The Greatest Books of All Time | Hacker News Reader

The Greatest Books of All Time

thegreatestbooks.org

43 pointsbribri30 comments

(Throwaway because I don't want to tie my main account to the recommendation site(s) I'll bring up)

This is a great resource that I haven't discovered before - I tend to read mostly from "top lists" when I'm not reading books I've been recommended organically - I appreciate the lifetimes people have already spent separating the wheat from the chaff. Thanks for sharing.

Now, since it's on topic, and not listed in the "list of lists" on the site, I'd like to share my surprising source for book recommendations...

I don't think that the actual discussion forums are worth spending brainpower or attention on, but I've actually gotten a lot of mileage out of the wikis that the 4chan communities of /lit/ and /sci/ curate. The former (/lit/, [1]) does a yearly vote to generate a top 100, but caveat lector: 2020's vote was raided by another board. You can see the past yearly top 100s on one page of the wiki ([2]), and I've not yet had a bad experience picking a book from previous lists (2020's still has worth if you ignore obvious troll entries). Sadly, the lists are usually in the form of an image and not raw text, so it's not very accessibility-friendly. Also to note: if you want to pick a book from a specific region or genre or want to know what order to approach a new author, there are plenty of other pages on the site beyond the top 100, which have also been great resources

Lastly, /sci/'s wiki ([3]) is primarily for reference texts, which is HN's speed. The math books and the Haskell books are a solid list from what I've worked through or skimmed so far (the math suggestions are more numerous than the acclaimed "Chicago undergraduate mathematics bibliography"), but can't vouch for any other subject.

[1] https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki//lit/_Wiki [2] https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki//lit/_Top_100_Lists [3] https://4chan-science.fandom.com/wiki//sci/_Wiki

Thanks for the link. Surprisingly the list is more culturally diverse compare to other book recommendations

Diverse? No, it is not. And not being diverse does not make it a bad 'list'.

I've tried to read " a sense of an ending" about 5 times and simply cannot get into it. I've read insane amounts of books across all subjects and categories. I have no idea how this book constantly comes to the top of best books lists.

Really?

The top two entries are dense modernist classics that only so many try to read. At third is Don Quixote. My stepmother remarked that pretty much everything that anyone mentions about Don Quixote comes from the first hundred pages or so.

The Iliad: "The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters...". Yep. Somebody, somewhere, must have translated it into dactylic hexameters in English, but I can't think who that would be: it is not a handy meter for English.

I think the algorithm needs some work.

This is actually my site. I built it over 10 years ago. I do understand the complaint about it being mostly western lit, and I've recently started searching for and adding more non-western lists. I am open to any recommendations. Thanks!

Standard ebooks have some lists like this with their public domain entries:

https://standardebooks.org/collections/modern-librarys-100-b...

Not sure how to access a master list of lists though

Good point, filed https://github.com/standardebooks/web/issues/102.

Great "Classics" list. I have read most in the past, but this is a very interesting list to go through again (even if it takes 2 years). Thank you (both Shane Sherman and bribri) for bringing this to my/our attention.

Thank you, great work.

Any list like this that doesn't include Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is highly suspect. I kept on scrolling, but it wasn't there.

The titles should be The Greatest Western Book of All Times. Most Asians can relate more to Three Kingdoms, Journey To The West, Ramayana and Mahabharata than these list

Interesting idea. Unfortunately, and maybe it is my loss, but any link (on any topic) using wordings such as "Greatest" and "of all time" I always cautiously read comments first before clicking. I already feel the headline cannot be true based on so many other experiences - Awesome lists are another.

Would it fuel more interest if simply Greatest was italicized thus emphasizing the method over the list?

Shame about the login filters. Not going to associate my ID with either of the Two you selected.

For the first 50 books, I'd read 38, wanted to read about 9 and couldn't care less about 3. (William Faulkner and Thomas Mann. Probably, they are the ones I should read first!)

Of the top 10 it was 9:1 read:want. I think I found the result pleasing but also surprising. I expected far more to be unread and unwanted overall. Most of them I'd read before leaving Universty.

I got tired of clicking through your social capture. I'd have done more than 50 if you got rid of this burden.

So: what's being harvested here? Explain to me how this affects SEO, or income, or anything specific. What was I doing in either clicking, or ignoring the social login?

edit: hmm. -2. is this bad karma because I sound boastful? I'm a 59yo, if you live long enough, you will read books on the classical canon of books to be read. Is it bad karma because I think Thomas Mann is boring? (I loved watching death in venice, but magic mountain was interminably, prosaically dull dull dull and I couldn't finish it) or because I dislike William Faulkner?

Or maybe because I asked what the login focus on FB and Apple was, and if this is (organ) harvesting?

The ratio of male to female authors and the small subset of countries that absolutely dominate this list tell me just about all I need to know about it.

Sure, they qualify how the list was built at the top, but titling it "The Greatest Books of All Time" serves to perpetuate the problems with who gets exposure and what styles and perspectives are considered worthy of praise. This kind of list is exactly the thing I'd have bought into as a pretentious high schooler. It's a shame to see this thinking continuing to be propagated in 2021, in my personal opinion.

Historically male writers vastly outnumbered female authors. It would be hard to build a historic list like this and correct that imbalance historically.

How would you build this type of list to correct for this?

It is still a massive problem within the publishing and review space. But slowly improving... lots more that could be done for non white authors as well.

For example, the top 350 books doesn't include a single Chinese book! This is enough to shows you how biased and worthless this list is. It's essentially suggesting there is no literary tradition outside the west.

It seems like your frustration is over the name of the list, and you would prefer it is listed as "The greatest books of Western Civilization". Is that an accurate assessment if the title was different you would be fine with it?

Since the site is in English I think it is likely aimed at an English audience...

>Since the site is in English I think it is likely aimed at an English audience...

To be fair, fully half of the top ten books were not written in English. Non-Indo-European languages can be translated just as well as French and Russian can.

True, but the number of people who focus on non-indo-european languages is a lot smaller than people who focus on languages "closer to home". Probably just comes down to numbers.

It would be interesting to see how culture impacts story/book. Russia seems to have so many amazing works of literature, but is that a function of their culture, or because of the intense focus the USA/UK put on Russia and learning their mindset during the Cold War, or because of something else?

>True, but the number of people who focus on non-indo-european languages is a lot smaller than people who focus on languages "closer to home". Probably just comes down to numbers.

I think it's likely less a question of focusing closer to home and more a product of how the publishing industry operates, as you suggested earlier. Would certainly be an interesting question for more investigation. If it were just down to numbers, I'd expect at least one book written in a non-Western language-- English language readers assuredly aren't quite as insular as the list would suggest.

>It would be interesting to see how culture impacts story/book. Russia seems to have so many amazing works of literature, but is that a function of their culture, or because of the intense focus the USA/UK put on Russia and learning their mindset during the Cold War, or because of something else?

This is also a really interesting question. There might even be some historians here who can chime in on it. It's common for certain countries' language and literature to become "in vogue" at different points in time (e.g. French was really popular in Russia in the 19th century, following the French Revolution). Maybe a similar effect played a role?

Your suggestion for naming would be more accurate and I would be fine with it. However, besides the naming, this list shows how shallow western reviewers are as greatest book lists on the chinese internet always include multiple western books.

I came here to say the same thing. In fact, there isn't a single book in any East Asian language (not just Chinese) within the top 350 listed there!

I think this is a great point. I would really appreciate to see more accurate lists or, better yet, more diverse lists.

However, I have to point out the irony here. Every time someone complains about the lack of western representation they just pretend there isn't a southern hemisphere in the planet. The East is not composed of only Europe, Canada, and the United States.

That's to say, fight for overall diversity, not for western vs. eastern representation because that's a false dichotomy.

I don't see the irony, I'm just more knowledgable about Chinese literature so I gave an example of how biased the list is using its lack of Chinese literature. I am fully aware that many other literary traditions are also not represented on that list, I think its fair to say the vast majority of books on that list belongs to what is normally referred to as western literature.

Do you have a better list?

Honestly, a lot of my objection is to the naming of this list. "Western works my review-based model scored the highest" just doesn't generate clicks the same way.

It isn't what people are search for either, the organic volume on that search phrase is through the roof.

This is true. It's also one of the reasons that search phrase is cluttered with lists that look startlingly like this one.

Better? No. Any 'best of' list is at most a bit of fun when taken with a pinch of salt, however the method obtained.

The boast or claim to be "The Greatest Books of All Time" lacks honesty or displays vast ignorance. The lists from which this list is compiled are intrinsically linked. This makes the title invalid, but, importantly my point, is that it does not make the resulting list invalid. Just please call the list what it is, a fun experiment.

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