Ask HN: What are the best books you've ever read?

The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings both stand alone as unparalleled fantasy novels. Buy a version with no foreword or footnotes and just, immerse yourself.

- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig)

- Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (Hofstadter)

- Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (Penrose)

- Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Suzuki)

- Demian (Hesse)

- The Stranger (Camus)

- Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut)

- Another Roadside Attraction (Robbins)

I have read many books that have had an impact on me for a time, but these are the books that have had an enduring impact going on now for decades.

And yes, one of these books, Another Roadside Attraction, is unlike the others. You can substitute any Tom Robbins book, or read them all!, but this is the book that started it all for me. Tom Robbins' books taught me to not take life so seriously.

Demian and The Stranger may be fiction, but let's just say their purpose is to get across a philosophical point.

Finally, with regards to Slaughterhouse-Five, you'll just have to read it.

Enjoy!

These aren't "The best" or whatever, but they're very good:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Summer_Book

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoner_(novel)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_on_a_winter%27s_night_a_tra...

- I'm currently reading Pyotr Kropotkin's autobiography, it's interesting.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

I ended up staying up all night reading most of the book

"Best" is always too hard - here are a handful that I love.

Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susannah Clarke

The Crow Road - Iain Banks

Equal Rites - Terry Pratchett

Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome

A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson

Black Holes & Time Warps - Kip Thorne

The Inventions of Daedalus - David E H Jones

The Cuckoo's Egg - Cliff Stoll

I hope one or two of those float your boat!

For the value of ‘best’ that includes (a) had a deep and long lasting impact on how I think about the world and (b) I consider beautiful pieces of writing in their own right, here are some in no particular order: The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein (These you might want to approach via a gentle introduction if you did not study Philosophy to degree level) The Rediscovery of the Mind, John R Searle Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh Diaries, Samuel Pepys Falling Off the Map, Pico Iyer A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor The Lonely Sea and the Sky, Francis Chichester The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope Bevis, Richard Jeffries The Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon GrossSmith The Inimitable Jeeves, PG Wodehouse

Hitch-22, essaysChristopher Hitchens Collected Essays, William Hazlitt Venice, Martin Gayford

The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch

Too obvious a list, perhaps, but some gems for all that! Happy reading.

The only book. The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges probably tops the list for me.

”The Count of Monte Cristo”, one of my favorites. It’s a classic the general story being jailbreak/revenge. A little slow paced at times but the writing is fantastic.

If you enjoy fantasy novels I would recommend ”The Wee Free Men” by Terry Pratchett, it’s outstanding.

Sartre's Nausea

The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Blue Nights by Joan Didion, in which she grieves the death of her forty-something daughter, just a few years after her abusive husband died suddenly from a heart attack.

The contrast between her gorgeous but also coldly precise writing, the grieving mother vs the lauded writer, the tension of watching her muse (very delicately, very distantly) on the nature of being an adoptive mother and wondering as a reader: what sort of wounds did Joan Didion pass on to her daughter and what wounds did her daughter inherit from her biological family, the contrast between the vibrant streets of New York and the cold hospital where her daughter was dying in a coma, knowing as a reader that this writer had just gone through the grief of losing her husband a few years earlier...

It was haunting, beautiful, and, naturally, a little voyeuristic by its very nature. I still think about it to this day.

The Count of Monte Cristo. I rarely get this absorbed by a book. It was a very satisfying read.

Grapes of Wrath stayed with me for a very long time. The Jungle too.

This is how you lose the time war. It was just damn unique and pleasant. Everyone who reads it loves it.

Cryptonomicon, another very entertaining read that every geek loves.

Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. The most incredible, mind bending adventure I have taken, in a book.

(The Netflix show although generally true to story does not do the books justice)

Paradise Lost, Gravity's Rainbow, Middlemarch, and 2666.

edit: The short stories which have stuck with me the most over the years are probably Joyce's "The Dead," O'Connor's "Good Country People," and a solid half of Borges's "Ficciones."

Permutation city, Greg Egan

Dictionnaire philosophique, Voltaire

The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek

The ICU Book, Paul Marino

The tragicity of the virtuous Justine. Warning r18 book that's pretty messed up.

There was a quote about how the wealthy can easily proclaim themselves virtuous and their actions will cost them nearly nothing. But for others, acting such a way will cost everything.

Never was the same afterwards. Especially as I also read all of the books referenced in Psycho Pass anime s1 as well.

The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt. Mearsheimer and Walt give a powerful explanation to the predicament of the United States' seeming unlimited commitment to the State of Israel.

1632 by Eric Flint - it became a series. I can read them over and over. - Alternate history, contemplative of everything that makes modern civilization possible and keeps it going.

The Art of Electronics - Horowitz and Hill - All the nitty gritty details you'll need if you're to be a good electronics designer

The adolescence of P-1 - Thomas Joseph Ryan - Introduced me to the idea of random walks leading to AI.

Computer Lib/Dream Machines - Ted Nelson -- Quite a bit of ideas about computers, I read it decades ago.

Diary of an Early American Boy: Noah Blake 1805 -- By Eric Sloane -- Early Americans really knew their shit, we tend to think of them as simpler people, this book dispelled me of that stupid notion.

Boys Second Book of Electronics - Alfred Morgan, 1957 -- Introduced me to the idea that I could make my own radio or anything electronic I wanted to make.

Gene Wolfe’s Solar Cycle and Gravity’s Rainbow

The Children's Hospital https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/the-childrens-hospital

A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving

The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself - Michael Singer

It had such a deep impact on me that I ended up using it as a "holy" book to take my oath of Canadian citizenship.

Cypronomicon is a pretty fun read

A Deepness in the Sky, hands down. Also worth reading is its companion A Fire Upon the Deep. Both are the pinnacle of SciFi.

The Overstory by Richard Powers - an intertwining of lives, as witnessed by the oldest beings on Earth, putting things into a rather different perspective.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi - compassion and redemption, set in a terrifyingly plausible near future where the oil and tech companies have been replaced by gene and agro conglomerates. Calories or joules, it’s just energy.

Weaveworld by Clive Barker - a dark, fantastical yarn of vivid (sometimes grotesque) imagery, spinning a new take on the oldest tale, that of good vs. evil.