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)

The Shining is a rare case of a film being far better than a the book it is based on precisely because of Kubrick’s reinterpretation of the story.

I find [this argument][1] that one of its central themes is a suppressed history of violence and bloodshed convincing.

A film masterpiece.

[1]: http://www.collativelearning.com/the%20shining%20-%20chap%20...

* Currently reading: Edgedancer

* Flowers for Algernon

* Going Rogue: Spells, Swords, & Stealth

* Split the Party: Spells, Swords, & Stealth

* NPCs

* Children of Time

* Death's End

* The Shining

* IT

* All 7+1 books of The Dark Tower

Dr. Sleep - a newer Steven King book that reads like the old ones. May be the best King book I ever read. A sequel to The Shining, taking place mainly during Dan's adulthood (Dan was the kid in The Shining), a nomadic group of RV-dwellers sustain themselves into unnaturally-long life by torturing kids with The Shining to death and eating as it oozes out of them in a gaseous state.

Honestly, I can't believe King wrote this after all the gaudy, self-indulgent garbage he produced after he stopped doing coke. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be ghost-written.

From a commentary about the linked article:

The common denominator in all of Dick’s fiction is a world beset by an unconstrained and monstrous entropy that devours matter and even time

Reference: https://dynamicsubspace.net/2010/05/09/stanislaw-lems-philip...

And also from the linked article:

The writings of Philip Dick have deserved a better fate than that to which they were destined by their birthplace. If they are neither of uniform quality nor fully realized...

Unlike Stephen King, Dick's books aren't very easy to read from cover to cover, but they're filled with rich references of dystopian tragedy.

William Gibson's Neuromancer is a little easier, but leans more stylistic similar to A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, who relied on a Russian-influenced argot called "Nadsat", which takes its name from the Russian suffix that is equivalent to '-teen' in English to inject the character's language with a certain brand of nastiness to go with the subverted plot.

Stanley Kubrick successfully adapted King's The Shining and Clockwork Orange, but failed to wrap his mind fully around Dick, methinks, as he could never bring a Dick-influenced project to its feet, A.I., which Spielberg couldn't do much with either.

Part of the adventure in reading Dick is figuring out what the hell happened before the novel began to have such a devastating effect on the present he so vividly presents.

Since he died, the imaginative powers of Dick have been tapped and retapped by Hollywood, (Bladerunner, Blade Runner 2049, The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Total Recall, The Adjustment Bureau, Screamers) ...and sometimes the results are even pretty good (despite the esoteric nature of his writing).

There's a lot to be learned about our existential existence from reading Dick, and I associate him more with Kafka and Camus, than his science fiction genre-mates.

Aren't we all amassing a collection boxes? Some which will go untouched from the moment they are organized. We just do it with folders on a hard drive today. Just yesterday I started to organize my media archive (http://pastebin.com/ZhtNgiBK). Some things I've only collected on the prospect that maybe a friend or relative would like to watch it one day, I have no intention of viewing it myself.

On a note related to Kubrick, here's a link to the analysis of The Shining referenced in Room 237 by mstrmnd: http://www.mstrmnd.com/log/802

It's a cool read if you're into his films, and you've approached a point in your own personal analysis when you thought, the deeper I go, the closer to madness I am.

For the average person, that was only a realistic scenario for bestsellers (Joy of Cooking, The Shining, etc). For all the less common long tail[1] books, there was nothing comparable to the internet + amazon.com.

Maybe some discussion of book readings/reviews on dialup USENET forums before amazon.com but again, that's a channel that only computer enthusiasts bothered with. All the C/C++ books I read were simply the ones that happened to be on the shelf at WaldenBooks, Bookstop, Borders, B&N. Even the hardcore magazines of C/C++ Users Journal or C++Report would review maybe 1 book an issue.

amazon.com has expanded my exposure to long tail books more than ten-fold. There was no comparable dissemination of worthy book reading ideas before it.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail

Even if you just consider the film classics based on his books (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Shining), he'll have staying power as people will find his books through the films.

Then there's the cultural impact he's had. Stranger Things was basically a Stephen King novel and even directly name-dropped him.