Hacker News Books

40,000 HackerNews book recommendations identified using NLP and deep learning

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steveseareronNov 9, 2015

East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath are on my upcoming list of titles to read. A few others I've read since high school that I ought to have then are Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet On The Western Front, and Of Mice and Men.

redismanonOct 1, 2020

I can't believe they're shitting on "They shall not Grow Old". The whole point of it was to give an emotional and immersive experience of one of the worst wars humanity has seen to modern audiences. There can be other goals than absolute historial accuracy. All Quiet on the Western Front is one of my favorite books and not because it's the most exhaustive and accurate history of WW I.

abrieonJuly 5, 2016

The posted article lacks substance, but I read "Over the Top" because of your comment. It is excellent. Thank you. I found my copy on archive.org[0].

I read it alongside "The Arms of Krupp"[1], and found the combination highly synergistic. The sensation of perspective is multiplied further if read with "All Quiet on the Western Front".

[0] https://archive.org/details/overtopbyamerica00empe

[1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24200511M/The_arms_of_Krupp_...

jopsenonJune 8, 2021

In "All Quiet on the Western Front" I recall one of the characters teachers encouraging the young kids to go... Did your teacher preach about the glory of fighting for freedom in Iraq?

Reading wikipedia it seems when the book came out it was critically received by some for "it's pacifists agenda".

Sure, we still glorify warfare, but our culture and tolerance for casualties have changed dramatically.

curi0ustttonOct 1, 2020

This a very personal opinion based on some popular classic book lists like those found on 4chan /lit/ etc.
(Note: All books are new and I calculated the price from Book Depository [0], you might be able to purchase more from Better World Books [1]):

- The Holy Bible
- Moby Dick by Melville
- The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
- The Master And Margarita by Bulgakov
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- The Iliad by Homer
- The Odyssey by Homer
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandra Dumas
- The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler
- The Qur'an
- The Prince by Machiavelli
- The Art of War by Sun Tzu
- Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
- The Confessions by Saint Augustine
- Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
- We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
- The Book Of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
- The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric
- Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andric
- Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
- Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque
- The Divine Comedy by Dante

--- This list totals out at 311.14EUR and has 23 books.
[0] - https://www.bookdepository.com/
[1] - https://www.betterworldbooks.com/

saiya-jinonJuly 5, 2016

"All Quiet on the Western Front" - the only book from cca 40 we were forced to read during high school classes that really consumed me - the horrors described, the progressive apathy to death all around and almost total randomness of survival... far from usual poetry. Still cannot comprehend such madness that was happening 100 years ago

yellowcake0onMar 18, 2021

All Quiet on the Western Front

It's a quick read, and can be finished in a single sitting if one has the mind to. It had been on my list for a long time, and lived up to its expectations.

The narrator's description of death as, "the skeleton working its way out of the body" is accurate, for anyone who has seen one pass from life to death up close. An emotionally shattering book.

eatonphilonDec 31, 2020

This was a good read. If anyone familiar with Germany authors can comment I'd love to be reading more historical fiction by actual Germans (Kerr is English, I think). I'm familiar with Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse (and of course, Goethe), but looking for authors a little more approachable than these greats. All Quiet On The Western Front was more in this category of an approachable read.

tldr; looking for recommendations from more recent German novelists translated into English because this American has a hard time finding them.

netnicholsonMar 27, 2017

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.

It might not actually be my first choice, but this one of the few on my short list that no one else has mentioned.

I read it in my mid teens (not too long after we stopped playing Rambo in the back yard) and it profoundly affected the way I view war, violence, and suffering. I've only read it the once (almost 25 years ago), and I hardly remember the story at all, but I vividly remember the feeling that it gave me.

bedigeronApr 29, 2010

That's what I thought when I saw the chopping and sawing parts. I seem to recall that in the Great War book "All Quiet on the Western Front", the author mentions that sharpened shovels get used as weapons extensively on the German side. The author makes some offhand comment about chopping deeply into someone's neck and chest with a sharpened spade or something.

secstateonJuly 5, 2016

Erich Maria Remarque on his book, All Quiet on the Western Front:
"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped (its) shells, were destroyed by the war."

By reducing the suffering of those who partook in WWI to an adventure we insult all those who were destroyed by war.

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