Hacker News Books

Like how Pierre Menard wrote Pierre Menard's Don Quixote but not the original? :)

You have some great but lengthy books (Don Quixote, The Lord of the Rings triology).

If you spend a lot of time reading, it's ok. If you doesn't and you want to read all the 50, be careful: you can run out of time.

Great job on the website I can understand the hug problems I'm sure it's more stable otherwise, how long has this been going on btw?

I've been meaning to read Don Quixote for a while now just downloaded it, hope I find the strength to start it.

Amazing. Don Quixote is a very underrated book.

That was a long way to go to get to a Ficciones reference. The Pierre Menard's Don Quixote and the Library of Babel are probably my favorite Borges stories, and I do think they're applicable to the author's point. I just can't help but feel that it was a painful process to get there.

It's fascinating to think of Shakespeare reading Don Quixote and adapting a story from it for one of his later plays.

I knew that Shakespeare and Cervantes had died within 10 days of each other but was surprised to find out that Cervantes lived to 68 while Shakespeare was only 52.

Don Quixote is the funniest book I've read in my entire life.

Watchmen (Alan Moore)

Origins of Form (Christopher Williams)

Starship & The Canoe (Kenneth Brower)

The Size of Lumber (Nicholson Baker)

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Shunryu Suzuki)

Deschooling Society (Ivan Illich)

Moby Dick (Herman Melville)

Bolo'Bolo (P.M.)

Le Ton beau de Marot (Douglas Hofstadter)

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (James Lovelock)

Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation (Umberto Eco)

Neuromancer (William Gibson)

The Intelligent Investor (Benjamin Graham)

Don Quixote (Miguel Cervantes)

Check out http://www.librivox.org. They have a HUGE catalogue of audio recordings of public-domain works. Grab a list of the 100 classic books of all time and download them. Don Quixote, The Prince, Picture of Dorian Grey, Pride and Prejudice...

> markets are the worst possible way to determine artistic value

Markets are the worst way to determine any value; if I ran the world all the prices of everything would be set differently. Nevertheless we haven't yet found a better way of estimating the value of things.

But on a relevant note; not only do markets give the impression that they don't value art closely to some sort of objective intrinsic value - they also probably can't incentivise great works either. Consider the case of Don Quixote [0]. We have arguably one of the greatest novels of any language, ever. It was "engendered" in a prison [1] and the value of that work to the literary canon goes way beyond whatever trials befell Cervantes in getting the life experiences to write it. The situation defies any sort of economic rationalism.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Cervantes

I'm reading Don Quixote and Becoming Steve Jobs.

I can't get enough of reading about the history of Apple and Jobs in particular. I read the Isaacson's Jobs biography twice. It's now more of a guilty pleasure than anything.

Don Quixote is good too. I'm listening to the audio book. While listening to it, I don't really know what to make of it. It's part comedy, part tragedy and all around captivating. Also recommend the mini-story within Don Quixote called The Ill-Advised Curiosity.

I also prefer seeing how my information ages:

http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/

http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-nonfiction/

I'm more inclined to the Board's list than the (self-selecting, possibly motivated) Readers'.

WEF have a list of the 20 most influenctial books:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/11/the-20-most-influenti...

Wikipedia has an (IMO) fascinating list of the most-sold books of all time. The Bible and Quotations from Chairman Mao (a/k/a "The Little Red Book") each have claims of over 1 billion volumes (1-6 being the range) sold. The next highest-selling book, Don Quixote, at 500m copies.

Contrast that with the most-viewed YouTube video of all time -- Gangnam Style has amassed 2.8 billion views in five years. That's still the YouTube record so far as I'm aware.

That makes me wonder what the highest number of impressions of any one media work has been.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0

That's a question of a lifetime because as you change, mature, books "change" as well every time you read them. With that said, many people approach this by choosing the author(s) first or the historical period, and then drilling down to specific titles. Parent mentioned some authors that were relevant to him/her. Don Quixote (book title) is a great book and it had a special meaning to me when I read it for the first time. It was when I was learning Spanish and consulting in Latin America. Quixote is well regarded as a literature masterpiece for the Spanish language and, to me, as a learner, it was like playing the piano while listening to Beethoven as a reference. Well, this was my own experience. You can choose authors/books to build your own experience around them, which I'm sure you will never forget.

My native language is Spanish. An interesting thing about it is that changing the word order generally does not change the meaning but it changes how it sounds (more prosaic or more poetic). That's not a hard rule, I'm sure you can also find examples where changing the word order changes the meaning.

I also agree with the rest of the comments here, the original Don Quixote is not a good book for learning Spanish, see here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote#Style

A modern children's adaptation of the story may be a good choice for learning if OP wants to use the same story.

• “On Liberty” (John Stuart Mill) for political enlightenment and an impeccable defence of [classical!] liberalism. It's packed with simple but enormously powerful ideas that are also timeless, thus applicable today and to so many aspects of life.

• “Don Quixote” (Cervantes): unanimously considered the best work of fiction in the Spanish-speaking world… and on many lists, even #1 of world literature, ever (!). Often overlooked (at least in Spain) by young folks as it is long, the language is archaic, and its themes appear quaint and silly today at first sight. But there's a reason it has been praised for centuries. It's funny and tender. Themes are also modern, and Cervantes' style is playful and innovative, making use of devices such as meta-references, alternative pasts, removal of the fourth wall, etc. I'm not sure how much non-native audiences can enjoy translations, though.

• “The Lord of the Rings” (Tolkien) for the original epic and touching fantasy. (I know many people devour it in their teens, or in their early youth… But I read it as an adult; quite late. Mainly because it seemed to be the only “difficult” book that many of my friends bothered to read, and that predisposed me negatively towards it. Also, my family hadn't read it, and there was no copy of it in our house.)

• “Brief History of Time” (Stephen Hawking): mind-boggling introduction to (astro-)physics, modern cosmogony, etc.

Don Quixote by Cervantes and the Tao Te ching. Former for its
buffoonery and commentary on human nature and the later for
its wisdom.

Reading Don Quixote I was amazed to find people 400 years ago complaining about needing a prescription from a guild barber for a potion from a guild apothecary.

I read Don Quixote in a 4 volume edition printed in 1796. It had been sitting on a shelf in a house my parents bought for 200 years quite readable.

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/

If you only read one book, I suggest Don Quixote, the Grossman translation particularly, if only for the higher quality footnotes (compared to Lathrop's which is very well translated but poorly commented). The advantage here is DQ is really like four or five books of various types, and has a Yale Open Courseware series attached to it, so for any chapters you want to know more about, the resources are at hand. Through this book you can learn so, so much about literature.

But also, watching Don Quixote and Sancho's friendship develop is heartwarming. It was a book written for entertainment first, and just happened to be saturated in intense philosophical and literary quality.

It depends a lot on what books. Many technical books age extremely quickly. You definitely don't want a 30 years old C++ book except for some sort of historical research purpose.

But even in literature there is timing, themes, references and fashion. You'd have a hard time writing Don Quixote today, because hardly anyone reads chivalric romances anymore, so the vast majority of people wouldn't know what you're even parodying. And I suspect most modern readers of Don Quixote don't really get it, excluding those with an education in european medieval literature.

Even without going that far, there are fads and fashions. If you want to write about wizards or vampires there probably are better and worse times to do it.

Even playing your cards right, how likely are you to get a hit? Because there's really no lack of good books on most any subject at this point, and it takes a very dedicated reader to exhaust the existing catalog, and the easiest way for a reader is to find out what's popular and try that, rather than giving a new author a chance.

Slight self promotion, but Standard Ebooks has a few of the classics, and a few more of the classic fiction available as nicely formatted and accessible PD ebooks (epub, Kobo variant epub, and Kindle formats for each):

- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/benjamin-franklin/the-auto...

- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/marcus-aurelius/meditation...

- Don Quixote by Cervantes: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/miguel-de-cervantes-saaved...

- Pride and Predudice by Jane Austen: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jane-austen/pride-and-prej...

- Vanity Fair by William Thackeray: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-makepeace-thackera...

- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles-dickens/david-copp...

- Washington Irving collection: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/washington-irving/the-sket...

- Father Goriot by Balzac: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/honore-de-balzac/father-go...

- The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/j-w-von-goethe/the-sorrows...

- Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/fyodor-dostoevsky/crime-an...

These are nearly always taken from the Gutenberg source transcriptions, but tidied up typographically and marked up using modern technologies. If you notice any problems with any of these we’ll happily take PRs!

A few fiction choices:

  * The Alchemist - the closest thing in my life to a religious text.  Just a beautiful story that I can recall at any time for some calm.

  * Desert Solitaire - just read this recently and it gave me an entirely new outlook on the relationship between humans and nature. 

  * Don Quixote - I was blown away by how a book that is ~600 years old could make me laugh and keep me interested.  Changed how I think about people 'a long time ago' since they could enjoy the same books I do.

  * House of Leaves - this one just split open my brain in an irreversible way, sort of like how you hear people describe certain drugs.

Don Quixote by Cervantes, or Shogun by Clavell.

"I know we asserted a principled stance against smoking, but we now live above a tobacconist!"

You could also say that when rumors did spread back in Mill's day (or before), they were harder to correct as quickly. As an example Cervantes spends a whole chapter in Don Quixote Part II arguing against the inauthenticity of a false sequel.

Times have changed, but the bar must remain high to dismiss centuries of political synthesis and struggle, based on a few new conditions.

I've been meaning to read Don Quixote in Spanish some day.

Slightly off topic: Would there be scope for a bilingual epub format for wide-screen devices displaying native text and translation side by side? This could be useful for Ancient Greek and Latin verse, Norse sagas, devotional readings of sacred texts, Hamlet in the original Klingon and even automagically machine-translated documents.

Dead-tree parallel texts have something of a market at the foreign language section of one's local book-store.