Hacker News Books

A friend recommended Catcher in the Rye, but it didn't appeal to me, so he suggested Cat's Cradle.

After that I went on a binge.

I know Slaughterhouse-5 gets all the accolades, but for me Breakfast of Champions is my all time favorite novel.

http://www.pomyc.org/blog-details/55

The exact quote by Gurdjieff is worth reading.

Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions" dealt with this theme in an extraordinary way. He created a character who was going mad because he felt he was living among robots. At last, his character finds an artist that had a "light" in him, a soul, and the character decides everything is ok. At this point Kurt Vonnegut inserts himself into the narrative (which struck me as extraordinary) and says that he decided not to kill himself because he wrote this story (his mother committed suicide.) This book also helped me become more self-aware.

As for sibling post, strong disagree WRT Douglas Adams. ducks. Unpopular opinion, I know, but your description of Vonnegut is curiously similar to how I might describe Adams. His supporters are enthusiastic and vocal. I wonder how large the group of silent dissenters is?

(Doesn't help that I'm also in that team of people with a strange disjoint out-of-time relationship to Vonnegut's novels having read Breakfast of Champions to early to understand most of it, and wandered the rest of the catalog randomly via my parents library and then the actual library as I grew older. Timequake was the only one released in a time where I was able to anticipate it, and given opportunity to hype it so much in my own head.)

— Roadside Picnic, by the Strugatsky brothers. The very thematic Soviet sci-fi behind STALKER.

— The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem. A brilliant collection of short stories on language, philosophy, futurism.

Currently:

— Nexus, by Ramez Naam (book 1 of 3). Nanobots meet augmented reality, transhumanism. Good.

— Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut. Hilarious stuff.

— Poe's collected works.

Next:

— The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu. I have my hopes high.

(If it helps anyone, Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions is a big fan of Dostoevsky and recommends his works in multiple writings.)

/$0.02

Once years ago I was in a 2nd hand bookshop in Sydney, and could hear a few staff members chatting excitedly in a back room. They were laughing over plot-points in Sirens! I listened for a long while, without revealing my presence. It was glorious. :-)

It just occurred to me to recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it the movie Gentlemen Broncos. I hadn't associated that and Sirens before, but there are many similarities. It's totally sci-fi, totally hilarious, and has a kind of Vonnegutian sugar-coated melancholy too. 5 stars!

It's also part of a fad of how science works or is absorbed in culture.

Here's the Times in 1973, reviewing Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, in which the antagonist, Dwayne Hoover's actions are caused by the bad chemicals in his system.

Is Kurt Vonnegut Kidding Us?

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/vonnegut-bre...

In 1973 it was chemistry. In 2013 it's neuroscience.

The only things that I can compare it to are more literary, but "Breakfast of Champions", "Foucalts Pendulum" or "Infinite Jest", aren't out of order.

They are all products of brilliant, obsessive, minds making a concerted effort to explain what they can see above the clouds.

As much intellectual ego that gets bandied about between computer programmers, its nice to keep a humbling base where you can actually see that no matter how smart you think you are, that there are people who are way way way smarter than you and actually have the dedication, skill and expertise to try to help you understand what they have spent their life learning.

- Ted Chiang - Stories of Your Life and Others.

- Lawrence Weschler - Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. A quality biography of Robert Irwin based on interviews over decades, and helps you learn to appreciate minimalist art to boot.

- Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice

- Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

- Burton G. Malkiel - A Random Walk Down Wall Street

- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Americanah. Saw myself in several of these characters

- Nikos Kazantzakis - Zorba the Greek

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Also good:

- Jack London - John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs. Illustrates all of the interesting ways in which a person is tempted to drink: when someone else buys you one, when it's cold outside, ...

- Danny Bowien - The Mission Chinese Food Cookbook. Lots of stories between the recipes.

- David Byrne - How Music Works

- Meg Jay - The Defining Decade

- Ernest Hemingway - A Moveable Feast

- Magdalena Droste - Bauhaus 1919-1933

- Arimasa Osawa - Shinjuku Shark

- Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind

- Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart

- Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

- Marie Kondo - The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

- Haruki Murakami - The Strange Library. A fifteen minute read.

- Tim Ferriss - The Four-Hour Workweek. Good tactics for saving time; bad business advice.

- Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

- John Berger - Ways of Seeing

On Deck, I have Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.

I became a Vonnegut fan at age 12 when I tried to check out Breakfast of Champions from the local library, and they sent me home with a permission slip for my mom to sign instead. So of course I had to read all of his books. Then had to reread them a few years later to understand them.

"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved." -- Vonnegut

Vonnegut, "Breakfast of Champions"