A lot of that would presumably have already been read by students taking this class, especially the Shakespearian tragedies and Moby Dick and perhaps Dante's Inferno.

Moby Dick might be a place to start. A popular reading is that it is an examination of the impossibility to understand large things.

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

A Gamut of Games - Sid Sackson

Good Math - Mark Chu-Carroll

Great book, but the comparison to Moby Dick makes no sense.

It's a cool idea but the thought of receiving 600 emails just to read Moby Dick is somehow making me very anxious.

They never once said they were not using existing machines to do these tests, not once, they only spoke about the quantity of the sample needed. Using the same analogy, saying I have a great story to tell you but then reading Moby Dick isn't necessarily cheating, because Moby Dick is a great story :).

I'm pretty sure after reading Moby Dick that I do not want to be hired by Ahab. It doesn't really turn out well for most of the crew.

This is a free audiobook of Moby Dick I listen to in the car when NPR is too gloomy. I have listened to it a lot lately.
https://librivox.org/moby-dick-by-herman-melville/

Yes, you can learn more from Moby Dick than 90% of the books on this list.

Moby Dick is one of my all time favorite classics. Should appeal to engineers and entrepreneurs as well as being a great read. The form is very unlike other classics of its period.

How quickly will Moby Dick be the most read book on this site....

Moby Dick probably would have sold more early on if it weren't interleaved with chapters from a whaling ship operating handbook.

Agreed! Though it's still about 80 pages. If you want to experience Moby Dick but don't feel like a strong reader or haven't found a way to enjoy this kind of literature, I'd recommend the audiobook while you're driving or doing something else for extended periods. The language is meant to wash over you and feel overwhelming.

I did not like the Hobbit, but other door-stop books like Moby Dick and Crime and Punishment I really have enjoyed. Seems stupid to stop because you didn't like one book. Would you write off movies if the first one you saw were bad?

I enjoy reading a good book but a large book (think Moby Dick) won't take me much more than a couple weeks at most reading regularly every day. I have no idea how to read a book for that long... that seems to indicate to me that perhaps you just read slower?

I struggle with this since I also want to read something I enjoy and not make it a chore. I tried reading Moby Dick recently and was so disappointed. I wanted to read the original but the old English threw me off and I found it boring.

Found a sample, here are the first 50 pages of Moby Dick: https://s3.amazonaws.com/pagedmedia/pagedjs/examples/index.h...

Watchmen (Alan Moore)

Origins of Form (Christopher Williams)

Starship & The Canoe (Kenneth Brower)

The Size of Lumber (Nicholson Baker)

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Shunryu Suzuki)

Deschooling Society (Ivan Illich)

Moby Dick (Herman Melville)

Bolo'Bolo (P.M.)

Le Ton beau de Marot (Douglas Hofstadter)

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (James Lovelock)

Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation (Umberto Eco)

Neuromancer (William Gibson)

The Intelligent Investor (Benjamin Graham)

Don Quixote (Miguel Cervantes)

I learned patience reading Moby Dick at 14, after trying and failing at 12. I am now a very patient person. And I treasure the concept of the end of a sentence.

I heartily recommend "In The Heart Of The Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex" if anyone is interested in learning more about Nantucket whaling. It is a captivating true story that talks about the characters and culture involved in the whaling community. It is also apparently the story that inspired Melville to write Moby Dick.

none. i rather spend my time outside of work on something else. currently reading the brothers karamazov and moby dick.

Fiction and philosophical nonfiction has far more potential to affect one's life than a pop-science book, at least in my experience.

Some of my favorites:

- Moby Dick. Probably the single greatest work of American literature, in my opinion of course.

- Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche. An excellent primer to his thought. Any of his books are worth reading, though.

- The Ego and Its Own, Stirner. An under-appreciated philosopher who can really shake up your foundations.

- Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Borges. His favorite short story of mine. It serves as a very effective metaphor for the power of fiction.

- Anything by Joseph Conrad, although I particularly recommend The Secret Sharer.

I tried reading Moby Dick several times and gave up because I felt a similar reaction to the prose. I finally opted for an audiobook version that was reviewed well for its lively narration. I loved it and subsequently bought a copy to reread certain passages. It's really a great example of literary engineering.

So, uh, I haven't actually read 'Moby Dick' in paper. I read almost everything on the kindle, so I'm not always as conscious of the 'heft' of a book as I might be. It's a wonderful book, and really grabbed me to the point where I couldn't put it down, and I finished it rather quickly and with little effort because of that.

Anyhow, I remember the first time I mentioned that it was a reasonably fast, light read to someone else, and they reacted like I had asked them to read "Atlas Shrugged" or something. Like, apparently, reading anything longer than a medium post is a whole lot of effort for most people, even if it's actually good.

I think about this every time a thin person tells me how easy it is to lose weight just by avoiding certain foods and, you know, eating a reasonable amount of said foods, or "just being more mindful." "It's easy" - I mean, I'm sure it is easy for you, and that's great! But some of us need to monitor our intake. I mean, I'll sit there and scarf a pound of pecans in a sitting, if I don't expend significant will to stop myself, and at what, 200 calories an ounce, I don't have to do that often to remain fat. And fruit juice? I think a significant portion of my gut is composed of that delicious fresh orange juice that the local taquaria will squeeze for you (and serve in those giant cups)

Of course, I don't yet know if monitoring my calories in and out will be enough to actually get myself to a reasonable size or not. I've only been doing it for two weeks or so. But I have been a vegitarian, and in and of itself, that doesn't solve the problem.

lol. but the third time you read Moby Dick those are the best parts.

loose fish vs fast fish is top of the line 19th century humor.

i admit i was bored to tears by those sections on the first read.

honestly i think it just isn’t a great read for people in their teens/20s as the world weariness, fatalism, and obsession with an imperfect understanding of an obscure expertise is something better appreciated as one ages.

Amazing book and you totally nailed the reason why it's my all-time favorite. It's a monster story where the book itself is the monster. Instead of seeing the monster through the words of the characters, the reader holds it in their own hands. In our insane pursuit of reading and understanding this monstrous book we become a little bit like Ahab himself by the end. It gives you an impression of something huge lurking behind the pages, something bigger than your comprehension. The pursuit of God, or the Truth, or whatever big universal thing you believe in, is such a huge and terrifying endeavor that it will break a human being if we are too honest about it. Moby Dick is truly an awe-inspiring experience. Also, don't skip the whaling chapters. They are secretly the best parts of the book.

Another book that gives off very similar vibes is Don DeLillo's Underworld.

Everyone should read Moby Dick . If the traditional praise is not enough, it is about how hard it is to understand. Code, tech, government, whales, or anything large. I identified with Ahab, mostly because he vacillates between confidence of knowing and fear of unknowing. It is just like working on a large software project.

Agreed. I would not find this kind of life hack approach to reading satisfying. On occasion certainly but I pick up a book explicitly to inhabit it. I don't pick up books I don't wish to become apart of and have become apart of me. The first 200 pages of Moby Dick were phenomenal to me. The book really drops off when the chapters atomize into non-fiction and lose the story. But I was not going to miss one word of what happened to the Pequod or the friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg. It doesn't really pick that story up as I'd like but I wasn't going to risk it. Parts of 'Les Miserables' felt like a slog but it was worth it to truly inhabit the world. I'll probably never read a 1,000+ novel ever again but I wouldn't have read it any other way.

For a reference book sure. They are often best digested out of order.

Personally I prefer authors from the 1920s: Fitzgerald, Hemingway and the like. But Moby Dick is a combination of long, a very American (New England) setting from a certain period in whaling, and a memorable story of obsession. I read it fairly recently and it’s actually a pretty good read. Fell free to start skimming when Melville gets into one of his long-winded encyclopedic descriptions of some whaling topic.

> that has stubbornly been able to avoid being conquered by the major empires in world history.

Was reading Moby Dick the other day and came across this excerpt...

'Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.

WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.

BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN.'

The more things change...

> But here we are, 2+ Trillion burned and nothing to show for it.

Other than another grateful nation basking in the glow of the democracy we've bestowed upon them. Mission accomplished.

I mean if you take a reductive tack like that then you can say the plot of Moby Dick is just that a certain sea captain chases a whale around and some poor simp is along for the ride.

The plot isn't the sum of these works, it is the scaffolding provided so that the author can explore various themes and theses.

Wow, awesome find. People have been worried about this problem forever it seems, not just in our modern world. But look how far we've fallen. If he thought novels were bad, I can't imagine what he'd think of our amusements and distractions today.

He wrote that in 1839, just 12 years before Moby Dick was published. Wonder what he thought of that fiction book, generally considered to be one of, if not the, best English language novels written.

What's particularly interesting, and was unknown to me, was that 'The Great Gatsby' was not an immediate success. I was similarly surprised when I read that 'Moby Dick' had an initial print run of 500 copies and that only 3215 copies were sold during Melville's lifetime [0]. I guess authors get second chances.

[0] https://www.biblio.com/moby-dick-by-melville-herman/work/550...

In the same logic, don't read Moby Dick unless you plan to hunt and kill a whale.

On occasion I have argued that dolphins are fish, despite being air breathing mammals, using an argument quite similar to this. The use of the word 'fish' to describe animals that live in the water predates biologists deciding they'd redefine the term unilaterally for the rest of society. The novel Moby Dick explains in detail the difference between whales and true fish, but then calls whales 'fish' in the rest of the book anyway.

If this line of argument doesn't work, I point out that in a phylogenetic/cladistic nomenclature, all tetrapods are fish and dolphins are tetrapods, therefore dolphins are fish (and so are we.) Of course in the traditional nomenclature 'fish' is a paraphyletic group that specifically excludes tetrapods.

Also truckstop hierarchy = social hierarchy in places where truckers exit the road to rest and receive services; and Moby Dick = an 1851 novel by Herman Melville. But "dish" is probably the trickiest thing here.

It was a wicked quote:

> In his poem “Each June I Made a Promise Sober,” Ogden Nash voiced the common cry of those who work in bookstores or libraries or live otherwise surrounded: so many books, so little time! Always the guilt-inducing pile of unread books, eyeing us like neglected pets. He lists some of the classics he hasn’t read—my own list includes, I blush to say, Moby Dick, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, The Faerie Queen, etc. etc. etc. etc.—and concludes:

“So every summer I truly intend /
My intellectual sloth to end /
And every summer for years and years /
I’ve read Sherlock Holmes and The Three Musketeers.”

Sources: https://www.bookbarnniantic.com/single-post/2014/05/24/74-RE...

Nash, Ogden. "Each June I Made a Promise Sober," The New York Times Book Review (June 7, 1953), 1.

As someone who has read Moby Dick front to back I can agree with this argument. I had a colleague once, really bright engineer but not as steadfast as I was at the time. I suggested he read this amazing novel and he instead opted for the book on tape. During a long drive he almost died from boredom. Literally! He almost fell asleep at the wheel. While he disagreed with me that manually reading the book was the optimal approach he was not trying to make things more complex. He was merely trying to take the easy way out. This grave mistake almost cost him his life. Consider this tale next time you are thinking about not putting in some work!

Wow!

I consider myself lucky that I practically do not have to deal with C++, but if I were a C++ kind of person, right now I would deeply appreciate how much hard work goes into a tool like this. [1]

In order to be any good, it has to be even more clever than the compiler, at least in a few ways.

And I have a hunch that in the field of programming languages that are used these days, C++ is probably not the easiest one to write such an analyzer for. ;-)

TL;DR - Respect! I can only - but vividly - imagine how hard it must be to create a tool like this.

[1] I have mixed feelings regarding C++, because I have only used it in tiny doses. I treat the language the same way I would treat a bear, if one suddenly appeared: Keep my distance, avoid any sudden motions, but also, under no circumstances, dare I turn my back on it because of the slight chance that it might come after me eventually. I do not actively dislike C++, I just have not found the time to learn it, and I get the impression that if I really want to learn it, it will take much more time than I can currently afford to invest. Maybe some day it will come to pass (that will be a good day also to finally read Moby Dick all the way through from end to end.)

A good editor can handle them without any trouble. I just downloaded Moby Dick from Project Gutenberg and opened it in Emacs. It opened instantly, I could immediately go the end (line 22333), scroll around, count the words (there are around 222617), count the ocurrences of the word 'whether' (there are 91, the last of which is on line 21769), make a change somewhere in the middle. All of this is instant.

You can do all that instantly in Vim too (... and I just checked to make sure). A megabyte of text is just not a lot of text for a good editor.

"If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really."

Then who but academics--or maybe graduate students--can read War and Peace, The Man Without Qualities, In Search of Lost Time (or really, most of its constituent books), Moby Dick, etc.?

And I can imagine being "partial" to calling myself a reader, but "amicable" seems the wrong word.

>sailing terminology

I've never been sailing but had no problem with the terminology because I read books. Books reflecting our civilization's Greco-Roman and Anglo-American historical ties to seafaring.

It's a form of cultural genocide to foment linguistic amnesia regarding the source domain for so many metaphors and narratives.

Nice use of "the Bronx" as a dog whistle for 'muh poor helpless minority yoof chilldrunz'. Guess what, smart kids of any color can read Treasure Island. Even in the Bronx, you can check out a copy of Moby Dick and 20000 Leagues Under the Sea. Even in landlocked Iowa, HS classes read Homer's Oddesy and Kon-Tiki.

Your unreasonable, emotional bleating about how we all need to lower our expectaions of non-sailing children is insulting to those of use who bothered to learn everything we could in spite of divorce, poverty, etc. and came out ahead.

Your unkind assumptions are full of holes and don't hold water; they are not seaworthy and should be scuttled forthwith.

The idea one can only learn about nautical terminology by literally being on the water is asinine and untrue. If you can't learn sailing terminology except by acutally sailing, you lack the capacity for abstract thought required for scholastic aptitude.

Removing sailing terminology is a way to subsidize illiteracy and pretend non-sailing kids are so stupid they need to be coddled with softened expectations.

Moby Dick is one of the greatest English works. Herman Melville, did not, in fact, get any second chance during his lifetime. My understanding is that except for "Bartleby the Scrivener", the reception for Moby Dick embittered him into not trying much afterwards. Bartleby might be autobiographical, that Melville "would prefer not to" attempt any works from then on.

His obituary in the New York Times is telling (Oct 2 1891) [1] - he was already considered an obscure trivia at the time. (The Sept 29 obituary notice actually misspelt Moby Dick.)

"There has died and been buried in this city, during the current week, at an advanced age, a man who is so little known, even by name, to the generation now in the vigor of life that only one newspaper contained an obituary account of him, and this was but of three or four lines. Yet forty years ago the appearance of a new book by Herman Melville was esteemed a literary event, not only throughout his own country, but so far as the English-speaking race extended."

Melville's revival came in 1919, long afterwards.

[1] http://www.melville.org/hmobit.htm

My 11 year old son did not want me to get him a story book. Instead he wanted a programming book, so we bought "Hello Python" by Anthony Briggs from a bookstore. The Amazon reviews for it ended up not so good, so we'll see how it goes: http://www.amazon.com/Hello-Python-Anthony-S-Briggs/dp/19351...

Anyway, I've recently read (my Kindle list):

    * Curious Myths of the Middles Ages by S. Baring-Gould
    * American Gods by Neil Gaiman
    * Instrumentalities of the Night series by Glen Cook
    * The Dragon Never Sleeps by Glen Cook
    * Many HP Lovecraft stories which I hadn't already read (I bought HP Lovecraft Complete Fiction)
    * Grimm's Fairy Tales
    * Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome by Apicius
    * Takeshi Kovacs series by Richard K. Morgan
    * A Fire in the Sun (Budayeen series) by George Alec Effinger
    * Wool Omnibus by Hugh Howey
    * Hunted (Iron Druid Chronicles) by Kevin Hearne
    * Catspaw by Joan D. Vinge

Also I've been watching videos more than reading recently:

    * Peaky Blinders
    * Top Gear
    * Skins
    * Grimm (where everyone in Portland lives in restored craftsman style homes and uses devices from Apple)
    * The Grand Budapest Hotel
    * Constantine
    * Moby Dick (Patrick Stewart version)

As with other commenters, I don't think this is too bad. A quick reader could easily get through the Shakespeare in an afternoon (and surely most people taking this course would probably have read or seen them before anyway...), and some of the rest are quite short.

The hardest book there, I would say, is "The Brothers Karamazov", which is a masterpiece with a little of everything in it, but it is rather dense in the way that Russian novels, and those by Dostoevsky in particular, tend to be. "Moby Dick" is also quite a weighty tome, but it's not a particularly difficult one to get through. I have no idea about the opera libretti or what miseries having to read them might entail.

What a wonderful selection, though, regardless (and lovely to see one of T.S. Eliot's Greek tragedies in there).

This a very personal opinion based on some popular classic book lists like those found on 4chan /lit/ etc.
(Note: All books are new and I calculated the price from Book Depository [0], you might be able to purchase more from Better World Books [1]):

- The Holy Bible
- Moby Dick by Melville
- The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
- The Master And Margarita by Bulgakov
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- The Iliad by Homer
- The Odyssey by Homer
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandra Dumas
- The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler
- The Qur'an
- The Prince by Machiavelli
- The Art of War by Sun Tzu
- Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
- The Confessions by Saint Augustine
- Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
- We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
- The Book Of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
- The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric
- Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andric
- Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
- Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque
- The Divine Comedy by Dante

--- This list totals out at 311.14EUR and has 23 books.
[0] - https://www.bookdepository.com/
[1] - https://www.betterworldbooks.com/

I reread Moby Dick as an adult within the last couple years. Found it far more interesting than I did when I was young. The book plays on narration in far more complex ways than I remembered.

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Seriously. Read it. The horrors of war leaked into your brain through a sci-fi novel. If you enjoy that, try Player Piano, a moral discourse on technology and its social effects. Even though it is old, the social complications are familiar.

To keep your brain busy, anything by Umberto Eco, but this would be my order: Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before.

Hard to choose one, but others haven't so neither will I.

Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. It's the War and Peace of the second world war. All aspects of society and human relations are touched upon in profound ways. It's been a long time since my last (re)read; a lot of the particulars are missing from my brain now. A book of ideas, punctuated with the starkness of WWII.

Moby Dick - mentioning this one always raises some people's ire, I don't know why. I fall into the language, the story is gripping, the long side paths into biology, ships, and so on give so much insight into either life of the time, or scientific understanding of the time. It's an attempt at a great novel. We can argue about whether it succeeds, but the attempt is breathtaking to watch.

Robert Penn Warren's All the Kings men. It's a great story of political corruption and ambition in the southern US, the characters are so well done. A story of power. A book of ideas; it discusses original sin, how people are influenced by their circumstance, subjective morality, and much more.

Zola's Germinal. Probably my desert island book. I've read it so many times. A soul crushing portrait of life as a miner in France. I'm sitting here typing, getting tears in my eye just over the poor donkey that lived it's entire life in the mine, and that is probably one of the least sad things in the book.

Les Miserables. What is there to say about this one? History, Paris, the nature of love, redemption, politics, justice, everything important to being human is in this book.

One thing I've been noticing with arguments against this lawsuit is that people are saying "If prices are too high, just buy from another publisher." The thing is that it just doesn't work that way with books. If I want to read Moby Dick but I think the price is too high, I'm boned. That publisher owns that specific book, and I can't just get a knockoff book. There's only one Moby Dick. They are the gatekeepers to that intellectual property.

In my (vane) attempt at reading Melville's Moby Dick I was struck at some point (Chapter 32: Cetology) by the following sentence, floating in a stormy and rather muddy sea of ramblings and jokes:

"Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty."

Moby Dick was one of the first "real" books I touched as child.
I got it from the school library over the summer vacations.
I have to admit that I too found the asides boring and only managed to get about halfway through until the end of the vacations. At the beginning of the new school year I had to return it but had the intent to borrow it again to finish it. I never did and this must be the longest open point on my personal to do list. I wonder if - after so much time has passed - I still would find the asides boring...

I think the opening paragraph of Moby Dick is one of the most memorable of all the novels I have read; I think it would be hard to drive home the emotion with the same gravity in fewer words, and I'll paste it here in case I can con someone else into reading it :)

> Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

The OP needs to take their Adderall or Strattera, put down their glowing box, and invest in self-education, not look for shortcuts or quick fixes.

I happen to have severe ADHD (rattles atomoxetine bottle, oh look a hummingbird) but managed to read Moby Dick, War and Peace, Grapes of Wrath, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the TAOCP set.

Doing what is easiest, condensed, or takes the least time isn't necessarily the best path to grow in any meaningful manner. There also bookmarks.

If you must:

A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies 192 pp.

War is a Racket 51 pp.

Read a book, and not just CS books or mass-market mental onanism books. And then read another one. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Alexa, read me Moby Dick while I drive home from work.

Part of the argument is that we draw conclusions and interpret a book based on our own experience in the current time - not the time at which the book is written. Meaning changes with time, he gives an example of Moby Dick. It meant something totally different to someone back when it was written and was not popular. It was not until later did the book become popular because it was interpreted for the various meanings people think it's about. Secondly, the book is written for that specific audience - not the entire internet and/or world. The author remains in total control. He then mentions Kafka as an example because he as so controlling of his writings.

Moby Dick is considered the great American novel. As someone who is not well read on American culture, could anyone help me with the surrounding context -- what made it the great American novel. I know I am asking for a lot here.

Thanks folks all those who responded. Now I am better armed. I did have a go at it about an year back. Read around 4~5 chapters and then realized I need more context to fully appreciate what makes it special. I sensed there's a lot of symbolism being used, but couldn't quite put a finger to what exactly. Was quite surprised by the homo-eroticism in some of the chapters, did not expect that. I assumed literature from such times would reflect more 'victorian' values. I presume that might have created a stir then, or may be not, I am not that well versed in American culture, especially from that era.

Curious why you think Moby Dick is not a good book. I thought it was going to be a long drag, but found the writing extremely enjoyable. Apart from the obvious "literary merit", reading this book feels like being at sea, isolated from the world, where life is subject to the rhythms of much more powerful forces, and you can look around and study deeply the rich detail present even in a closed system like a ship.

To those skeptical that "old books" can have aesthetic relevance even today, I highly recommend reading the first chapter or even the first paragraph:

> Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

From a few angles:

* I read the Bible out of curiosity and ended up joining a church, so that's pretty consequential.

* Moby Dick and Journey to the West were probably the most sheer enjoyment I got out of books

* Learning C# 3.0 by Jesse Liberty is extremely dated at this point, and was dated even when I read it, but was the first book that made me "get" many basic OO concepts and taught me a language I've gotten a lot of professional mileage out of

* Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual and Sedewick/Wayne's Algorithms. Most people do algorithms in school. I learned about it while I was already writing programs for money all day, which means it deeply impacted the way I think about my work.

* Discrete Math with Applications by Epp -- I didn't read it all the way through but gave me the foundations to actually understand what the hell the books in the last bullet were talking about

* Battle Cry of Freedom by MacPherson was the first really meaty historical book I read. Turns out I like those a lot.

So many more but this seems like a reasonable place to stop for this discussion.

They're all right, somehow.

A film teacher of mine used to always quote Northrop Frye as saying "The category judgement precedes the value judgement." As in: it's a great thriller, but a terrible romance. Moby Dick is hard to classify, and (by this logic) harder to judge. Those approaching it as a novel had every reason to call it a failure. Melville was pushing himself. In jazz I've heard this called "going out." It's something you earn.

His lesser-known works like "Bartleby the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno" are much more coherent and approachable (they stick to a familiar category), but still have much of that slow, mysterious otherworldly quality and are well worth reading (in my humble opinion).

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Benito_Cereno

East of Eden is my favorite book I've read in the last several years. Beautiful end to end and very moral. If you've read it it's totally worth reading Journal of a Novel: a collection of letters Steinbeck wrote to his editor every day as he was writing East of Eden. It's a fascinating window into the mind of a master deliberately creating a masterpiece.

Other favorites: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, In Our Time by Hemingway, The Magus by John Fowles, 100 years of solitude, Moby Dick (perhaps a precursor to all modern fantasy?) Stranger in a Strange Land, and Infinite Jest. I've also loved both of DFW's big essay collections: Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll never Do Again.

When I was a kid we had the whole set. I assume that it was something tied together with Britannica -- we had an early 60's set. I tried to read them but the font faces were so small that they were terrible reading copies. If memory serves, I remember really, really trying to read Moby Dick and Darwin (are they both on the list?) but the tiny type and terrible formatting defeated me.

More than 45 years later, I've read maybe 70% of the books in the list (maybe more), but all in different, more readable editions. Today almost everything I read is in epub, and pdf for technical and scientific papers.

I don't think thats a meaningful comparison. Moby Dick is a book, written by 1 guy and maybe an editor or two. NYT employs 1,300 people.

When you read a book all you get is the text. NYT has text, images, related articles, analytics, etc. Moby Dick doesn't have to know what pages you read. NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough).

If Moby Dick was being rewritten and optimized every single day it would be a few mb. Its not, so you can't compare the two.

Yes NYT should be lighter, no your comparison is not meaningful. A better comparison would by Moby Dick to the physical NYT newspaper.

I've read over 500 fiction books and 2000+ non-fiction. I've read many of the big thick classics like Moby Dick, War & Peace, Infinite Jest. I've kept a spreadsheet of all the books I've read somewhat like Art Garfunkel[1] (of Simon & Garfunkel music duo).

I've also read Nick Carr's "The Shallows"[2] and other authors about about the web's effect on attention span, distractions, etc.

With all that said, I'm not convinced that people "should" read long form books. I read all those books because I personally enjoyed it. I just can't say with confidence that others should do the same or they will be "missing out" on some unquantifiable intellectual nirvana.

I also enjoy getting lost in Wikipedia articles and jumping around hyperlinks without fully finishing the wiki article I was reading. (Wiki articles are not ever "finished" anyway so there's no guilt trip in leaving the page to head down another rabbit hole.)

15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos? I think so. I don't hold my traditional reading method for C++ to be superior; it's simply what I did before the internet was available in 1995. I certainly did not learn Golang by reading a book cover-to-cover.

Books certainly have benefits but I think they are overstated in relation to non-book forms of consuming words.

[1]http://www.artgarfunkel.com/library/list1.html

[2]http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp...

> But look how far we've fallen.

I dispute this statement. For one, more people alive now can read than could read back then.

Also, we no longer engage in the sport of bear-baiting.

> Wonder what he thought of that fiction book [Moby Dick], generally considered to be one of, if not the, best English language novels written.

He likely thought it was crap, because the British reviewers thought it was crap, because they got a mutilated copy to review. It wasn't until Melville was dead that the book actually got a fair shake.

> GEB is a textbook on AI that's just trying to come at it sideways.

That's because it's not a book on AI at all [0]. It talks about it a lot. And sets up a lot of fundamental ideas for it. But it's as much a book about AI as Moby Dick is a book about whaling.

It's great reading if you're interested in AI (edit: If you're on HN, you'll probably love the book /edit), but if you pick it up expecting an AI textbook, or a book about AI, you may be disappointed. Or at the very least, won't get the full message.

Another book I'd recommend is "The Minds I" by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. It's a collection of essays about AI and philosophy, relating to the idea of the "self", with several pages of reflection after each essay by Hofstadter and Dennett. I'm about halfway through so far, but it was worth it alone just for chapter 5, "The Turing Test: A Coffeehouse Conversation". Also the Ant Fugue from GEB is one of the featured essays.

[0] Though you can't really fault anyone for believing that. Hofstadter complains in the intro of the 20th anniversary edition (and several interviews) that everyone thinks the point of GEB is something different. And it's never what he intended the point of GEB to be.

Specifically, he says "GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?"

> Moby Dick is a book, written by 1 guy and maybe an editor or two. NYT employs 1,300 people.

Totally irrelevant. Why should the number of employees in the company have any bearing on the size or cost of the product? Ford has 5x as many employees as Tesla. Should their cars be 5x as big or 5x more expensive?

> NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product

They may want this but they don’t need it. They successfully produced their product in the past without it.

> If Moby Dick was being rewritten and optimized every single day it would be a few mb.

Irrelevant and likely false. If anything, books and other text media tend to get smaller after subsequent editing and revising.

> A better comparison would by Moby Dick to the physical NYT newspaper.

Comparing a digital text product (Moby Dick) with a digital text product (a NYT article) is as close as it gets.

Moby Dick can be read aloud in 24 hours (well, at least experimentally closer to 26 -- we just did it! it's super fun: https://maritime.org/events/mobydick/ ). I've read it (silently) in 12. However, I don't agree with the assertion that reading a novel requires that rapid pace to fully enjoy it, though I've personally found that I'm unable to resume reading a novel on my Kindle the way I am with a physical text.

70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville

1. Silence. I'm not smart enough to get anything done with a lot of noise or music going on.

2. Distracting my mind. I read long, complex fiction novels for 30-60 minutes at night before bed. This is the most valuable part of my day because it acts like a shutdown script for my mind. Afterwards I feel completely disconnected from what I'm working on, worrying about, or struggling with. Some novels that I've used in the past: War & Peace, Ulysses, As I Lay Dying, Moby Dick.

3. Frequent breaks. While working I make sure to pause regularly and often stop altogether, walk-around, etc. This helps and hurts because it can interrupt flow, but the big benefit is that I find myself less tired at the end of the day when I stick to this.

4. Pen & paper. I buy spiral-bound notebooks at Walgreens for $0.35 and fill one every 3-6 months or so. I use pen and paper to plan programming projects, do class designs, brainstorm ideas, draw diagrams, almost everything.

5. Org-mode. I also use org-mode to more formally track things. I consider my notebook an "informal" workspace, while my org-mode files are more "formal". I utilize the agenda feature to produce to-do lists and calendar.

6. Diversity of projects. I try to always have some toy or pet project to play with when I find myself lacking motivation or hitting dead-ends on my primary work.

7. Try to keep it to 8 hours per day. This often seems (or "is" depending on your management) impossible, but it really does make an enormous difference in your ability to stay consistently productive and creative.

At the risk of sounding like a pretentious asshole, over the past few years I've been reading the classics I was forced to in high school and college and hated at the time, along with many "new" ones. Now books like Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamosov, and even Pride and Prejudice are oddly just as entertaining as the works of Koonts, King, etc. This might simply be because I love fiction but hardly ever read it anymore. Or maybe the relative excitement of everything simply increases as I become more boring in my old age.

Dude go to half priced books or your local secondhand bookstore and just clean house. Classics in particular are a dime a dozen.
Here's a list of "classics" to give you some ideas:

* A Hundred Years of Solitude

* Crime and Punishment

* East of Eden

* Moby Dick

* Shakespeare's collected works

* Bible, Koran, etc - keep as many sacred tomes as you can

* Plato's Republic, maybe some other philosophy classics like Thus Spoke Zarathustra

* Midnight's Children (how old does it have to be to be a classic?)

* Paradise Lost, Iliad, Odyssey

* The God of Small Things

Novels once rated the same consideration by critics.

"Once upon a time there were good American novels and bad ones, but none was thought of as a work of art."

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7197.html

Moby Dick, written in 1851, wasn't widely regarded as a work of art until after World War I.

To counter Ebert's summary: Why are the self-appointed guardians of the ramparts of canonized art always so jealous in protecting it from being invaded by newcomers? This story has been repeated over and over again with portrait paintings, Impressionism, architecture, novels, cinema, and everything in between. It's an old and tired plot, and one he should certainly be familiar enough with to disdain.

Some of the listed titles, since the site seems to be under heavy load:

Books:

* Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume I and Volume II

* Philip K. Dick, Minority Report

* Ian Fleming, Diamonds are Forever

* Fred Gibson, Old Yeller

* Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues

* Alan Lerner, My Fair Lady

* Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night

* John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

* Dodie Smith, 101 Dalmatians

-

Movie titles:

* Around the World in 80 Days

* The Best Things in Life are Free

* Forbidden Planet

* Godzilla, King of the Monsters!

* It Conquered the World

* The King and I

* The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956 remake by Alfred Hitchcock
of his 1934 British film)

* Moby Dick

* The Searchers (1956 film version with John Wayne from Alan Le May’s 1954 novel)

* The Ten Commandments (1956 version by Cecil B. DeMille, who also directed a similar film in 1923)

Due to the increasing popularity of casual dining and the decreasing accessibility of Danish nobility, I've rewritten Hamlet to be an Appleby's assistant manager.

The fifth act of SICP is meta-linguistic abstraction, and among Javascript's merits it is not. SICP is no more a book about Scheme than Moby Dick is a whale tale.

I admire the effort, and understand the sentiment behind the project. I just think the authors are missing the big picture of SICP. In fairness, few of us are Ablesons or Sussmans.

"The Displaced and the American" and "The Dwellers Behind, On, and Beyond the Threshold"

Even just looking at the synopsis of the first:

"This essay presents a brief consolidation of the argument of my class Race and the New Republic – that the American culture, notably of the antebellum period, rests on the trauma of displacement and that Americans have coped with it in a divisive, self-destructive way. My essay explores the use of this concept in Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick, classic American novels that attempt to symbolically depict, if not reconcile, this division of the American social landscape."

This is barely even coherent.