What Hacker News says

zabzonkApr 2021

18th Century. It's completely readable, as are many other works written at the same time, such as Boswell's Life of Johnson.

As for the 16th (and early 17th) century - Shakespeare?

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pmdulaneyDec 2017

Boswell's Life of Johnson. I have an old OUP hardback in Scotch Roman that is an old-fashioned experience in itself.

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pklauslerJun 2017

OK. I'll define this as "10 books that I'd recommend to my 40-years-younger self to prioritize", and leave aside the problem that 2 or 3 of these would not yet have been published.

  The Iliad
  Shakespeare
  The Life of Johnson
  Federalist Papers
  Pride and Prejudice
  Ulysses
  The Waste Land
  The Selfish Gene
  The Making of the Atomic Bomb
  Infinite Jest

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jackfoxySep 2011

I've meant to compile this list, so you just inspired me. I wish the Durants had had the stamina for one more volume. I don't know much about the European revolutions of 1848 and would have like to read about that time from them. I already had read a lot of ancient Greek literature in translation as well as The Pentateuch, all the historical books of the Old Testament and the Gospels. Western Civilization springs from intellectual roots in Athens and Jerusalem, so any survey has to include that heritage. My degree is in Comparative Literature, so I put a lot of stock in origninal source material. The only languages I read are English and German, so everything is in English or translation except Faust, which IMO would be a waste in translation. The books I read for my survey (this was my survey to fill in my personal Bildungslöcke) are not all classics, and not even all to be recommended. It may appear surprisingly heavy on 20th century, but a lot of intellectual threads I thought I should understand better got kicked off in that century. In more or less chronological order by authorship or content (and I've probably forgotten a few):

Euclid The Elements

Arrian The Campaigns of Alexander

Garmonsway (trans.) The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Komroff (ed.) The Travels of Marco Polo

Haydn The Counter-Renaissance

Braudel The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, Vol I&II

Pascal The Thoughts

Spinoza The Ethics

Christianson In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton & his Times

Newton Opticks

Newton Principia (get the modern English translation by U.C. Press)

Hampson The Enlightenment

Voltaire Candide

Rousseau The Social Contract

Boswell Life of Johnson

Goethe Faust

Phillips The Cousins' Wars

Schom Napoleon Bonaparte

Heidler & Heidler Old Hickory's War

Babbage On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures

de Toqueville Democracy in America

Darwin On the Origen of Species

Foote The Civil War: A Narrative

Maurois Disraeli

Twain Life on the Mississippi

Spector Admiral of the New Empire, The Life and Career of George Dewey

Cardwell The Norton History of Technology

Abbott Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions

Meyer & Brysac Tournament of Shaddows, The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia

Doughty Travels in Arabia Deserta

Lefevre The Golden Flood

Massie Dreadnought, Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War

Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Durant The Story of Philosophy

Cardozo The Nature of the Judicial Process

Schapiro The Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Popper The Logic of Scientific Discovery

Kershaw Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

Blemenson (ed.) The Patton Papers (1940-1945)

Hayek The Road to Serfdom

von Mises Human Action

Skinner Walden Two

Chambers Witness

Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Guevara Guerrilla Warfare

Cleaver Soul on Ice

Lacey The Kingdom, Arabia & the House of Saud

Durant The Lessons of History

Hackworth Lessons Learned, Vietnam Primer

Quigley Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time

EDIT: Just remembered two more

Hobbes Leviathan

Locke Two Treatises of Government

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cafardSep 2022

Somewhere in Boswell's Life of Johnson he quotes Johnson as asking, in reference to the American colonies, "Why do we always here the loudest cries for liberty from the drivers of slaves?"

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tkgallyOct 2020

One thing that struck me when I read Boswell’s Life of Johnson more than twenty years ago is how strange Johnson seems to have been in person yet how strongly he was admired and loved—at least in Boswell’s telling—by people who knew him. Boswell mentions his “oddities of manner, and uncouth gesticulations” [0]. Macaulay goes into more detail: “His grimaces, his gestures, his mutterings, sometimes diverted and sometimes terrified people who did not know him. At a dinner table he would, in a fit of absence, stoop down and twitch off a lady's shoe. He would amaze a drawing-room by suddenly ejaculating a clause of the Lord’s Prayer. He would conceive an unintelligible aversion to a particular alley, and perform a great circuit rather than see the hateful place. He would set his heart on touching every post in the streets through which he walked. If by any chance he missed a post, he would go back a hundred yards and repair the omission. Under the influence of his disease, his senses became morbidly torpid, and his imagination morbidly active. At one time he would stand poring on the town clock without being able to tell the hour. At another, he would distinctly hear his mother, who was many miles off, calling him by his name.” [1]

I wonder if a person today with a similar mental illness would be accepted and respected in society as Johnson was.

[0] https://archive.org/details/lifesamueljohns10boswgoog/page/n...

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42971/42971-h/42971-h.htm#Pa...

Edit: “how strange he seems to have been” -> “how strange Johnson seems to have been”

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