Hacker News Books

I can't narrow it down to one (it's like trying to pick a favorite binary message format), but the best I can do:

A Single Man - Christopher Isherwood. A beautifully somber story of a gay man dealing with loss in the 60's. When I read it as a kid, it helped deal with the sense of alienation I was feeling during my adolescence. Also the movie a few years back (while ending fairly different from the book), was awesome.

The Big Sleep - Chandler. Literary people all seem to prefer Hammett to Chandler, but for my money there's never been better prose written before or since. "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts" and "I never saw any of them again - except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them." are two of my favorite sentences of all time.

Before Night Falls - Reinaldo Arenas. It's technically an autobiography, but I read it as a novel. More alienation (this time in 1970's Cuba), but written amazingly well (even the English translation).

Dear Mr. Henshaw - Beverly Cleary. I'm not embarrassed to list a kids book as one of my favorite novels (considering how many people on here I'm sure loved Harry Potter). It's a story about a kid who's dad left him, and it's written as a series of one-sided letters to an author (the titular Mr. Henshaw). I re-read it about twice a year (it's a short book).

After Many a Summer Dies a Swan is perhaps best remembered today for having been mentioned in Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man, but it's definitely worth reading. The 1950s saw a number of British ex-pats in Los Angles writing novels about their experiences. Isherwood's novel is another classic of the genre although the best of the lot, in my opinion, is Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One (just skip the atrocious movie of the same title which was so bad, Waugh stipulated that Hollywood would never again get to film his work).