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Comment by the_clarence | Hacker News Reader

I can't get interested in a book if I don't get a warm recommendation. Anyone want to recommend one of the books in that list?

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Before looking at the list, two of the books that came to my mind as possible candidates were Permutation City by Greg Egan, and Glasshouse by Charles Stross. Permutation City made the list, and I definitely endorse it.

Glasshouse is not on the list, but I definitely think it's worth a read.

Neuromancer is on the list and it may be my personal favorite novel (if not #1 on my list, it's very close).

A couple of Murakami novels were on the list here. I've read several of his novels and would basically make a blanket statement "read anything by Murakami".

I'm about 200 pages into 1Q84, and am not really enjoying it. Is it just not for me, or does it just take a while to get into?

1Q84 marked Murakami's "Float On" moment, chosen I felt to allow him to cash out his career in a Western market.

It wasn't especially superior, just a bit less abstract with a hint of "possible movie adaptation". If you enjoyed his other fiction, check out his nonfiction.

> cash out his career in a Western market.

That's funny because one of the plots is about fixing up a book in order to win a literary prize

I would put that aside for now and go back to Hard Boiled Wonderland & the End of the World. That was an incredible read, and much more accessible.

1Q84 is one of the ones I haven't read personally, so it's hard to say. I can just comment that all of the other Murakami works I've read really "hooked" me right from the beginning.

After Dark was my first and that was pretty much a "I sat down to 'read a few pages' to see if I wanted to read the book or not, and when I looked up I was 2/3rds of the way done" experience.

I liked some of Murakami's work, but I didn't really like 1Q84. I remember e.g. South of the Border, West of the Sun as being better (that's just the first title that springs to mind).

I was once a huge fan of Murakami, but I did not enjoy 1Q84.

At the time of first reading his novels, the reason I enjoyed them so much was how different they were to anything else I'd read. They felt like a lazy Sunday afternoon, except weird things keep happening. Sometimes those weird things feel sinister, sometimes not. You just sort of drift through the book, never quite grasping the entirety, but it is soothing enough that you don't care.

However, once you've read a few, the forumula becomes more obvious and starts to lose its appeal. I started with Hard Boiled Wonderland, which I recommend, and another that I enjoyed was The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

But after that, it is probably enough.

Iain M Banks use of weapon is both an incredibly good book and a portal to the culture series , in which almost all books are just as good.

The Culture series permanently changed my perspective on the universe. Earth is just one more of the oddball primitive worlds well off the beaten path.

Same happens to me, and if I am not interested I can not focus on reading it.

Tor Nørretranders' The User Illusion was a great read, hereby warmly recommended. One of the principal ideas was that our senses take in many orders of magnitude more of data than we are able to be conscious of. I believe he estimated something like 10 Mbps taken in and 80? baud being aware of — something like that, I should read it again sometime.

Many are just classics (and not mindfuck in my opinion).

Hesse is good in general.

Kafka is good in a weird fucked up way and to be recommended after one had to deal with the legal system for example.

Castaneda is interesting fantasy, but many took it literal and a real cult evolved around his books (with him included as the Guru).

Peter Caroll is interesting, if you like the occult.

And Robert Anton Wilsons Illuminatus! is the bible of conspiracy theories.

(But a really good book and deserving of the mindfuck category, I think it popularized the term mindfuck)

The Trial does deserve the term mindfuck, I think, both because of the story and because it upends the notion of what most people expect of a novel. Kafka's other words are weird and wonderful and not nearly as hard to read as some seem to think, but if you've read The Trial, they're not very mindfuck-y, and that's a big problem with a list like this - each book you read that is still a mindfuck will make a lot of the rest seem pretty pedestrian (though often still good).

Neuromancer and Snow Crash are usually recommended here.

John dies at the end -> all the other books. Silly scify nonsense that will have you giggling. Oh, and the Zoey Ashe trilogy too.

Read them all and highly recommend them, but to be clear, these are not mindfucks, It's just well written entertainment, nothing ambitious.

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