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Comment by bsenftner | Hacker News Reader

His finish, going into details of Nietzsche is simply wonderful.

For those that have tried, but cannot penetrate these types of books, start with any Nobel Literature winner that looks interesting. They are the gateway to serious literature, and by reading the recognized "best written intellectual novel of the year" you'll be gradually exposed to the writing structures used in harder to penetrate literature.

Don't be fooled into thinking that a Nobel Literature winner is difficult to read, none of them are and that is why they have the award. They are also white knuckle rides through tragic human lives where the main character wins against incredible odds, and these novels demonstrate the critical thinking and secondary considerations necessary to prevail when others are crushed. Great literature teaches one first hand how to use critical thought, a dire need today.

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> Don't be fooled into thinking that a Nobel Literature winner is difficult to read, none of them are

Kind of a stretch there. No casual reader can handle Doctor Faustus (Thomas Mann) or the Glass beads game (Hesse) without serious effort. Sure, one can try, in the same way one can try running a marathon without training, with the same predictable results.

I've read a few books from Hesse, including The Glass Bead Game, and found the English translations rather readable. His more commonly recommended books, Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, should be fine for any high school level reader.

for those saying "The Glass Bead Game" is a difficult read, be aware there are multiple translations from the original German. One in English is simply titled "The Glass Bead Game" without the subtitle "Magisti Ludi", another it simply titled "Magistri Ludi", and yet another is titled "Magistri Ludi: The Glass Bead Game". The first one I mention was originally translated during the 60's, when Hesse was enjoying popularity with the counter culture set, and that version is written to be largely understood by a general audience. The other translations are more literal to the original German and are a more difficult read. I read the first, easy one initially, but have read the others versions over the years as well. I prefer the easy one, simply because the ideas are the same on all of them, but with the "easy one" I can discuss with non-readers of Hesse and they understand what I'm talking about. The other versions use language that is not in common usage, meaning I have to translate to easier terms to discuss the book with anyone.

Any personal recommendations for a starter or favorites (perhaps top three or five or something like that)?

Doris Lessing

Ernest Hemingway - starting with “The Old Man and the Sea”.

After reading that, you’ll no longer think that Nobel Prize winners for literature write books that are difficult to read and understand.

Most of Steinbeck is similarly approachable.

When someone ask for my favourite author my answer is Hemingway. Want to write better? Try to write like Hemingway.

That said, people who read less tend to believe that more and bigger words equal better writting. My (usually scientific) texts are described as "telegraphic", and heavily expanded without adding any real content. E.g. "the house was white" gets transformed to "the paint that covered the beautiful house was pure white".

I've never enjoyed Hemingway; his short sentences feel unnatural to me. I end up feeling like the narrative is trying, hard, to manipulate my feelings, to the degree that sense of being manipulated ends up being the loudest voice in my head as I try to read Hemingway. I've finished his books with only a memory of arguing with the prose the entire time.

Three Booker prize winners I’m particularly fond of:

The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

Girl, Woman, Other - Bernardine Evaristo

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is another recent literary favorite

I haven't read Evaristo but I will add Salman Rushdie to your list. Particularly, Midnight's Children.

I bounced off Midnight’s Children the first time I tried to read it, but that was probably 10 or 15 years ago now. I’m in between books at the moment, so your comment will push me to put it on the top of my list for the new year :)

Girl, Woman, Other is one of my overall favorites from the last few years. Th character work is phenomenal. Do try to read a hard copy, rather than on an ereader, if you can. The book uses punctuation and the layout of text on a page creatively, and I’m not sure how well that gets preserved in an ebook.

I've tried my damnedest, but simply cannot get into Rushdie. Given that Midnight's Children won the "Booker of Bookers", I thought that would be a great place to start. When I finished the book I turned it over in my hands wondering if I missed something or if I'm simply not smart enough to get Rushdie. I read a couple more of his books and the result was much the same, unfortunately.

Big Rushdie fan here. I used to think it could be because of a lack of cultural context especially for books like Midnights Children and Moors Last Sigh but now I also think that it could also be a matter of taste. Rushdie himself quotes Milan Kundera who said: "...that the novel descended from two parents, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy". The latter is a style of writing where all conventional rules of literature are broken, it's just wildly creative so to speak. Rushdie's Midnights Children and James Joyce's Ulysses fall into this category.

If you want to see the other style of writing in Rushdie, I can suggest Shalimar The Clown or The Ground Beneath Her Feet. But these are nowhere near as grand as Midnights Children.

In either category, a fair amount of interest in history helps to enjoy his books.

After a few pages into Midnight's Children it made me a bit uncomfortable (not bored)- not for the story or characters like in other novels- where you identify with characters or feel for them, their plights, etc. It made me uncomfortable in reading the way the story was told. I wondered why was this book so loved, it does not seem like any good book I've read so far, in fact it somewhat destroys the ideas I have about how a good novel should be. And then a thought occurred that maybe it is because of those things- as tirumaraiselvan (sibling comment) put it 'all conventional rules of literature are broken, it's just wildly creative'- that this book was loved. With that understanding I 'decided' I was going to be ok with the discomfort I felt till I finished the book. And then creativity became visible and the discomfort sort of went away.

Exactly! Midnights Children and Moors Last Sigh are so non-linear that one cannot expect to get the hang of it till they are atleast 50 pages through. It's usually on the second reading that the amazingness of those initial pages is felt.

Krasznahorkai is by far my favorite Booker recipient

He also did the screenplays for most of Bela Tarr’s movies

Imre Kertesz - Fatelessness

Easy to read but provides a profound understanding of the unique historical situation it describes. A famous and heartbreaking sentence: ‘(…) I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.’

It's subtle in how it delivers it's brilliance: A Clockwork Orange.

Warning: spoilers follow that do not diminish the knock out punch this work delivers: It's written in it's own language, a mixture of Russian and UK slang, which one cannot read at first. About 3 chapters in, the language clicks and then a good reader starts the book over from the beginning. It is a popular book due to the film, and the ultra violence depicted within, but it is also ground breaking philosophical literature because the main character is a hardened criminal and is the narrator, he spends the entire novel explaining his philosophy of life, which by the end of the novel you realize is the same philosophy of modern politics, and the UK edition of the novel ends with the entire novel being the story of a senior member of parliament's youth origin story.

The fact that the novel is in a fictional language increases the reader's submersion in the story line, creating one of the most impactful novels I know.

Another great read, much shorter, more like getting into a street brawl: Notes From The Underground by Dostoyevsky. Practically the creator of self critical essays, and often the first read for people interested in Existentialism.

Anything from the "Beat Generation" authors, anything from Philip K Dick, anything from Herman Hesse.

If one gets into the books that invent their own dialect, the most dense I found was "Riddley Walker" by Hoban Russel. As a non native English reader it was very difficult to make progress, but once the understanding settles in, it's a pretty nice story. Also of note is Anathem, even though Stephenson's jargon is more accessible, I think, to Latin languages speakers.

Roughly sorted by thickness (for the editions I own), these are among my favourites and arguably a good starting point

* Animal Farm - George Orwell

* The Fall - Albert Camus

* Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes

* One hundred years of solitude - Gabriel García Márquez

* The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

Master and Margarita is wonderfully burlesque and beautiful, and not that thick ;-)

I like to encourage extensive use of quotes whenever I see them in book reviews, and at least this author makes a little effort to provide some. It often annoys me to no end when I read long book reviews with very little quotes from the actual book. Like, where is the evidence of this amazing writing.

I understand that for some books specific quotes don't quite get across what makes the book great. But in those cases I expect the author to address that characteristic directly, and make an effort to try to explain why the book is great despite not being very quotable. And by quotes I mean quotes that can span an entire page if need be.

The only exceptions to this that I'm inclined to allow is when your descriptive writing skill is at such a pro level that the review itself is a piece of art. But most "professional" book reviewers are not even at that pro level frankly.

An example of actual "pro level" would be this Martin Amis line from one of his reviews:

"You can stir a vat of molasses with James Wood's Chekhov boner." (I'm recalling the line from memory)

Long quotes are problematic from a copyright point of view, especially because different countries have different interpretations of what may be called "right to quote" or "fair use".

>> Great literature teaches one first hand how to use critical thought, a dire need today.

And that's why we see in the halls of our colleges, where these works are pored over day in and day out, that these humanities majors are the font of wisdom in our civilization.

BTW Nietzche speaks in goodreads quotes and meme-like aphorisms. If you can't get through Nietzche maybe reading isn't for you. (There's nothing wrong with audiobooks, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv5IyRuEVI4&t=10s either)

If not them, then who is? It sure is not the management wealth class, driving all of humanity off an extinction cliff. It's not the religious leaders, that appear to be as corrupt as they can possibly be. It's not the tech industry or leaders, that appear to be yes-person suck ups to wealth if not fascist wealth itself.

Wisdom does not equate with power, in fact: overt power is not the result of wisdom, but fanatical perseverance to wealth creation, often in opposition of wisdom in favor of simple dominance of others, and basic mental illness driving that individual.

Your profile has made me curious. May I ask you if it was the MBA itself that made you come to this insight? It's so uncommon to see an MBA holder with such views.

Well, I also have 5 undergraduate degrees: computer science, creative writing, philosophy, statistics, and a general business degree. I was a fat kid that stuttered, read far too much to avoid people and then got carried away with learning. I read all the Nobel Lit winners by the end of my 4th grade, by the end of grade school I was running out of authors, but I discovered writing software and that took over my attention.

Plus, my MBA was also to understand the world, as business is this world.

> BTW Nietzche speaks in goodreads quotes and meme-like aphorisms.

Aside from the fact that I doubt it's true, this seems a lot like panning The Third Man as derivative of later thrillers.

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