Hacker News Books

My favorite books of 2020 are :
- Lolita by Nabokov, delightfully written and disturbing
- the Foundation series by Asimov, a classic. Great plot

Most dissapointing famous books IMHO:

3. Lolita

2. Catcher in the rye

1. Anne Frank diary

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

Nonfiction:

Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders by Jack D. Schwager (1993)

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (history)

That gymnastic doctor managed to have hunderds victims and it was during era where existence of child abuse was acknowledged as real thing.

Also, see Lolita as a popular book.

I read Lolita because I was really curious about the unreliable narrator aspect. The writing was incredible. I tried to get my friends to read it, but the subject matter really put them off.

Lolita is considered one of the greatest books of all time.

It was written by a non-native speaker in English. Thinking a non-native speaker can't write great English novels is the ignorant view, in my opinion. Is it difficult? Of course it is. But all writing is difficult.

you can inspire someone to become more active in the support of a cause, throw more kindling into their fire, so to speak.

Try reading Lolita by Nabokov.

Yes. As a reader and speaker of the English language, you are absolutely required to read Lolita as soon as possible. It is one of the best novels ever.

Lolita is supposed to be a challenging piece. In this thread people are discussing the details, but the way I see this and I hope it’s supposed to be seen as is that there is a tremendous contrast between prose and motif. More than any other book ever written IMO. Prose is extraordinarily beautiful, motif is extraordinarily disgusting. It tears the reader apart, inside out. That’s art.

I stuck to the classics. Kafka's Castle is absolutely brilliant. I read it greedily, just couldn't stop. It doesn't look magical at first sight but I could feel the atmosphere, the temperature, even smell.

Other than that Nabokov's Lolita is just celestial. And it's not only about the wording which is beyond beauty. Sometimes I caught myself thinking that this book reads me not the other way around. It's very precise, very unabashed, very intimate. Sometimes it looks surprisingly like your own reflection. Can't recommend enough.

The big difference is that Lolita is a book, so it aims to be published, while most if not all AI Dungeon content stays private and unpublished, so I don't think it's the same.

Lolita is not a "how to" guide. Lolita is a fictional novel in which the protagonist that does engage in pedophilia meets a very unhappy end.

I've been into Klosterman lately

Downtown Owl (novel)
Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs (essays on pop culture)
Eating the Dinosaur (more essays)

Other Novels:

Lolita - Nabokov
White Noise - Delillo

Lolita IIRC is about the viewpoint of a predator justifying his behavior, no? At least I thought that was what the book was about.

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.

There's been a lot of discussion about this over time. Take Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, for example. It's frankly some of the best prose I have ever read, ever.

The book is written from the perspective of a pedofile lusting after a young girl. Stanley Kubrik's film of the movie in 1962 won an academy award. There was an immense ammount of controversy surround the movie and the book, and they still are. Art or obscenity? We'll be having this discussion for years to come.

I've been striking out with my fiction lately with one dud after another. Thanks for these excellent suggestions. I'm ready to dive back in.

Three books that I haven't seen listed, but were impactful on my life:

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita -- Incredible writing, maybe the best ever. And english was Nabokov's second language. Don't miss this just because of the creepy subject matter or because you saw one of the movies. This is an incredible read and one of the English languages greatest books.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses -- I initially put off reading this by McCarthy's singular use of punctuation and his long, spare sentences. But I picked up the audiobook from Books on Tape (pre Audible) and fell into it. When read by a talented narrator its like poetry (and I mean that in a good way). When I finished it I immediatly rewound the tapes and listened to it again.

Rudy Rucker, White Light -- I read this 38 years ago and still think of it often. Think Alice in Wonderland written by William Burroughs and Kurt Godel. Giant cockroaches, absolute infinite, the devil harvesting souls, Albert Einstein, the Banach–Tarski paradox: its a wild ride. Hard to find but available on Kindle.

Fiction :

* Lolita by Vladmir Nabakov ; an absolute master class.

* The Harry Potter series by JK Rowling ; one for the memories!

Non Fiction :

* Letters of Note by Shawn Usher; a compendium of wonderful letters from the past. Highly recommended. https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Note-Collection-Correspondenc...

* Deep work by Cal Newport ; very applicable to the modern day distracted soul.

No, Lolita by Nabokov is not banned in France. I saw this book myself in a French library a few years ago. And according to French wikipedia (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita#Les_traductions_fran.C3...), a new French translation was published in 2001.

I highly recommend reading some of his other books if you enjoyed Lolita - I find them to be more complicated (in a good way) and also written magnificently. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Despair, 'Ada, or Ardor', Pale Fire, and Transparent Things are all personal favorites. But all of his novels are absurdly good.

His short story 'Beneficence' may be may favorite piece of writing ever. He had a knack for capturing a simple occurrence, making it moving and immersive, and wrapping up his story with a poignant conclusion that I have found in very few other authors' works.

I just reread Lolita at 45, for the first time since I was 14.

I slogged through it the first time, and didn't particularly enjoy it. All I remember from the first reading is that HH seemed kind of icky. I was barely older than Delores was in the first half of the novel, and I didn't really understand all the implications. I probably skimmed a great deal of the book without paying attention to it. Much of the subtlety of the story and all of the brilliant writing went right over my head.

Then I happened to pick up The Fued, about the friendship and subsequent falling out between Nabakov and Edmund Wilson. It mentioned several times that Lolita was a runaway success, and it made Nabakov famous.

I thought there must be something more to Lolita than I remembered, so I picked up a copy at the library. It was a whole different book. This time, I found the story both riveting and disturbing. On the first read, I knew that what he was doing would be called abuse, but I didn't really understand how he took advantage of her trust and naivety and adolescent rebelliousness. Or how awful it is to dehumanize pre teen girls and characterize them as sexual objects called nymphets.

HH claims to know that he took something irreplaceable from her and ruined her childhood. But - and I think this is why they say he is an unreliable narrator - it's not clear if he really believes what he's saying, or if it's a calculated ploy to garner sympathy.

The writing is incredible. The story is troubling and fascinating, and stayed in my mind a long time after. RIP Delores Schiller.

I'm not sure I agree with the idea what we primarily like stories that take place in familiar (moral) universes. For a lot of pop-fiction that's surely true but generally works we think of as being of merit challenge the reader.

A lot of Borges stories come to mind. Stanislaw Lem's work like Solaris, on moral issues surely Nabokov's Lolita or Ada or Ardor. The Master and Margarita in the Soviet Union, Le Guin's the Left Hand of Darkness with takes on sexuality way ahead of their time and so on. If I go through my list of favourite books there's a lot of those.

I've gotten rid of most of all my paper books a long time ago, I had too many and was always tempted to buy more. I even got rid of my beloved Austen anthology that's how seriously I was paring down. I figured I can get everything I love on e-format. I kept three physical books I'll never be without: Lolita, Madame Bovary, Les Misérables. Merely looking at the words does something to me.

"-- and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past, an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds ... but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshiped (...) I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine;"

> The book Lolita is ok in europe, a bit weird but not banned.

I don't think people even consider it weird, as most people haven't read it. People who do read the book tend to be predisposed towards appreciating literature as an accepted vehicle for exploring ideas and thoughts that would be condemned in real life — including all kinds of murder, sex, drugs, illicit liaisons, and assorted forms of destructive behaviour.

Incidentally, it is for sale in every decent bookshop that has an English literature section; Penguin publishes it in their modern classics line.

I have not read the novel, but put it on my reading list a few days back when I discovered it in the best reads list of "The complete Review" [1], which in turn I discovered via the excellent Conversations with Tyler [2] podcast which I started listening to in order a week or two back. I discovered this in a roundabout way via Hackernews (was mentioned in unrelated linked posts multiple times lately)

Why this comment? If you don't know, please check out the fantastic Conversations with Tyler podcast. And if you are looking for a very diverse, entertaining and informative podcast, try it.

Also the "Complete Review". Wow what a website! Proper 90s feel and still delivering value. If you think Lolita is one of the best books to read, you are probably having a similar taste and the reviews might work for you.

[1] https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/nabokovv/lolita1.htm
[2] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/

I was until recently one of those people who insisted on finishing any book (or movie or TV show, for that matter) they started. Otherwise, I wouldn't feel closure. I dropped a few books (Lolita, The Pragmatic Programmer, Kitchen Confidential etc.) but kept feeling guilty later on. I am glad to hear from so many people here that dropping in between isn't such a bad thing after all.

Related question: do you guys have a similar system for research papers? I've tried reading them a lot but have successfully made it through only a few. At this point, I even question if the effort in getting through their drudgery is worth it.

    No, he was not [great - ] he was typical 
    of a pop culture humorist

You're presenting "great" and "pop cultural humorist" as mutually exclusive terms.

It feels fundamentally incorrect to compare him to writers producing conspicuously deeper and denser stuff.

If you judge him by standards and goals to which he never aspired then I'd agree he comes up awfully short.

Reminds me of the old days when people derided the Beatles and other rock and roll acts because they didn't meet the standards of classical music. Or when people derided e.g. Shigeru Miyamoto because video games didn't measure up to the narrative achievements seen in the best movies.

It's true: The Godfather and Super Mario Brothers are both things that appear on your television screen. Just like Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy and Lolita and Finnegan's Wake are all books. Not sure they're trying to be the same thing, though.

For me, #94 shows up as Lolita (Everyman's Library (Cloth)) by Vladimir Nabokov (Mar 9, 1993). Siddhartha is nowhere to be found.

Interesting stuff, thanks.

> or in response to some form of judicial process (subpoena, search warrant, or other court order).

So basically, this info is available and can be used against you in a trial. Is a fake sense of privacy.

The main difference between public libraries and internet is that the former have much less controversial adult or political stuff but a lot of stablished literature touch taboo and very sensitive matter. Has this people read 'Lolita', 'the Catcher in the Rye' or took a look to 'The Capital' in the past?, has borrow a Quran recently? For how many days? How many times? Any attorney could easily use pseudoscience and cheap psychology to draw a line and build a relate leading to any conclusion of their interest with this info.

It varies, but in general, most novels undergo extensive edits, genius writer or not. E.g. Maxwell Perkins cut 60,000 words from Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel.”

As for Nabokov, he had, like many other famous authors, a contentious relationship with editors.

> By “editor” I suppose you mean proofreader. Among these I have known limpid creatures of limitless tact and tenderness who would discuss with me a semicolon as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is. But I have also come across a few pompous avuncular brutes who would attempt to “make suggestions” which I countered with a thunderous “stet!”

It seems his wife did a lot of editing:

> Nabokov wrote Lolita while travelling on butterfly-collection trips in the western United States that he undertook every summer. Véra acted as "secretary, typist, editor, proofreader, translator and bibliographer; his agent, business manager, legal counsel and chauffeur; his research assistant, teaching assistant and professorial understudy"; when Nabokov attempted to burn unfinished drafts of Lolita, Véra stopped him. He called her the best-humored woman he had ever known.”

What work was further done at the various publishing houses I don’t know, but the first edition, published by Olympia, was “riddled with typos,” which would indicate little additional editing was done for this edition. The typos were corrected for the American publication.

But what is the actual difference between the two? Is the second more extreme? Is one drawn and the other real? Or is the second drawn but based on real models ( like the fine)? Is it the difference between nude and naked?

Pixiv is generally drawn but there are no examples of the other. The book Lolita is ok in europe, a bit weird but not banned. There is even
nude art of children - though it is controverial.

Delany's writing raises the perennial question of whether we can separate the art from the artist (the view in the current climate seems to be an emphatic "no", see for example the recent Times article about Nolde's paintings being removed from Merkel's office [1]). For the obvious comparison of Nabokov, I'm inclined to view Lolita separately from the author and his personal beliefs. If Nabokov held views similar to Humbert, he kept those thoughts to himself, and I don't think anyone reading Lolita can charge Nabokov of advocating those ideas, although it seems really popular to do so in literary circles today.

I am not sure the same case about "a lack of advocacy" can be made for Delany or his oeuvre.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/arts/nolde-nazi-exhibitio...

Many comments here get fluency and the lack of an accent (pronunciation) mixed up. Although pronounciation and general entonation is part of being fluent in a language, the message is still the most important factor in fluency and the only one being evaluated by the quiz in the study.

For instance, many people who are native English speakers have terrible accents (ie Texan, Scouse, Scottish, etc etc) that make it hard for other native English speakers to understand, even though they're nearly 100% "fluent English speakers". In fact this applies to many if not all languages.

As a curiosity, two of the most lyric works of literature ever written in the English language - Lolita and Heart of Darkness - were written by Vladmir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad, one Russian and the other a Polish immigrant to the US that had terrible foreign English accents.

"Nabokov was fascinated by doubles, and his work is full of them — mirrors, twins, reflections, chance resemblances. Sergei was his brother’s double, a “shadow in the background,” as Nabokov put it."

I need to re-read Lolita in the light of this. I know that the book mocks the supposed connections between an author's experience and his work but I've always felt the Humbert-Quilty relationship to be a deeply personal one that the author drew on from somewhere.

As much as I enjoyed both Pale Fire and Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, I cannot, in good conscience, let these be the only Nabokov books to be mentioned here. Having read all his nonfiction and his autobiography over the past three years, I must warn against starting with either of these, two of his most difficult, novels.

You see, Nabokov toys with his readers - he leaves puzzles throughout his books; he writes in defiance of literary criticism (part of his impetus in Pale Fire); he foreshadows with a trail of anagrams. To throw someone in media res of two of his most complex tales (perhaps only surpassed by Lolita and The Gift), might give a premature distaste for Nabokov's heady style.

What I would personally recommend for someone new to Nabokov would be any of Despair, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, or Transparent Things.

If you like Nabokov, you may also want to try:

Rushdie, Salman - The Satanic Verses

Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49

This tool seems a bit nonsensical for anything that isn't as blatantly politically one-sided and polarized as Ayn Rand.

Just a random couple of highly appreciated titles from my collection:

    Hyperion, Gormenghast, Lolita

(Sci-fi, British gothic fantasy, 20th century American literature)

And it suggests The Farside (well yeah, if you want something completely on the opposite side of well-written prose), Tintin, and Shakespeare (huh?).

As for breaking any bubble I might live in: I grew up reading Tintin.

Interestingly enough it throws up Preacher as well, a comic written by Garth Ennis. Again not really breaking any bubble there: I love his works and have read Preacher, The Boys, Battlefields, and all his Punisher stories (that man is the only comic writer who truly groks Frank Castle).

Lolita the book is protected because it fails the third prong of the Miller test. Nabokov's Lolita is considered to have "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific" value. However, that test sets the bar at a completely arbitrary level:

What about Adrian Lyne's 1997 movie, Lolita? It has artistic merit, but arguably not as much as the novel.

What about girls' dancing and gymnastics? Should photography of those activities, even including women's international gymnastics competitions, be banned just because, viewed with an eye toward prurience, they might qualify? Certainly the activities have artistic value, but how much?

What about purely fictional depictions of minors, either in manga (see the case of Christopher Handley's manga possession) or even in fictional stories that may not be deemed to have serious literary merit?

His criticisms of Dostoyesky do not sit well. I've read several of Nabokov's books -- Lolita, Pale Fire, Speak Memory, The Defense, and Invitation to a Beheading. The last 2 are highly recommended and in general the works originally written in Russian are underrated.

Nabokov's character development and psychological penetration don't hold a candle to Dostoyevsky's though.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut
1984 by George Orwell
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
My Antonia by Willa Cather (1918)
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson Mccullers
The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Ulysses by James Joyce

"American universities don’t teach Soviet literature because American students show little interest in reading it. All of the professors with whom I corresponded said that universities were full to the brim with Soviet literature courses in the sixties, but interest took a nose dive once Russia ceased to be the Evil Empire."

This is supposedly the reason? When I was in school, I was not required to read any Russian Liturature. I didnt care at the time, I was working towards a business degree, with a minor in biology. My writting skills, and use of the English language was, and still is atrocious; I ended up taking most the required English, and Literature courses my last semester.

My first introduction to Russian Liturature was years later. I checked out Lolita by Valadimire Nabokov. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Well, after reading the book, I finally appreciated good writing. I found his writing beautiful, and easy to read. I wonder why some of his work wasn't required reading. I wish I was forced to read at least one of his books in high school, or college.(I understand why a high school english teacher wouldn't even mention Lolita. It wouldn't be worth the backlash, but his other books are appropriate?).

As to why I wasn't introduced to any Russian Liturature, I always thought it was due to the Mcarthy Era--where anything remotely related to socialism/communism was career ending? And, professors remember what their predecessors went through, and just decided it wasn't worth it. Stick with the safe stuff politically? I assumed, today, Russian Literature, at least some authors, were required reading in most American college Lit. departments? I had no idea, the students were the one's whom showed no interest in Russian literature? Are their any recent English, Lit. majors who would chime in? Just curious to see If you agree with the author?

(Valadimire Nabrakov Lolita is one of his English novels. I always thought it was translated. His first nine novels were in Russian.)