Ask HN: What book bit, stung and shook you deeply?
Books that “bite and sting”. That “wake us up with a blow to the head”. And which “affect us like a disaster, that hurts us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves”.
Ever read a book like that? Which was it? How did it affect you? What did reading it do to you?
[1] Brief an Oskar Pollak, 27. Januar 1904. , https://homepage.univie.ac.at/werner.haas/1904/br04-003.htm.
English (ChatGPT): "I believe one should only read those books which bite and sting. If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow to the head, then why read the book? To make us happy, as you write? My God, we would be just as happy if we had no books, and those books that make us happy, we could write ourselves if necessary. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that hurts us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like if we were being driven into forests, away from all people, like a suicide, a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
Original: "Ich glaube, man sollte überhaupt nur solche Bücher lesen, die einen beißen und stechen. Wenn das Buch, das wir lesen, uns nicht mit einem Faustschlag auf den Schädel weckt, wozu lesen wir dann das Buch? Damit es uns glücklich macht, wie Du schreibst? Mein Gott, glücklich wären wir eben auch, wenn wir keine Bücher hätten, und solche Bücher, die uns glücklich machen, könnten wir zur Not selber schreiben. Wir brauchen aber die Bücher, die auf uns wirken wie ein Unglück, das uns sehr schmerzt, wie der Tod eines, den wir lieber hatten als uns, wie wenn wir in Wälder vorstoßen würden, von allen Menschen weg, wie ein Selbstmord, ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns."
70 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] thread> Never believe that [fascists] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. They [presume] the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
— Sartre (1944)
Honestly, I don't understand what kind of effect you hope to achieve by calling random people Nazis except self-validation, but I guess I could turn your Sartre quote around to apply to [autistic pedants].
For me, Borges answers both. It would've changed things.
A fascinating memoir by a philosopher turned brain surgeon, facing a terminal cancer diagnosis. A person who spent their entire life pondering the morality of life being faced with their own ultimatum.
I reread it once a year, at minimum. A deeply moving book.
Love this quote from the book: "You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving".
Going in, you know things are going to end badly. The foreshadowing is so deep that it gets painful to turn pages as you watch everyone make mistakes that would condemn all those men to death. But the two days on the ice?? I read a lot and have read some truly painful books, but some of those stories still haunt me.
Off the top of my head, the most moving books I've read are The First Circle, any long Dostoevsky novel, The Master and Margarita, The Tartar Steppe, any Elena Ferrante, any Cormac McCarthy, some Murakami (Ryu and Haruki), Gene Wolf (The Book of the New Sun), 2666, parts of Moby Dick, any Alice Munro. All well known "good books".
I'm not sure what it is about it. On the surface it's a fairly straightforward story but the way the everyday struggles of the times, strong friendship and love are interwoven, is perfect.
https://marydoriarussell.net/novels/the-sparrow/
Almost didn't finish it. Whatever your feelings on religion are, it's a fascinating and heartbreaking exploration of how far a man can be pushed before he loses faith in his god.
If you've never seen it, I highly recommend to watch it.
Not giving any spoilers, but as a father, the ending of the talk made me shed a tear.
I was 13 at the time, and I was lucky enough to have a passionate English teacher that gave us challenging books to review. I chose "1984". It was the first book I'd read, up to that point, that didn't have a "Hollywood ending". The hero didn't save the day and get the girl… just the victory of tyranny over individualism. Admittedly, I had read a lot of crap, up till then.
As the leader directly tells Winston (i.e. you, the reader): "If you want a picture of the future, think of a boot stamping on a human face - forever."
I was gripped by the writing up till the very last words, then a panic set in… I thought that there were pages missing… I literally checked that someone hadn't torn out the last chapter where everything is made right again. No. There was no liberation. I sat stunned for the better part of an hour.
"The Dispossessed" by Ursula le Guin: never have I experienced the idea of a working anarchism described in such a genuinely coherent form.
A biography of Dr Paul Farmer and how he dedicated his life and sacrificed everything to solve (in his words) “easily preventable” health problems in Haiti.
It hits on many levels: his unapologetic empathy for ordinary people, the global abuse and abandonment of Haiti by western powers, the flaws of thinking about global health through a lens of utilitarianism, the real change that just one person can initiate, etc
Highly highly recommended!
Absolutely. Munro's Meneseteung was what convinced me to stop trying to be a writer, and stick to hacking.
This will rightly get me down voted but in U.S. politics lately I was thinking, "How much would you be willing to lie to get towards a desired or avoid a bad political end?" Though that thought is really just Le Guin retold.
impossible to communicate the experience. run, don’t walk.
prefer the audiobook.
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"Everything Flows" by Vasily Grossman is a novel that explores the devastating impact of Soviet policies on the lives of individuals. Although the book does not focus exclusively on the Ukrainian Holodomor, it addresses the broader tragedies inflicted by the Soviet regime, including the forced famines in Ukraine. The Holodomor, specifically, was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that caused the deaths of millions of Ukrainians due to starvation.
In the context of the novel, Grossman discusses the repercussions of such events on the human spirit and the moral compromises of those who survived. The narrative sometimes touches on how the Soviet authorities repopulated areas depopulated by famine and repression with new settlers, often people from other parts of the USSR, to consolidate control and continue the Sovietization process. The novel provides a deep reflection on guilt, suffering, and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of oppressive political systems.
I often read fantasy fiction and someone recommended Hobb for having a joker/fool character along the lines of Wit in Sanderson's Cosmere universe.
Well, it turns out Hobb is brutal when it comes to writing stories that destroy people. I finished the trilogy, but I was more impacted by it than any other work of fiction I've read in years.
1. How small ideas can have big consequences - each section is a logical consequence of the former, and
2. How multidisciplinarism is greater than the sum of its parts. One can be an ok historian, sociologist, or political theorist, but combined can find connections outside of the narrow scope of any single domain.
The accounts of working conditions, especially of children, will never leave me.
Virtually Everything in Capital is an artificial made up nonsense, starting from the basic premise of class struggle being the root cause of economic dynamics.
I know that both from experience growing up in one of shitty socialist countries and from talking to professional economists with various backgrounds.
i say let psychiatrists and cult researchers do the job of figuring out why those ideas take off, and let’s hide those silly books from mass access
Knowing something is bullshit doesn't translate into being able to effectively refute the thing because telling someone that the thing is bullshit is unconvincing.
I will prove it now in situ. Your take is bullshit. See, failed to change your mind.
I don’t have time nor energy to craft a perfect comment with evidence and good reasoning, many people smarter than me have done it multiple times (and many millions have died proving Marxism wrong).
You can waste whole life and arguing with idiots about stupid ideas, not my cup of tea )
Related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...
And also there are not only conflicts but mutual interests.
And also all of it differs drastically from type of industry, country, culture, type of company, current macroeconomic situation, political regime etc etc.
This is nothing but wishful thinking and malicious ignorance to take 1 of many factors and build an ideology on it.
And ideology that eventually can not solve a single problem it intended to solve.
You know, you do not need to agree with a philosopher to learn things with him. The main point of philosophy is being able to understand ideas from different thinkers and learn something with them, even in cases where you do not agree much with them. Moreover, Marx is one of the most influential thinkers in the XIX century. You lose a lot when you let your ideology dictates what kind of ideas or books you are not allowed to explore or if you let these things creates a strawman that do not let you think objectively about some ideas.
He is no more “thinker” than hitler.
Do you learn a lot from hitler?
I can't even ...
Among other things, it discusses the famine in China under Mao in the late 1950's and early 1960's.
Some families traded children with each other. That way, they could kill and eat someone else's children instead of killing and eating their own.