5 ms·

No Sartre or Camous? No Hundred Years of Solitude? No Pamuk? No Henry Miller? No Nabokov's "Dar", no "Ishmael", no " Stepenwolf", no "Dorian Gray", no "Brave Ne

No Sartre or Camous? No Hundred Years of Solitude? No Pamuk? No Henry Miller? No Nabokov's "Dar", no "Ishmael", no " Stepenwolf", no "Dorian Gray", no "Brave New World"? No "mockingbird", no "Atlas", no motorcycle maintenance? No dr.Zhivago? What kind of a list it is?

kunai 11y ago
It's self-explanatory -- it's just list of the books ann acclaimed intellectual and magnificent artist loved. It's not a reference book list for philosophy majors.
replicant2020 11y ago
No Thomas Pynchon? No David Foster Wallace? No Heidegger? No Kundera? No Kerouac? Oh what a terrible person, to have not read everything in an arbitrary list of authors and books that I feel like name dropping.
- dschiptsov 11y ago
  "On the road" is there. I forgot Philip K. Dick and Yukio Mishima! Oh, sorry, because it is His list it must be exceptional.
  - sambeau 11y ago
    His list is interesting because he is an interesting person. He is also a highly original and highly influential person. Trying to get-to-know what his influences are is a (probably flawed) but understandable exercise. I think it would be fair to argue that he, himself, was an exceptional character. It's very human to want to try to understand exceptional people. Is that wrong of us?
    - dschiptsov 11y ago
      Where did I argued against his personality? I just considered this particular list being rather poor and provided some suggestions.
- laxatives 11y ago
  Is David Foster Wallace really among that calibre of writers? I'm reading Infinite Jest and I think I kind of hate it. There's some amazing chapters, but I can't help but loathe a lot of it. It just feels like pretentious drivel that isn't written by someone who has a clear idea of whats occurring, but by someone who wants to write what sounds "cool". Its almost like emotional pandering. I know he lead a pretty eventful life, but he tries to have so much depth on so many different topics, I get the impression he did the shallowest research time could afford. It would be the equivalent of trying to fit as many highlighted words on a wikipedia page into a paragraph as possible, without understanding what any of them mean. For example, he has some kind of obsession with optics, but every description reduces to convex/concave mirrors and "it just works".
  - bshimmin 11y ago
    I think it's an incredibly challenging book, but also a masterpiece. It's really hard work to get through in places, and some chapters are much, much better than others. Some parts of it are astonishingly and gleefully excellent, some parts work less well (I was more interested in tennis than in Quebec separatism, to be honest). For me, it bears comparison with Ulysses in that both are works of epic length and a singular uniqueness. Sometimes when I read a book I can conceive, even without being a writer myself, of how it came into being; with Infinite Jest I just can't even begin to imagine how that book appeared.
  - replicant2020 11y ago
    I'm currently reading it too, and am about 100 pages from the end. On a chapter-by-chapter level I think the quality is mixed, in the sense that not every chapter has the impact and pace that the first chapter has. In some chapters it feels like he labours a point for far longer than necessary for the reader to get the message. One criticism I hear quite a lot is that DFW's own writing on the topics of addiction and depression are shallow and not representative, though I can't really say how true this is for lack of experience. The thing that worked for me in I.J. was that Wallace managed to combine elements of comedy and tragedy, not just in alternating parts but often within the same body of text. Some chapters are so tragic as to be darkly comic, in particular some of the descriptions on the backgrounds of members of AA. Plus, don't forget that Infinite Jest isn't his only work :). I haven't read The Pale King but have heard that it does away with a lot of the verbosity of I.J. and feels a lot more focused, and there are other works of fiction and also his more journalistic essay-ish type pieces, for example those from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (the collection, though the titular piece in particular I found very funny). I'd also highly recommend Oblivion: Stories, even if Infinite Jest didn't gel with you, as I think it's as emotionally powerful but a lot more focused than Infinite Jest. It doesn't attempt the comedy/tragedy mix that I.J. seems to try for, and as a result the stories are shorter but just as affective.
wodenokoto 11y ago
I haven't read a single book/author you list. Does that make me somehow a bad person, or what is your point?
- dschiptsov 11y ago
  Read some, the answer, probably, would emerge.
logingone 11y ago
Have you read much Camous?
- dschiptsov 11y ago
  Not much. Plague, The Fall, and especially The First Man.
  - bshimmin 11y ago
    I think you were being gently mocked for your spelling there. (Read L'Étranger, it's great!)
josephmx 11y ago
Anyone who hasn't read your list of obscure authors that make you feel special is an idiot!
- dschiptsov 11y ago
  > of obscure authors You can't be serious.)
  - josephmx 11y ago
    These authors aren't particularly famous outside of your Literature 101 class
logfromblammo 11y ago
"De gustibus non est disputandum." "Diff'rent strokes, for diff'rent folks." If you don't like Bowie's list, you can make your own. I had enough of philosophers and internationally acclaimed authors in high school. Literature teachers have their own canon of books that must be read, and I hated having someone else's idea of an influential book forced down my throat. While it isn't quite as bad as "stop liking things I don't like," an unsolicited "you should like more of the things I like" is still irritating, when I'm not in the right mood for it.
- dschiptsov 11y ago
  It is not "you should like more of the things I like". These are not mere "modern classics" or "internationally acclaimed authors", most of the titles I have mentioned offhand are remarkable masterpieces, no worse than 1984, Lolita or On The Road which were on the list. And I forgot The Magic Mountain, Grapes of Wrath, Catcher in the Rye, Age of Reason, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, etc.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    They may be masterworks, but that doesn't mean everyone will--or should--like them. I find it more useful to organize influential works like trees rather than as lists. That way, you can find a branch that you like, and walk up and down its nodes. For instance, if you like Twelve Monkeys, you could walk up the branch to Brazil, further up to _1984_, sidestep to cousin _Catch 22_, skip to uncle _The Trial_, and go up to _Crime and Punishment_ and _The Brothers Karamazov_. Whereas if you like The Magnificent Seven, you might walk up the branch to The Seven Samurai, sidestep to Yojimbo, and go back down to A Fistful of Dollars. When you put out lists of finite length, featuring only the brightest stars in the sky, you lose quite a lot of detail in your constellations.
    - gglitch 11y ago
      Right on. I'd add that the value of having such a large and diverse canon is that each person finds their own branch or branches that eventually ramify down to tiny twigs unknown elsewhere on the tree, but that have immense personal beauty and significance. The value of canonical taxonomies in lit isn't that all the books are good, but that there's something in them somewhere for anyone. But not necessarily all of it for everyone.
dang 11y ago
The HN guidelines ask you not to be gratuitously negative in comments. This is so gratuitously negative that it could be a parody. If you'd like to list your favorite books, you should do so (somewhere else, though, since it would be off-topic here). But scorning someone else for not sharing your taste violates the spirit of this site, not to mention was guaranteed to lead the thread further into off-topic bickering.
- dschiptsov 11y ago
  Imagine that someone less holy would post a list of supposedly remarkable projects in CS without mentioning McCarthy's LISP, Kay's Smalltalk, Armstrong's Erlang, Stallman's Emacs, Cox's Plan9, git of Linus, etc. How would you react? Like in this example, these books I have mentioned are not even a matter of opinion, they are such masterpieces, without which no list could be considered worth having. You probably pissing up the wrong tree.
  - tehstone8 11y ago
    This isn't necessarily meant to be a list of remarkable books or masterpieces. It's just the list of one person's favorite 100.
  - dang 11y ago
    They're utterly a matter of opinion. Please stop, and please don't be uncivil on Hacker News.
    - dschiptsov 11y ago
      Nope. Certain aesthetics are related to that set of hardwired emotions (as in Minsky's Emotion Machine) we call the Human Nature. The notions of youth, health, beauty, honesty, clarity, straightforwardness, etc. In software engineering there are other aesthetics. The famous maxim "for people to read and accidentally for machine to execute" sums up almost everything. Clarify, conciseness, readability, modularity, compossibility, loose coupling, design around protocols and interfaces - every decent programming guidelines, such as Google's Common LISP or Python style guides will show you a set of variables to optimize. Norvig's LISP style guide is also nice read. Like it is in arts, each genre has its own aesthetics, and there are universal ones, such as non verbosity, clarify, following standard, familiar idioms. So, some artifacts are objectively better (according to certain human-universal aesthetics or those derived from laws of complex systems of Nature) than others no matter what conditioning you have in your head. Haskell's syntax, for example, is aesthetically better than Java's no matter what opinion you, or even majority hold. Do you have sheriff's bage or something?

kunai 11y ago

It's self-explanatory -- it's just list of the books ann acclaimed intellectual and magnificent artist loved. It's not a reference book list for philosophy majors.

replicant2020 11y ago

No Thomas Pynchon? No David Foster Wallace? No Heidegger? No Kundera? No Kerouac? Oh what a terrible person, to have not read everything in an arbitrary list of authors and books that I feel like name dropping.

dschiptsov 11y ago
"On the road" is there. I forgot Philip K. Dick and Yukio Mishima! Oh, sorry, because it is His list it must be exceptional.
- sambeau 11y ago
  His list is interesting because he is an interesting person. He is also a highly original and highly influential person. Trying to get-to-know what his influences are is a (probably flawed) but understandable exercise. I think it would be fair to argue that he, himself, was an exceptional character. It's very human to want to try to understand exceptional people. Is that wrong of us?
  - dschiptsov 11y ago
    Where did I argued against his personality? I just considered this particular list being rather poor and provided some suggestions.
laxatives 11y ago
Is David Foster Wallace really among that calibre of writers? I'm reading Infinite Jest and I think I kind of hate it. There's some amazing chapters, but I can't help but loathe a lot of it. It just feels like pretentious drivel that isn't written by someone who has a clear idea of whats occurring, but by someone who wants to write what sounds "cool". Its almost like emotional pandering. I know he lead a pretty eventful life, but he tries to have so much depth on so many different topics, I get the impression he did the shallowest research time could afford. It would be the equivalent of trying to fit as many highlighted words on a wikipedia page into a paragraph as possible, without understanding what any of them mean. For example, he has some kind of obsession with optics, but every description reduces to convex/concave mirrors and "it just works".
- bshimmin 11y ago
  I think it's an incredibly challenging book, but also a masterpiece. It's really hard work to get through in places, and some chapters are much, much better than others. Some parts of it are astonishingly and gleefully excellent, some parts work less well (I was more interested in tennis than in Quebec separatism, to be honest). For me, it bears comparison with Ulysses in that both are works of epic length and a singular uniqueness. Sometimes when I read a book I can conceive, even without being a writer myself, of how it came into being; with Infinite Jest I just can't even begin to imagine how that book appeared.
- replicant2020 11y ago
  I'm currently reading it too, and am about 100 pages from the end. On a chapter-by-chapter level I think the quality is mixed, in the sense that not every chapter has the impact and pace that the first chapter has. In some chapters it feels like he labours a point for far longer than necessary for the reader to get the message. One criticism I hear quite a lot is that DFW's own writing on the topics of addiction and depression are shallow and not representative, though I can't really say how true this is for lack of experience. The thing that worked for me in I.J. was that Wallace managed to combine elements of comedy and tragedy, not just in alternating parts but often within the same body of text. Some chapters are so tragic as to be darkly comic, in particular some of the descriptions on the backgrounds of members of AA. Plus, don't forget that Infinite Jest isn't his only work :). I haven't read The Pale King but have heard that it does away with a lot of the verbosity of I.J. and feels a lot more focused, and there are other works of fiction and also his more journalistic essay-ish type pieces, for example those from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (the collection, though the titular piece in particular I found very funny). I'd also highly recommend Oblivion: Stories, even if Infinite Jest didn't gel with you, as I think it's as emotionally powerful but a lot more focused than Infinite Jest. It doesn't attempt the comedy/tragedy mix that I.J. seems to try for, and as a result the stories are shorter but just as affective.

wodenokoto 11y ago

I haven't read a single book/author you list. Does that make me somehow a bad person, or what is your point?

dschiptsov 11y ago
Read some, the answer, probably, would emerge.

logingone 11y ago

Have you read much Camous?

dschiptsov 11y ago
Not much. Plague, The Fall, and especially The First Man.
- bshimmin 11y ago
  I think you were being gently mocked for your spelling there. (Read L'Étranger, it's great!)

josephmx 11y ago

Anyone who hasn't read your list of obscure authors that make you feel special is an idiot!

dschiptsov 11y ago
> of obscure authors You can't be serious.)
- josephmx 11y ago
  These authors aren't particularly famous outside of your Literature 101 class

logfromblammo 11y ago

"De gustibus non est disputandum." "Diff'rent strokes, for diff'rent folks." If you don't like Bowie's list, you can make your own. I had enough of philosophers and internationally acclaimed authors in high school. Literature teachers have their own canon of books that must be read, and I hated having someone else's idea of an influential book forced down my throat. While it isn't quite as bad as "stop liking things I don't like," an unsolicited "you should like more of the things I like" is still irritating, when I'm not in the right mood for it.

dschiptsov 11y ago
It is not "you should like more of the things I like". These are not mere "modern classics" or "internationally acclaimed authors", most of the titles I have mentioned offhand are remarkable masterpieces, no worse than 1984, Lolita or On The Road which were on the list. And I forgot The Magic Mountain, Grapes of Wrath, Catcher in the Rye, Age of Reason, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, etc.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  They may be masterworks, but that doesn't mean everyone will--or should--like them. I find it more useful to organize influential works like trees rather than as lists. That way, you can find a branch that you like, and walk up and down its nodes. For instance, if you like Twelve Monkeys, you could walk up the branch to Brazil, further up to _1984_, sidestep to cousin _Catch 22_, skip to uncle _The Trial_, and go up to _Crime and Punishment_ and _The Brothers Karamazov_. Whereas if you like The Magnificent Seven, you might walk up the branch to The Seven Samurai, sidestep to Yojimbo, and go back down to A Fistful of Dollars. When you put out lists of finite length, featuring only the brightest stars in the sky, you lose quite a lot of detail in your constellations.
  - gglitch 11y ago
    Right on. I'd add that the value of having such a large and diverse canon is that each person finds their own branch or branches that eventually ramify down to tiny twigs unknown elsewhere on the tree, but that have immense personal beauty and significance. The value of canonical taxonomies in lit isn't that all the books are good, but that there's something in them somewhere for anyone. But not necessarily all of it for everyone.

dang 11y ago

The HN guidelines ask you not to be gratuitously negative in comments. This is so gratuitously negative that it could be a parody. If you'd like to list your favorite books, you should do so (somewhere else, though, since it would be off-topic here). But scorning someone else for not sharing your taste violates the spirit of this site, not to mention was guaranteed to lead the thread further into off-topic bickering.

dschiptsov 11y ago
Imagine that someone less holy would post a list of supposedly remarkable projects in CS without mentioning McCarthy's LISP, Kay's Smalltalk, Armstrong's Erlang, Stallman's Emacs, Cox's Plan9, git of Linus, etc. How would you react? Like in this example, these books I have mentioned are not even a matter of opinion, they are such masterpieces, without which no list could be considered worth having. You probably pissing up the wrong tree.
- tehstone8 11y ago
  This isn't necessarily meant to be a list of remarkable books or masterpieces. It's just the list of one person's favorite 100.
- dang 11y ago
  They're utterly a matter of opinion. Please stop, and please don't be uncivil on Hacker News.
  - dschiptsov 11y ago
    Nope. Certain aesthetics are related to that set of hardwired emotions (as in Minsky's Emotion Machine) we call the Human Nature. The notions of youth, health, beauty, honesty, clarity, straightforwardness, etc. In software engineering there are other aesthetics. The famous maxim "for people to read and accidentally for machine to execute" sums up almost everything. Clarify, conciseness, readability, modularity, compossibility, loose coupling, design around protocols and interfaces - every decent programming guidelines, such as Google's Common LISP or Python style guides will show you a set of variables to optimize. Norvig's LISP style guide is also nice read. Like it is in arts, each genre has its own aesthetics, and there are universal ones, such as non verbosity, clarify, following standard, familiar idioms. So, some artifacts are objectively better (according to certain human-universal aesthetics or those derived from laws of complex systems of Nature) than others no matter what conditioning you have in your head. Haskell's syntax, for example, is aesthetically better than Java's no matter what opinion you, or even majority hold. Do you have sheriff's bage or something?