Hacker News Books

Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoy. Absolutely amazing, I highly recommend it.

For my language choices I'm constrained to reading Anna Karenina as my material, haha, but I still consider this pretty good! Thanks for the tip.

Anna Karenina is the novel I probably read the most of without finishing. After a while, it became hard to care about rich people and their affairs and varied "nervous conditions".

Anna Karenina is the better book.

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

And here is an advice from Anton Chekhov: “My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.”

I am currently listening to Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, and it is by far the most interesting book I've read/listened to. I have been moved to tears again and again by this book.

Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun (1917) just turned 100, and it is also one of my most favorite books of all time, it too was moving me to tears again and again.

Not the OP, but I can name a few.

I found Anna Karenina, or Crime and Punishment 100x better than all non-fiction books I ever read.

I also read Anna Karenina (I am a big fan of Russian literature) - but none the less (or maybe rather b/c of that) I am curious to learn how this book did change your perspective on your life?

I don't just read books; I wallow in them. I remember well the acute pain of not knowing how to read and the relief when my mother taught me. I was five, and I just haven't stopped reading since. I'll be 38 in a couple of months.

I'm reading Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor, because O'Connor is wicked and funny. Favorite book? As others have pointed out, this is a ridiculous question -- my favorite kind! Some books I love: Lolita, As I Lay Dying, The Ghost Writer, Goodbye, Columbus, Blood Meridian, Anna Karenina, Where I'm Calling From, Huck Finn, Dubliners and on and on. I read mostly literary novels, but I read fairly widely -- genre stuff (skiffy, crime), history, philosophy, pop science, whatever's good. I average around 1 book per week, but I read in jags and sometimes go a couple of weeks without reading anything but blogs and news.

I'm sure there are any number of studies that will show the benefit of reading, but I much prefer to classify books with whiskey and cigarettes. How do you measure the utility of whiskey and cigarettes? I like the Romantic idea that books are bad for you. You know, the kind of thing that destroyed Emma Bovary and robbed Señor Quixote of his sanity. Maybe I just need to manufacture a vice. I don't like cigarettes, and a beer (and a book) after the kids are in bed is about all I can handle these days.

I highly recommend Anna Karenina as read by MaryAnn, in English, and as read by Eva K. in German. They’re both easily professional level.

Good list. I really recommend these to everyone. they are listed in my order of love to like. Hope you enjoy Conor.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (864)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (159)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (268)
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (337)
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (130)
and last but not least
The Stranger by Albert Camus (this one is short, idk how many pages, but its like 60. and if you read it from an existential point of view, it can have life altering effects.)
Keep in mind, these are my absolute favorites. I don't think you can go wrong with any one of them. =]

I'm not nearly as well read as you, but I've really enjoyed Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and War and Peace. I enjoyed Tolstoy's constant arguing against the Great Man Theory, even if I disagree with aspects of his position. And I love Nabokov, both Lolita and Laughter in the Dark.

I've just started reading Checkhov's short stories. They're almost comically dark. I like them.

Anna Karenina, A Suitable Boy, and the like. Excellent books but after college it's been difficult to start and keep at them in a acceptable period of time given the time (or lack of it) is an issue now. I also wanted to read Ulysses. I am stuck around the ~20% of Dostoyevsky's Idiot since a long time. Off late I've had better success with shortner ones.

For me the reason is simple - it's just the daunting number of pages and it is a shame that I have not read/finished these books.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (I don't know which translation I read).

Imagine the plot of three or four excellent movies woven together. It struck me how little human nature changes over time and across cultures. It also features some fascinating Russian history as a backdrop. As a person who almost exclusively reads non-fiction, it changed my view of how powerful fiction can be. I can't fathom what must've been in Tolstoy's mind to have the ability to create something like this.

Honorable mention to The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I'd like to learn more about Russian literature - I don't know if it's these authors and books that grabbed me, or if it's something larger.

I'm at one far end of the spectrum, but I was reading Stephen King in 5th/6th grade, read Anna Karenina (chosen myself) in 7th grade for a book report and had read nearly all of Tolstoy's works by the end of 9th grade. My parents never had a punishment for failure, only failures without effort. The idea was to set your goals so high that they cannot possibly be accomplished. It still holds to today for me...when I don't reach the goals I set for myself, I'm not disappointed, I look at how good I actually did do. The only time this is an issue is when coming up with those annual and semi-annual review goals that determine are used to measure if you're going to get a reasonable merit increase or not.

Oh I loved Freakonomics!! What an excellent question. I want to propose 2 books:
1. Getting Things Done by David Allen. It really changed how I approach not only my workday but pretty much everything that could constitute "work" in my daily life. It's a bit of a learning curve to start, but once you implement GTD in your life it becomes second nature. You can learn about it here: https://gettingthingsdone.com/ and there's a good intro to it here: https://zenkit.com/en/blog/a-beginners-guide-to-getting-thin....
2. How Not to Die by Dr. Michael Greger. When you start thinking of plants as medicine it really changes your whole approach to food and life in general. I've started following his 'daily dozen' and I've got to say that I feel absolutely incredible. (Check out his website here: https://nutritionfacts.org/)

Amazing works of fiction that I come back to again and again include Anna Karenina and The Three Musketeers

I just finished Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. (9.3/10)

Should I read Ulysses? I’ve wanted to read it on account of its acclaim but after reading some comments here I feel like maybe not?

Here are two fiction books that I really enjoyed and learned from:

1) Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. This book is an emotional roller coaster. After reading it, you will better understand what life is like for the mentally challenged.

2) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. You will get a glimpse into the life of Russian aristocracy in the 19th century. More importantly, you will learn about love and human relationships.

I would just point out that "Gödel, Escher, Bach" is one of the books he read this year. As is Anna Karenina, which took me several months of devoted attention to read.

The Bible. Harold Bloom's "Western Canon", Knausgaard's "Min Kamp", "The World According to Garp", Robertson Davies Deptford Triology, "Anna Karenina", "Consilience of Knowledge", "House of Leaves" "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" All these books messed me up to varying degrees.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain): A tale about escape, thinking for yourself and looking upon society with a critical eye. Plus, I find the beauty of the language, especially dialogues written in the characters' respective slangs, stunning.

Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoi): Intertwined tales about love and finding happiness that simply feels timeless. I think Tolstoi's greatest achievement is making the characters feel so human in this. For what it's worth i did not find it a difficult or heavy read at all.

The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyesky): Them russians really have something with humanness. Where Anna touches love and happiness, karamazov contrasts religion and ethics, faith and reason. Once again, it feels like it could have been written today and still be as relevant.

1984, Orwell. Don't think I need to go into this one, but every time i read it, I find something. This novel was really deeply thought out, inventions like doublespeak really makes you think about how we think about and react to politics.

I realize most of those are likely required reading in american high schools, which to me is proof that your public school system is not entirely lost. I wish we had read some actual substantial texts in my schooling and didn't have to discover these in my early 20s.

I'm reading Anna Karenina right now. It's enjoyable. I think many people would get something out of it if they read it. But most people never did. The majority has never been "well-read". And so, if we can make the majority well-equipped with information (by destroying impenetrable silos and distributing their grain), who cares if that doesn't have any other effect? The person who is well-informed will not necessarily be the same person who has received an excellent liberal arts education any more, but at least ze'll be well-informed.

Edit: clarity. I never intended to say anything about the classics' value, only their past and future popularity.

(in hindsight, the former could easily have been an interpretation of the post)

I was really surprised that this article was written by a humanities professor. I understand he's trying to make a point, but the premises in the first paragraphs are indigestible.

> No Westerner would call such a work “literary"

Why? There are plenty of works such as this in western literature.

> Russians revere literature more than anyone else in the world.

Again, I feel this claim is a bit baseless. Let's see why he thinks that:

> When Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina was being serialized, Dostoevsky, in a review of its latest installment, opined that “at last the existence of the Russian people has been justified.” t is hard to imagine Frenchmen or Englishmen, let alone Americans, even supposing that their existence required justification; but if they did, they would surely not point to a novel.

Well, this is the opinion of Dostoevsky, a writer. I'm sure similar hyperbolic comments were made by the french naturalists (Zola about Flaubert... ) or German idealists (about Goethe...)

Then the author proceeds to engage in other baseless generalizations about Russians' attitude to literature compared with other cultures.

I appreciate his insights on Russian literature in general and Solzhenitsyn vision in particular. But I do not understand why he needs to precede his text by such myopic comments.

Anna Karenina is a really beautiful story. I read it a long time ago and it is, at the very least, a great achievement, so sweeping, so intricately detailed, so many rich characters, so much insight into human hopes and struggles. I don't know much about its context but I imagine if you read up on Tolstoy's life and Russian social conditions at the time it would make reading the book enormously stimulating - a panoramic story covering the intersection of a flowering cosmopolitan aristocratic society and a more ancient world of feudal landlords, at a turning point in history shortly before that world vanished forever.

Mostly I would read Tolstoy for the same reason I would read Nietzsche - to break through our regrettable tendency to take the past and its people for granted. It's one thing to read about the ideas Nietzsche developed on a Wikipedia article, it's wholly another to read him in his own words and suddenly find yourself thrust into contact with a whole mind, a living, breathing bundle of thoughts and anxieties and dream, a human being palpably aching to find meaning, caught in the middle of one of the greatest social upheavals of human history. To get a sense, just for a moment, of the sheer enormity of the fact that whole generations of people lived and died without knowing anything of the world we lived in.

19th century literature is special. There is so much heat, passion, confusion, pain and soul-searching in it - it feels so close, yet so far, from the world we live in. For me at least it is humbling and amazing that people like Tolstoy laboured on and left behind such vivid traces of their souls for us to discover and enrich ourselves with.

Edit: I suppose this is a long-winded way of saying that the value of literature is that it helps you develop reverence and respect for the enormous reality and weight of history. Arrogance and shocking stupidity are the natural consequences of not realising your tiny place in history. The best literature breeds deep humility.

Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoj

I read non-fiction related to business strategy, sociology, economics, and technology constantly. In fact I went down the the LA public library and picked up 10 stellar titles just this weekend, I highly recommend all of these:

- Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software [MIT]
- Prisoner's Dilemma [William Poundstone]
- Thinking Strategically [Nalebuff]
- Co-opetition [Nalebuff]
- Cluetrain Manifesto [Searls]
- Open Sources 2.0 [O'Reilly]
- Innovator's Dilemma [Christensen]
- Net Worth [Hagel]
- Democratizing Innovation [von Hippel]
- Fooled by Randomness [Taleb]

Other books I always keep around are "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" (a history of DJ's and electronic music), The Singularity is Near, and some Calvin and Hobbes ;-)

All the reading is most definitely worth it, if you don't feel that way you're not reading the right stuff.

The best book I've ever read is probably Anna Karenina (Magarshack translation, not the Oprah version, which is ironically much drier). Other very influential books on me include The Wealth of Networks, Shaping Things, and Free Culture. In fact, all 3 of those were given to me at different times in my life by the smartest person I know (a family friend of my parents)

Maybe the key to the non-fiction reading is having an agenda. I always feel like I'm downloading knowledge that is going to help me make bank and/or help people so that keeps me riveted (beyond the intellectual stimulation, which I'm a total whore for, too ;-)

The most moving Morse code story I’ve heard is this one from Somalia: A man writes a letter complaining about conditions in a hospital, and the government imprisons him in solitary confinement, with no one to talk with and nothing to read. After eight months, his next door neighbor whispers across: “Learn ABC through the walls....” and he learns an ad-hoc Morse Code through knocks and taps. Then, after two years, the neighbor begins “reading” to him, via the code, the 800 page novel Anna Karenina.

https://www.npr.org/2017/09/11/550058353/rough-translation-h...

Anna Karenina is a classical novel that follows classical literary conventions. It's heavy and will give your understanding of Russian naming a workout, but it's still basically readable.

Ulysses, on the other hand, is hundreds and hundreds of pages of modernist stream of consciousness, from the point of view of many characters who don't believe in providing context, where every sentence is packed full of complicated wordplay and obscure allusions, and everything happens at a snail's pace. If the idea of reading a book where you literally can't understand half of it gives you pause, Ulysses is probably not the book for you.

For what it's worth, Joyce is commenting on Finnegans Wake, which goes 10x on everything above and is basically entirely incomprehensible.