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That criticism is pretty applicable to The Sun Also Rises. Two great sentences and a lot of setting description.

― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

  "How did you go bankrupt?" 
  "Two ways.  Gradually, then suddenly."

    -- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

- “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

- “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

Chess Openings for Black, Explained

Hooked How to Build Habit-Forming Products - Nir Eyal ( great book very insightful )

The Power of Habit - Charles Duhigg ( interesting topic, long book )

Bandit Algorithms - John White ( great book, very short and easy to get through )

Ask - Ryan Levesque ( interesting ideas on sales funnels for websites )

Predictable Revenue - Aaron Ross ( so so, I liked some of the sales ideas but I see them used too often now )

Sherlock Holmes Adventures - Mike Ashley ( good book if you like the original and want some fresh material )

We may be getting off the query hint topic, but normals can use SQL Server as you've described. They can write queries and get data out, they just can't expect those queries to perform optimally without expertise.

In normal language, you and I have the freedom to convey our thoughts a billion different ways. But only one guy wrote The Sun Also Rises (for example.) Hemingway found the right way to write it.

To those that lack that ability, I'm sure "Hills like White Elephants" is a story about a train station and "The Sun Also Rises" is a story about drinking.

The best writers know when to shut the heck up and let their stories resonate beyond the words on the page.

Utilized in one of the more memorable exchanges in The Sun Also Rises:

"Let us rejoice in our blessings. Let us utilize the fowls of the air. Let us utilize the product of the vine. Will you utilize a little, brother?"

... and so on for nearly ten pages, utilizing wine, pubs, etc.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fAcAd5gFdB0C&lpg=PP1&dq=h...

I bet if you apply this tool to more of his writing, you'd find it neutered it completely, removing much of the magic that makes it so great.

"They became intimate and friendly by imperceptible degrees, and then by leaps."

Which reads very similar to the Hemmingway passage. Maybe he stole it ;)

Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes)

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (Paul Zindel)

The Things They Carried (Tim O' Brien)

This Side of Paradise (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury)
Essentially a children's sci-fi novel, but it doesn't read that way.

A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway)

Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates)

On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
*One of my personal favorites, but most people either love or hate it, so maybe save this towards the end.

On my own reading list:

Speedboat (Renata Adler)

Money (Martin Amis)

Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

Everyone writes garbage, all the time, including the greatest writers. Indeed, when you do much serious literary criticism, one of the first things you learn is the (perhaps surprising) extent to which great writers can write terrible junk in their rough drafts. Sometimes terrible passages almost make it into print, as, for instance, the first chapter of Hemmingway's book "The Sun Also Rises", which had already been sent to the printing plant when Hemmingway, on advice from Scott Fitzgerald, sent a telegram asking that the first chapter be cut. You can find that cut chapter online, and everyone whose ever read it agrees that it is terrible -- cutting it was a very good idea.

Likewise, there are some famous cuts from Tolkien that would have been awful if they were included.

If the author decides to cut a passage, the author is saying "This isn't really true for this story, this is garbage." You would be unwise to read deep meaning into passages that get cut.

Whenever I have the misfortune to visit a shopping centre, I always make an effort to quote Waugh: "All that succession and repetition of massed humanity... Those vile bodies..."

> "How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.

> "Two ways," Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly."

In other words, at all times, Mike's march to bankruptcy was always obvious, but somehow he couldn't see it, or do anything about it, until it was too late!

If you read accounts about inflation in the mid to late 1970's, you'll see that by the time inflation started getting out of control, it was too late to prevent it. Inflation couldn't be brought under control until Paul Volcker aggressively raised interest rates, which was very painful for a lot of businesses and a lot of people. 10-year treasuries hit 16%/year. Mortgage rates hit 20%/year. Valuations for all kind of assets hit rock bottom.

It's not too hard to imagine the following Q&A a few years from now in some congressional hearing:

> Q: "How did inflation get so out of control?"

> A: "Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly."

I re-read The Sun Also Rises[1] yesterday. You could change the names and it'd be the story of plenty of people I know today. History repeats itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises - if you haven't read it, it's the best book.

That's really funny.

On the one hand, I feel a satisfying connectedness when I visit a real-life place mentioned in a book: I traveled the Spanish countryside after reading "The Sun Also Rises", and got lost in the countryside and drank red wine on the hills. I also visited the killing fields in Cambodia after reading "The Killing Fields" and "Swimming to Cambodia". It was fucking terrifying that this happened in my lifetime.

On the other hand, I can see how stressful this is for locals, like both in Alaska and Spain who aren't asking for the influx. But at least in Cambodia, it is an important historical legacy and it brings revenue.

I've come to the conclusion for myself that I don't want to bother the locals just for my own satisfaction unless the target destination has been built with concern and sensitivity, and not for exploitation. Even the latter case is still subjective: are the streets of Paris' tourist-traps exploitative and annoying? What about the shops around Giza's pyramids? Both locations seemed to be unhappy about the tourism. I spoke with a shop owner in Panama and he said the locals love/hate tourists: the dollars are important, but the psychological impact of having their homes be fishbowls is not insignificant.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

- From The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.

So, I am not encouraged by trends - populism, protectionism, increasing divide between haves and have-nots, climate problems, resource competition (such as for water), and suchlike - but I would not expect a tipping point for a while.

I am not in a position to predict anything, I lack the expertise/data, and my record for, say, trying to predict markets (this property boom can't last, this stock-price boom can't last, etc ad nauseam) is abysmal.

That being said, I can't imagine that 50 to 100 years out that push will not have come to shove and societal collapse will, at the very least, have pretty much ended aspirational notions of or for a global society progressing towards better and better outcomes for all.

The good news: I've always been wrong before :-)

Even John Keats, the "poster boy" for poetic works of unending beauty and pure inspiration, quit his job as a surgeon-in-training to become a full-time published-and-paid poet. He could've easily worked his day job as a surgeon and moonlighted as a for-free poet by night. His primary goal was to be a poet, and he found the only way to do so was by making it his career.

Even Vincent Van Gogh, the more modern keeper of raw artistic expression, pined for more people to buy his work, not the least of reasons being to fend off abject poverty, but also as a validation of the style he admittedly created. He was resigned in his later years to live off his brother as he painted prodigiously, but by that point he was in the throes of psychosis. Is that what you meant by "art for art's sake"?

It's surely a romantic notion that artists draw forth passionate forms of expression from fending off psychological defect, hungry bellies, and harsh surroundings. But the truth is, every one of those artists to a person wanted to get paid doing what they do. Perhaps the money is a validation, or incidental being a published or culturally accepted artist, or simply a means to an end. Doesn't matter a whit. They want to do what they want to do full-time.

In other words, "Shakespeare got to get paid, son"[1]

[1] http://i.imgur.com/cyIGF.jpg

Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami (I love Murakami’s novels, recommend starting with Hard Boiled Wonderland though)

Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball - Haruki Murakami

The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammet (Surprising just how much San Francisco is in it)

The Postman Always Rings Twice - James Cain

Seveneves - Neal Stephenson (recommended)

Pattern Recognition - William Gibson

The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway (recommended, refreshing language)

Non-fiction:

Running Lean - Ash Muraya

Lean Customer Development - Alvarez

Talking to Humans - Giff Constable

Hooked - Nir Eyal (probably not need the book to get the thesis)

Sprint - Jake Knapp

Juno Beach - Mark Zuehlke

Anti-Education - Nietzsche

My working hypothesis is our brains are always learning - literally everything. We learn our concept of time from our experience with it. We learn our concept of a relationship with another person from our experience with them. If someone comes into our life easily - relative to other relationships - our brain associates them with less value. It’s also horrible logic.

Edit- as for whether someone likes you: people accept, overlook, and tolerate more aberrations from normal/good treatment from people they value or like. If they’ll accept little of your aberrations then they’re unlikely to ever like you - run for the hills. That’s one of my tricks for likeness.

I've heard this story many times over the years and was always found it amusing but was skeptical that it did HST any good. I mean, what use is it to blindly just copy something letter by letter?

I did Nanowrimo on a whim this year and it was a lot of fun (I doubt I'm actually any good at it, though). In doing it I found myself going to Gatsby and a Hemingway book (The Sun Also Rises) for examples of clear, direct prose. I thought back to this Thompson anecdote and thought to myself that if I ever wanted to really pursue writing, a straight copy of one of those books would help my prose ten fold.

So I agree with this article. Type out the code you're borrowing from, don't copy and paste. Also, tchlock23 is right in that you also need to start some small projects from scratch and suffer through them with minimal help.

When Hemingway started out, he worked for the Toronto Star (another Canadian newspaper). He wrote his first novel during this time: The Sun Also Rises, about expatriates living in Paris.

Hunter decided to apply to a Canadian newspaper after admittingly not being familiar with it. Then not long after he wrote his first novel - The Rum Diary - which was heavily inspired by Hemingway's first, about expatriates living in Puerto Rico.

In conceptual fields, such as math and physics, the big breakthroughs happen young. Werner Heisenberg was 27 when he came up with the Uncertainty Principle, and Einstein was 26 when he discovered relativity.

In fields where progress is primarily empirical, such as biology, the big breakthroughs tend to happen later. Alexander Fleming was 42 when he discovered penicillin and Jonas Salk was 40 when he invented the vaccine for polio.

This distinction can be extended to artists. To write a great empirical novel, one rich in observed life experience, one must live a long time, and therefore Tolstoy was 41 when he wrote War and Peace. But to write a novel where one demonstrates new techniques for grammar and structure and pacing (a novel noteworthy for conceptual innovation) then one will be young, and therefore Hemmingway was only 26 when he wrote The Sun Also Rises.