediately start to think of farming more like Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea": hard work, rewarding, but there's little choice in getting on with the work.

Maybe one day. Maybe.

BTW, for those buying, unless you're a reporter, I highly recommend the large size. If you look at the notebooks of great men, most tend to be closer to the larger size. Michelson is the one that sticks in my mind, since I walked past those notebooks every day for 7 years.

I'm not sure why schools tend to fixate on that particular work. Hemingway may not be to your taste anyway but I much prefer A Farewell to Arms, A Moveable Feast, many of his short stories, etc.

If anyone is interested, this is how I created this twitter account automatically tweeting every single sentence of "The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway.

It is rather simple actually, i just used Excel > Google Spreadsheet (with its script tool) > Zapier > Buffer.

Excel to get a text copied from a PDF, concatenate (as it is divided by lines, rather than sentences), then separating it in sentences and finally dividing the sentences by 140 characters (one tweet). And yes, I did chose Hemingway because he uses short sentences.

Then I created two sheets on Google Drive Spreadsheet. One with all tweets on a single colunm. Other with the new tweets. I created a script to copy each tweet from the "all tweets" sheet to the "new tweets" sheet, one by one, on a appended row, every 2 hours.

This is because Zapier needs a "trigger" to perform its tasks. So the zap here is every new row added on "new tweets" sheet, it will send it to the my tweets line on Buffer.

Finally, I scheduled Buffer to tweet 12 times a day. A not so flooded schedule I guess, but still able to tweet the whole book (2017 tweets) in less than 6 months.

So, follow if you will, it was a fun way to find out what I could with Zapier actually.

I was amazed because it seemed to me that very little happened in the story. The plot, characters and character interactions are very simple. Yet, I couldn't put it down because it was so compellingly written. It was superficially simple, but incredibly deep because of what it deliberately left out. I'd never read anything like it.

I wish I could get across to you what you are missing because appreciating Hemingway introduced me to a different way of enjoying literature.

Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman

The Prince - Nicollo Machiavelli

Being Mortal - Atul Gawande

High Output Management - Andrew Grove

Elon Musk - Ashlee Vance

Red Plenty - Francis Spufford

The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway

Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari

The Four Agreements - Don Miguel Ruiz

The Inner Game of Tennis - W. Timothy Galleway

My Gita - Devdutt Pattanaik

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Istanbul - Orhan Pamuk

The Stranger - Albert Camus