HN Explorer

Do Hackers read *other* books?

4 points by red_malang ↗ HN
I wonder what kind of authors / flippant novels hackers around these parts read.. My favourite would probably Count of Monte Cristo (Bridge of San Louis Rey a close second + for whom the bell tolls), what are yours (non-technical)?

10 comments

[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 26.6 ms ] thread
spooneybarger
a few off the top of my head in the fiction genre: Joyce's Dubliner, Ulysses & Finnegans Wake. Cervantes' Don Quixote. Borges. Dashiell Hammet. William Burroughs. Bukowski. Faulkner. Jim Thompson. Stewart O'Nan. Nabakov. Philip K Dick's more schizophrenic works ( Scanner Darkly, Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale ). Henry Miller. Gogol. Mary Karr's The Liars' Club. Flannery O'Connor. Denis Johnson. Hunter S. Thompson. Italo Calvino. T Coraghessan Boyle.

I reread Finnegans Wake and Don Quixote every couple years.

EDIT: and I have to admit to an odd attraction to and repeated returns to reading Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

red_malang
Don Quixote? re-read? very impressive. I have to say I gave up after following him and his horse around for a few days. I probably just didnt get it..
spooneybarger
I love Don Quixote obviously. I find the symbolism to be something I can regularly latch onto as a way to describe things in my life. On the same note, I reread Waiting for the Barbarians by Coetzee for the same reason.
red_malang
Coetzee is on my wishlist, heard great things about him - as soon as I am done with my current read I suppose: Portrait of a lady (Henry James) ;)

Update: Great, thanks for the suggestion - I'll go look it up at the uni library.

spooneybarger
Waiting for the Barbarians is a great start. It is a good read + it works as a great analogy that can be brought up when talking to people who let fear run their lives.
ajuc
I read mostly fantasy and sci-fi - some favorites:

"Lord of the Rings" J.R.R.Tolkien

"The Last Wish", "The Sword of Destiny" A.Sapkowski

"The Last Unicorn" P.Beagle

almost anything by S.Lem.

My favorite mainstream book is

"Wielki Las" Zbigniew Nienacki (unfortunately no English translation available).

[dead] stiggz
Anything by Vonnegut, Palaniuk, Douglas Coupland, or Neil Gaiman.
zvrba
Fiction: Iain Banks (the bridge; wasp factory; walking on glass; player of games). Ender's game. Asimov. Dostoyevski. Ayn Rand (Fountainhead). Sigurd Hoel. (excellent norwegian writer)

Non-fiction: stuff about military strategy (Sun Tzu, Clausewitz; musashi - the book of 5 rings). Philosophy (zen, taoism; epistemology and philosophical logic). Mathematics.

+ stuff on TODO-list that I have to catch up with.