Hacker News Books

I've seen most of them, here some recommendations of my own:

* Revolver (2005)

* Enter the void (2009)

* The fountain (2006)

* Jacob's ladder (1990)

* Lost highway (1997)

* Love and sex (2000)

* RocknRolla (2008)

* The road (2009)

* The shining (1980)

That's a really interesting concept - the snippets idea reminds me of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. No chapters in that book, only paragraphs

Haven't got to that one yet, but Blood Meridian was incredible and so I plan on buying the rest of his work. I also really liked The Road - have read it twice, each time in 1-2 days (I normally struggle to make time to read).

The Road really is a fantastic book, makes you think about how rapidly humanity would change if civilization dissolved. Can't wait for the movie to come out this fall.

The Road was also another excellent book by Cormac McCarthy. I'm not sure about his other books but this one was a really easy read.

The Road was one of the most devastating novels I've ever read. A part of me wishes I'd never read it. But it was also one of the most stunning pieces of writing I've ever consumed. It's worth it for that.

But it is truly horrific.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Really got me thinking about what is in front of us.

The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig. Beautiful novella, a pleasure to read.

Try as I might, I can't bring myself to love Blood Meridian more than The Road.

But I would definitely place it among my top 20 books of the last century. Perhaps even in the top 10

The Road (2009) is like a horror movie for fathers, really destroyed me watching it but made my more aware of how tough it is to be a father & husband.

At different points in your life great stories can impact you in different ways. A simple example of one that could do this is The Road by Cormack McCarthy. I never had kids, but from what I've heard people who read it after becoming a parent are hit with far stronger emotions than those who don't have kids.

I love Cormac McCarthy and Blood Meridian is a fine way to get into his work, but it was a hard read for me because of the pacing. NCfOM, The Road or Outer Dark are easier to follow IMO. I hope this comment is considered useful enough to pass the HN guidelines.

Go buy a good novel. Here's some random picks for you:

The road by Cormack McCarthy (a real page turner),
The New York trilogy by Paul Auster,
Corrections by Jonathan Franzen,
The stranger by Albert Camus.

Eric Blair (known to some as George Orwell) wrote two of the most biting descriptions of the grind of poverty:

Down and out in Paris and London

http://www.george-orwell.org/Down_and_Out_in_Paris_and_Londo...

The Road to Wigan Pier

http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/

I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road recently. I found it compelling and disturbing at the same time. Definitely recommend it.

If you want to really experience McCarty's The Road - get some headphones, put Godspped You Black Emperor: F A ∞ on repeat - and spend a couple hours reading it. There is really nothing like it. The movie can't come close.

One of my favourite books is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Three reads and counting...

A friend of mine recently became a father and says that he reread the book and saw it in a completely different light as a result of having a son of his own.

Books don't change over time, but I'm pretty sure that your life situation and experiences can to the extent that a book becomes open to a new interpretation.

Here are the first books that crossed my mind.
The Road.
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.
How to Read a Modern Painting: Lessons from the Modern Masters.
The Sun Also Rises.
The Wind Up Bird Chronicles.
Reamde: A Novel.
1984.

Current: The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Last: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.

The best recent: Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamon.

When I am at a loss for something to read and I want something that is usually a low-effort but very good read, i throw darts at the Pulitzer for fiction list.

I'm reading Greer's "Less" today, the most recent winner, and it is really pretty great.

If you haven't read Hemingway, "The Old Man and the Sea" is a pretty good starting point.

If you are into post-apocalyptic fiction at all, you need to read McCarthy's "The Road"

(Note, if you want Steinbeck - personally, I liked 'Of Mice and Men' a lot more than "The Grapes of Wrath" but both are good. Just saying I don't always side with the committee)

I mean, we can argue all day about what the best book is, but everything on that list is going to be both very good and usually quite accessible; you will note that Joyce is conspicuously absent, and a few of these are assigned reading in high school.

If you want to read stuff before that (and get free books from gutenberg!) I recommend you check out Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad. Both are excellent. "The end of his tether" is my favorite Conrad. "Roughing it" is my favorite Twain.

The best books I've read in the last decade (that I can remember, I've only been keeping reading lists since ~2015) are mostly important because they have contributed to my inspiration and style as a writer.

* The Road - Cormac McCarthy

* Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

* No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy

* On Writing - Stephen King

* 11/22/63 - Stephen King

* The Stand - Stephen King

* Hell's Angels - Hunter S. Thompson

* East of Eden - John Steinbeck

* Slouching Towards Bethlehem - Joan Didion

* In Cold Blood - Truman Capote

I read The Road and I can empathize. There's a few awful scenes, including one that really hits you after you think you've been desensitized to the horrors. However, I'm really glad I read that book because it's incredibly profound. Certainly, it's deeply unsettling to the reader, who is forced to imagine living through every cherished thing in your world destroyed and defiled. Yet, it also imagines what is the core of humanity when it exists in a vacuum without any obfuscation (my rationalization of the child, to those who have read it). Plus, this is all written in really beautiful prose- I found myself re-reading many lines to appreciate the creative use of language. I hope this convinces you to stomach the ugliness and give it a read :-)

I've read The Road twice. First as a son, then as a father. My dad and I went though some crap I couldn't grasp when I was young. The book made me feel like I could finally understand what he was going through. Why he did what he did. I've never had a book change me like the road had.

I read it again when my son was 4 months old. That's when I finally understood, at a visceral level, what it means to carry the fire. I think we're both going to be better because of it.

I will read the book one more time after my dad passes.

Hayek literally wrote the book on the "sentiment that I expressed", it's called The Road to Serfdom. Hayek's views on the "economic calculation problem" were more subtle than 'it doesn't work' and they needed to be because by the time he wrote the book, communism was a real economic power and it was getting more powerful. I'm not sure how you think Russia went from backwards feudalism to nuclear superpower by "not growing at all".

One book that examines this scenario is "One Second After" by William Forstchen [0]. It involves a coordinated EMP attack over America and the effects on a small town in North Carolina. In the same vein as The Road but more detailed in how society devolves i.e. how people behave and what is valuable / scarce as the event progresses. It is not pretty but a fascinating read that will make you consider such a scenario and how you can better prepare.

[0] http://a.co/2DWrTJ5

Sure, but a concern about growth and technological revolutions is just as easily found in Keynesian economists works. The conception of socialism here is just regurgitating Hayek's understanding of socialism in "The Road To Serfdom" as fundamentally being about "big government", which is woefully disconnected from the writings of almost every socialist (government centralization is theorized method of implementing the socialist mode of production by some socialists, but it's not fundamentally the point nor is there an understanding of welfare reforms as being "more socialist" by any Marxist I know). Or it's confusing what some socialists agitate for against neoliberal revanchism as their ultimate aims. Either way I wish these people would read a single work by a socialist or have some understanding of the schools of thought within socialism before making these hilariously misinformed pronouncements. It might even challenge their understanding of the "enlightened billionaire class".

Definitely agreed that the eagerness to write off Marx is related to a misunderstanding of what Marx actually said though.

On the Sensations of Tone by Hermann von Helmholtz

The Road by Jack London

all of the Oz books by L. Frank Baum

The Scottish Students' Song Book

Heart Songs

The Age of Reason

The Art of Money Getting by Barnum

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, by Robert Sapolsky

Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari

Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian is better, stylistically, but changed me less as a person)

The Alchemist and The Fifth Mountain, by Paulo Coelho

The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Tribe, by Sebastian Junger

I know a lot of people who found The Road incredibly depressing. But I thought it was optimistic and the most moving thing I've ever read.

I haven't read Blood Meridian yet, but Child of God (another McCarthy novel) definitely lacks the optimism of The Road.

As for this article, I think that the subconscious fascinates almost everyone. The reason we have psychology (in my opinion, of course) is that it's apparent to almost all of us that there's something going on under there.

Everyone has anecdotes like the one mentioned in this article, where a solution to a problem appears in a dream or pops into someone's head immediately after waking.

Non-fiction:

Coders at Work by Peter Siebel and Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston - I loved reading about the founder's stories and first-hand perspectives of notable programmers.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton - really interesting perspective on "work" and various types of careers and people that find happiness in them/work itself.

Superfreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner - even if you don't agree with their arguments or think that the authors are all fluff, I think that their writing style is exceptionally clear and easy to understand.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - some really interesting ideas and analysis, although the book could have been 1/2 as short

Fiction:

Anathem by Neal Stephenson - starts out slow but after the first 200 pages it became a really great story that I couldn't put down.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel - loved the main story of the book, the controversial ending didn't bother me too much because I don't feel like it takes away from the story at all.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson - cheap fun and suspenseful

The Road by Cormac McCarthy - I don't think much needs to be said about this book

White Tiger by Aravind Adiga - extremely interesting and gripping novel about a side of the world most of us Westerners never see

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - finally read this classic. I read the "Ultimate Edition" which contains all 5 of Adams' novel, loved the first one but the story felt like it started to putter out by the third.

The Border Series (All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing, etc) is riddled with inaccessible scene description (non-stop landscape lexicon) and bouts of Spanish, only barely detracting from each story's general awe-inspiring quality.

No Country For Old Men is more accessible and I'd definitely recommend it. The Road is also a must.

no, just no. This was a terrible film. Does not compare at all to the book or film of The Road

I assume you have not read or watched The Road [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road

I love the snippets of prose I've seen from Blood Meridian and The Road, but I am reluctant to read them, even though they're well on their way to becoming classics of the English language. My impression is that the books are saturated in darkness with very little light shining through. The violence and horror will stick in my thoughts long after I put my books down. There are certainly books and movies I regret ingesting for imagery that they've embedded in the back of my mind.

Did you get that feeling reading these books?

The Art of Computer Programming, volume 4a: Combinatorial Algorithms...and I am not suggesting I understand a meaningful fraction of it. It reminds me of how little I know. And in fairness I've been reading volume I by fits and starts since the late 1980's.

Critique of Pure Reason for similar reasons in another of my lifetimes. It's another book I'm not smart enough to criticize meaningfully.

Fiction, clearly Cormac McCarthy's The Road. As a parent it's just brutal to find a place to put it. Not necessarily my first recommendation among his novels, either.

Futurists prefer "forecasting" rather than "prediction" since the future is constructed from the past (that is, data) and not from the examination of pigeon entrails, tea leaves, or flakey models with deus ex machina solutions.

David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming would be a good choice. It's a snapshot of forecast reality, not near-future sci fi, and scary.

https://smile.amazon.com/Uninhabitable-Earth-Life-After-Warm...

Also worthwhile, David Pogue's How to Prepare for Climate Change: A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos. Similar to the Wallace-Wells book, but from a different perspective.

https://smile.amazon.com/How-Prepare-Climate-Change-Practica...

Cormack McCarthy's The Road is a disturbing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive when life on earth dies off from the bottom up. It is set a bit further in the future than the others, at a point where the die off of humans is happening. Collapse and death is mostly low tech.

https://smile.amazon.com/Road-Cormac-McCarthy/dp/0307387895/...

It does seem like we are living in a utopian sci fi novel these days (pandemic aside). We have ignored the warnings of pending collapse until there is no longer time to correct course or even adapt. So it's likely we wail be living in environmental chaos for the next 20 years and then slip into extinction over the next 10 as we experience first hand the last great die-off.

I'm the fellow that's sooo tempted to add another 50 books to be read. But, that's an incredibly detailed list and more than enough to last. I will highly recommend 2 books though.

Anathem, Neil Stephenson. Have read this book at least a dozen times now.

Lilith's Brood, Octavia Butler. This is one of only 2-3 books in my life that made me physically uncomfortable at times. It's not a happy story, but very well done. It'll make you think and feel.

(3rd book)
The Road, Cormac McCarthy. Dark, stark, brutal prose. Not strictly sf, but is in an apocolyptic setting.

> Did you get that feeling reading these books?

Not gonna lie: Blood Meridian deals in some very grim and violent subject matter. There are no heroes in that story. Its about a gang of scalp hunters (the Glanton Gang. They actually existed if you can believe it...) so I'll leave you to draw your conclusions about what a story like that would entail. The way McCarthy makes those types of scenes digestible is by almost always describing them in the past tense. You the reader come upon them after they happened. He also writes with a detachment to the event and speaks of some downright unspeakable acts almost matter of factly. I am pretty squeamish and I could handle it so you'll probably be fine because of that.

The Road I found harder to read than BM. Its less violent (although there are a couple spots that get pretty gruesome) but just unrelentingly bleak and grim. I needed to lie down after reading it. Again his detachment from the events happening make it bearable. Worth it IMO.

Assuming you haven't read them, I'd recommend digging into All The Pretty Horses or No Country For Old Men. Both are incredible stories that have the same scenes of elemental good vs evil that crops up in McCarthys work over and over again but are less... intense.

I like understanding where I am located in space and time, that is why I love reading about science & science fiction ; it is indirectly related to religion in the sense that it makes you think about your world, about yourself.

Buddhism / Religion / ... :

- Siddartha - Hermann Hesse

- The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

Science:

- A brief history of time - Stephen Hawking (space, time)

- The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins (evolution)

- Le cerveau intime - Marc Jeannerod (in french only)

Science-fiction:

- The Road - Cormack Mc Carthy

- City - Clifford D. Simack

- Time is the simplest thing - Clifford D. Simack

- Ringworld - Larry Niven

I have read The Road; I have not read Blood Meridian (yet - not sure if I will or not).

I read The Road when I was probably 22 or 23. I now have a son who is six (I'm a man, for context), and I suspect that if I were to re-read it, I would likely weep uncontrollably for an hour or two, and then spend the next several months sporadically crying and clutching my son. It is a hard, hard read, and even harder (I assume) if you're a parent.

That being said, it's also a masterpiece of a book. Ultimately it does have a glimmer of optimism, it's just a really rough time getting to that optimism. I don't regret reading it, but once is enough, for now.

A bunch of books by Kahlil Gibran. Read The Prophet twice.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Love In The Time Of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Problem Of Pain by C S Lewis

Disgrace by J M Coetzee

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

On Writing by Stephen King

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Dictionary Of The Khazars by Milorad Pavic

Candide by Voltaire

The Labyrinth Of Solitude | Life And Thought In Mexico by Ocavio Paz

I finished that last one today. Read this:

All men, at some moment in their lives, feel themselves to be alone. And they are. To live is to be separated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the mysterious future. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature -- if that word can be used in reference to man, who has "invented" himself by saying "No" to nature -- consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.

I recommend this old book.

I tore through The Road a few years ago and consider its prose some of the finest I've ever read. It's grey-ness stuck with me and I still think about it now and then (combined with the dialogue in No Country for Old Men, which I've only seen, not read).

I think you should read one of them. If you want, I'll read The Road (or any other one) while you do and we can talk about it. Someone has to carry the fire.

There was a time a few years ago when I was absolutely certain that the world was going to return to sustenance level living really soon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe). And then I read The Road and got extremely depressed.

So I've thought about this a lot, and even asked someone (who you may have heard of) if there was already a system or procedure in place so people could keep in contact after a global catastrophe. His answer was a simple "no." My thought was that if people could keep in contact, they could better manage their survival, to access information on crop growing and to get updates on any "nomads" who might be roaming around.

The best answer really is amateur radio. And hopefully information can be recovered from hard drives after the world becomes stable again.

But please don't get me wrong. I don't advocate people freaking out. My dad was a missile engineer (programmer?) who really pounded the peak oil thing into us, and his predictions on "wars over energy" really influenced my thinking, so it's hard for me to gauge how biased I am.