Hacker News Books

* The Secret History -- Donna Tartt

* The Goldfinch -- Donna Tartt

* Hotel New Hampshire -- John Irving

* A Prayer For Owen Meany -- John Irving

* Wonder -- R.J. Palacio

* Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- Mark Twain

* The Elegance of the Hedgehog -- Muriel Barbery

Irving and Tartt are my favorite.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt is an amazing novel about a group of classics students who try to reproduce such a banquet with interesting results.

"The Secret History of Wonder Woman."

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385354045/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...

It's stunning that the comic book character was created by a man who secretly lived with two wives as part of the radical women's rights/free love movement of the 1920s...

I can't recommend Donna Tartt's books enough, especially The Secret History and The Goldfinch. I've read both 3 times now.

63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt

Oh boy, you fucked up now. Here are the books I read this past year that I felt were "Good", starting from the most recent :

To Kill A Mocking Bird (Insanely good)

True Grit (Insanely good)

The Little Friend (Good)

Priceless (Very good, about art theft)

The Secret History (Insanely good)

Ready Player One (Good, nerdy)

Shadow Divers (Very good, history nerd book)

Diary of Anne Frank (Very good)

Unbroken (Very good, way better than the movie)

With The Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (Very good)

Seveneves (good, but I'm a Stephenson fanboy)

The Martian (Very good, but just watch the movie).

I read a bunch of other stuff, but that's what I found really "good" this past year.

> Makes me want to reread The Secret History though, it perfectly captured the weird cozy but suffocating vibe of being trapped in an isolated bubble with the same people for years on end.

The cozy vibe of murder?

Jokes aside, my impression of the school in that book was that it was closer to one of the fancy east coast SLACs that do have somewhat of a reputation, but it's been a while

Fates and Furies - Lauren Groff
Brilliant. It's considered "literary fiction" but I found this book to be an absolute page-turner, much more so than what is usually described as a "page-turner". The summaries / back-cover marketing copy can't do it justice.

Florida - Lauren Groff
Sublime, poetic, haunting collection of short stories.

Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang
Exhalation - Ted Chiang
Being released in May 2019 (I got an advance copy), but many of the stories are previously published and/or available online. "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" is just wonderful. Ted Chiang's work is the definition of economy in storytelling. Absolutely quality over quantity.

The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Death's End - Liu Cixin
I’m not sure how fulfilling it would be to just read the first one. They really feel like a single (big) novel. Worth it.

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O - Neal Stephenson, Nicole Galland
Kind of Stephenson-light(?). Smart, entertaining and seems destined to be a TV series.

The Secret History - Donna Tartt
A bit slow to get going. Lots of Greek, snow, and booze at a private liberal-arts college in Vermont.

The Grownup - Gillian Flynn (short story)

"He reached for a pen in a cup on his desk; amazingly, it was full of Montblanc fountain pens, Meisterstücks, at least a dozen of them. Quickly he wrote out a note and handed it to me. 'Don't lose it,' he said, 'because the Registrar never assigns counselees unless I request them.'
The note was written in a masculine, rather nineteenth-century hand, with Greek e's. The ink was still wet."

Donna Tartt, The Secret History, 1992

This is a little sad but probably inevitable. I went to one of these rural small liberal arts school decades ago (good faculty but no national reputation). Even then it felt anachronistic with a bunch of privileged young people studying like English and philosophy and history but in a giant beautiful isolated summer camp. There was no real connection to industry or jobs (or the outside world) and not much STEM so if you didn’t have connections you kinda got screwed. Makes me want to reread The Secret History though, it perfectly captured the weird cozy but suffocating vibe of being trapped in an isolated bubble with the same people for years on end.