Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?
It seems like most book recommendation threads end up being filled with a load of self improvement type books. Do you have any fiction book recommendations that have positively impacted your life? Maybe a book that helped you through tough times or made you change your outlook on life?
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 299 ms ] threadMon. Grass by the wayside. And then. Soseki.
But if you're specifically looking for "books that affect your outlook on life", you might try reading through Peanuts. It's a comic strip, but there's a lot going on in there.
But reading stories is fun, and something I do constantly. Currently I'm re-reading Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive. Every year or two I re-read Dune, Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Amber, and Steven Brust's Taltos series. Always a pleasure.
My recommendations would probably echo those already posted, with the addition of small random stories that I remember fondly because they were just fun, interesting, or surprising (e.g. H. G. Wells: The Door in the Wall, or the original Mary Poppins books recently completed after finishing the Dresden Files for the first time.)
I'm a sucker for slow burns in cinematography and books, but you can't just have no pace or structure and then say "yeah, these kids have no patience".
My completely uneducated opinion of the glass bead game was that Hesse was describing what could be a very interesting concept in a very poor manner, always high-level, and abstract enough that at times I thought he didn't flesh it out in his mind either and couldn't convey it properly.
Also the sandwich is pretty good.
Idk if the original French is much better, though I’ve heard it uses archaic language so if you’re reading for plot it might not be great. That also reminds me of something I think is really neat:
Dumas originally published the book as a series of volumes in a French newspaper over 2 years!
2 years! Can you imagine? I could barely put the book down when I first read it, that much suspense would kill me.. Also interesting how similar that is to the TV dramas of today.
Whatever you do, just don't read a "Public Domain" translation. A lot of Victorian-era translations of 19th Century French literature are... crap.
I have a fairly predictable "best novels ever written" list which includes _War and Peace_, _Anna Karinina_, _Brothers Karamazov_ and _Dune_ ... but I would also place _SevenEves_ on that list.
I found _Fall Or: Dodge in Hell_ to be terrible, however.
Stephenson is awesome, I love some of his books, but others are for completely lost on me.
- Lord of the Rings: The other bible. Not even the very wise can see all ends; be of good cheer.
- A Wrinkle In Time: 9 year old me, there is such a thing as a tesseract, and there is also Mrs. Beast.
- The Master and Margarita: apocalyptic reading from someone who knew, and a cat who always pays his way.
- the Discworld series: Sir Terry knew our hearts better than most, and sin, young feller, is treatin’ people as things.
- If On A Winter’s Night, A Traveler: a perfect joke that you can tell once, plus a love story.
- Good Omens: Gaiman and Pratchett team up, what’s not to love?
- Moby Dick: And so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.
- Lucky Jim: grad school, a survival guide. Come in on the fa la la las, there’s a good chap.
This doesn’t include poetry, which is also in my head constantly.
It's a good book, but aesthetically it suffers in my mind because it's a rewrite of Pratchett's earlier book Sourcery.
i like the gaiman/pratchett teamup. They balance each other out very nicely.
Still, melville had a lot to say about human nature, abolitionism, philosophy, xenophobia... name a pressing concern of american life in the modern age and you'll find echoes of it here, too.
"For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blankets between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal. "
If you’re going to try, I think the visual style that would work the best would be animated. The real world could be done in Heavy Metal style, and the ‘verse done like ReBoot — or maybe akira or something. I’m not at all excited about a live action version.
Otherwise, the Hitchhiker's Guide is always a great read.
Anything by Dostoevsky.
And then it was good for me in my middle age when I realized how flawed other parts of Rand's philosophy are and how much I disagreed with them and why, and got to move past it to even better places. :D
"The Accidental Tourist" by Anne Tyler. (There is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in)
"Dom Casmurro" by Machado de Assis (also his "Epitaph of a Small Winner") (The narrower the life, the more intense the obsessions)
"The Count of Monte Cristo" (get the Robin Buss translation from Penguin) ("Wait and hope")
- Brave New World: Aldous Huxley is a genius and a wordsmith
- Dune: a sci-fi masterpiece, highly recommended to anyone into sci-fi
- Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: not purely fiction but an amazing book I will surely re-read during my lifetime
Perhaps I should read it again to get a deeper appreciation for it
I also found some of the ideas easier to take away and hold onto.
One particular scene made such a strong impression on me about being calm in difficult situations. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, when Harry is flinging Dumbledore's precious instruments around, Dumbledore remains monk-like still.
If you like Harry Potter, and you read HN, chances are you'll love HPMOR.
The premise is that Harry Potter was raised by people who cared and taught him the Scientific Method. He then uses that approach to solve and understand things.
I never thought I would like fan fiction until I came across HPMOR being recommended so many times elsewhere.
It's a common recommendation for exactly that - but I'm amazed by how much it's in the back of my head and gives me support. Especially in the current time.
I can't point to an exact quote.. but I'm listening to all audio books(as background noise) by Douglass Adam's for the last weeks and it just feels like there is a part in the books for almost every weird situation in life....
And it's not like it gives a solution for every weird situation... it's more like it supports to feel however you feel about it...
I had no use for the foray into soft pornography mid-way through, but otherwise it was well worth the read.