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Comment by tocs3 | Hacker News Reader

"Books are not oranges."

As an aside, what do you mean by this? I would have an even harder time giving and answer to the best orange I've eaten.

The Hobbit. My brother read it to me when I was just starting to read. When he was done I asked him to read it again. he said no and I learned to read in earnest. I was often shooed out of the adult section of the library. I have read lots of books by now.

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The best orange has a structure of a peak ripe grapefruit. Peel doesn’t stick, micro-columns separate easily and burst with juice. If grapefruits were orange-flavored, I’d eat them all day.

Still waiting for January and my morning ritual of juicing a small grapefruit into an 8oz ice-filled mason jar.

It's a damn shame we haven't figured out how to coerce citrus like we do tomatoes.

Ever tried pomelo?

> what do you mean by this

That books are not a commodity.

I feel like it would be hard to choose the best of a commodity, so this is even more perplexing to me.

Easier because directly comparable, harder because one can't tell the difference?

The point _may_ be that oranges can be evaluated based on a few simple variables (eg., richness of flavor, juiciness, etc.), where there's no common set of variables that can be used to evaluate all the different types of books (ie, what makes a good history book differs to what makes a good philosophy book, etc.) and if they can't be compared, a 'best' can't be established.

That said, as the author alluded to, 'best' in this context is vague and can mean what we want it to, eg., person a may consider best to mean the book that has had the widest influence, where person b may consider it to mean the book that they personally found the most insightful, etc.

Right. That’s why it’s helpful to get recommendations.

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