Hacker News Books

I haven't read Breakfast of Champions yet, but it's on my list. The Sirens of Titan is also a good one.

If you haven't read a Kurt Vonnegut book, I highly recommend that you do. The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Breakfast of Champions, and Slaughterhouse 5 are all great places to start.

I've read most of his books and think The Sirens of Titan is arguably the best.

I highly recommend The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut - little read compares to his other books but fantastic Sci Fi IMO.

If you really want to read some interesting and literary valuable sci-fi about Titan, then read Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titan". :)

https://www.amazon.com/Sirens-Titan-Novel-Kurt-Vonnegut/dp/0...

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

Somehow Rick & Morty really reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut. Similarly dark sense of humour about our meaninglessness in a vast, chaotic universe.

Emerson's Essays. SARK's first 4 or 5 books. The Sirens of Titan. Stevenson's essays.

Professionally, The Art of Project Management did the most for me.

Privately, general-fiction-wise, The Wind-up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami did the most for me.

Privately, SF-wise, three books by Kurt Vonnegut: Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-five and The Sirens of Titan

Sometimes authors do this for you. For example in The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut he quickly introduces a time travelling character who tells the main character vaguely what will happen to him throughout the book, leaving him with a picture of beautiful Sirens on Titan, Jupiter's largest moon. From then on you wonder how the main character will end up living on Titan. Vonnegut even centers the title of the book around this kind of suspenseful trick.

When done by a skillful author, this kind of pre-reveal can be really engaging.

Adams doesn't say he wasn't influenced by Vonnegut in those quotes.

Also, here's another quote[1]:

> "I've read The Sirens of Titan six times now, and it gets better every time. He is an influence, I must own up. Sirens of Titan is just one of those books – you read it through the first time and you think it's very loosely, casually written. You think the fact that everything suddenly makes such good sense at the end is almost accidental. And then you read it a few more times, simultaneously finding out more about writing yourself, and you realise what an absolute tour de force it was, making something as beautifully honed as that appear so casual."

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070302103312/http://www.darker...

---

But I suppose there is a difference between "influenced by" and "trying to emulate" isn't there, and I absolutely should have said the former. They are books that have some similarities, each in their own style.

I recently reread Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titan" and was really surprised to notice to what degree Adams drew inspiration from that book. He did acknowledge it as an influence [1], but some ideas my naive self had attributed to Adams are closer to well-done rearrangements/retellings of elements from Sirens of Titan (which certainly wasn't written in a vacuum either) in a different comedic voice. Both works are fantastic, though.

[1] http://www.darkermatter.com/issue1/douglas_adams.php

Too many to mention. A list of books I've read more times than any others - many times each:

SARK's first 4-5 books, Robert Fulghum's books, Emerson's essays, Hazlitt's essays, Bertrand Russell's essays (e.g. Sceptical Essays, Unpopular Essays), GK Chesterton's essays and his book Heretics, Nietzsche's books, William James' essays, RL Stevenson's essays, La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, La Bruyere's Characters, Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, Ben Zander's The Art of Possibility...

Somebody mentioned The Sirens of Titan (Vonnegut) in the comments below. I've gotta second that recommendation. It's Vonnegut's first novel, and probably not his best, but it's certainly my favorite.

If you resonate at all with Vonnegut's humor and pathos, then please oh please grab a copy of Sirens. I'm tired of being the only one at the dinner table who's read it!

Kurt Vonnegut's works: The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano, Jailbird, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater...

Find the time to read Vonnegut.

Personally, I actually liked the ideas, but everything else was a complete disaster.

The book is written in a very simple, juvenile style, at the linguistic level of a YA novel. There's zero depth to any characters. By modern standards, it's all "tell", no "show". I've read several reviews that suggest this is actually how most modern Chinese novels are written. That doesn't make it more readable, unfortunately.

The style seemed rather unintentionally surreal. My sense after reading was that I had just been reading Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titan" but without any of the humour. Many of Vonnegut's books are breezy, somewhat outrageous fables that don't go very deep into their characters, of course, but they work because they're funny, colourful, inventive, well written, and are full of great ideas. I think Lui Cixin's book would have worked much better as a Vonnegut-style satire.

If you want a similarly dark look at the future of humanity's role in the universe, take a look at Peter Watts' Blindsight [1]. While it certainly won't win any prizes for literature, and it has some odd quirks, it's considerably better written, and might especially appeal to fans of Neal Stephenson's loose, ragged style of writing. Moreover, it's probably the creepiest sci-fi novel I've read. On the surface it's a somewhat straightforward story about a team of transhuman specialists who are dispatched to investigate an apparently alien artifact. But it goes deep into some fairly cynical ideaas about human consciousness that are somewhat existentially unnerving.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Firefall-Book-Peter-Watts-...

Someone read the Kurt Vonnegut book, The Sirens of Titan!

This is mine:

- Summae Technologiae by Stanislaw Lem

- The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem (reread)

- Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

- The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

- The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

- Embassytown by China Mieville

- The Vegetarian by Han Kang

- Perchance to Dream (stories) by Charles Beaumont

- Highrise by J.G. Ballard

- In a Glass Darkly and Other Stories by Sheridan Le Fanu

- The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling (checkout my openly annotatable edition https://hc.selectedintelligence.com)

- All We Shall Know by Donal Ryan

- New American Stories edited by Ben Marcus

- This is The Way by Gavin Corbett

It's been a very fictional year. I guess I wasn't enjoying reality enough to read about it.

I've been told it's how modern Chinese novels are written. To a Western reader, it reads like juvenile fiction. The language is childishly simple, and all of the character's inner live — motivations and emotions and thoughts — are spelled out rather than inferred, and there's little no depth or ambiguity anywhere. I liked the historical context, but I found the whole thing to be very wooden and unimaginative.

I finished the first book, but I couldn't deal with it either. I think it could have worked terrifically if it had been written in a satirical style like Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s The Sirens of Titan. Some of the chapters about the aliens do come across like Vonnegutian comedy, but I'm not sure if this was intended. Overall, the book takes itself very seriously.