Holy the firm
In 1975 Annie Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooded room furnished with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person." For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice death, and the will of God. In Holy the Firmshe writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an airplane accident, about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she calls "the hard things -- rock mountain and salt sea," she sees, sometimes far off and sometimes as close by as a veil or air, the power play of holy fire. This is a profound book about the natural world -- both its beauty and its cruelty -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dillard knows so well.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
3people
2015–2026years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I've found that a lot of people like Paul Kalanithi's writing style in "When Breath Becomes Air". Not the happiest, but people like it.
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is also well-written.
Some people say "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance" is very well-written, but I disagree heavily, it sucks.
"The Little Prince" is well-written, even if it's a children's book.
Kurt Vonnegut writes well.
You can't go wrong with The Western Canon.
Charles Fort, if you can decipher him.
E.O. Wilson, "Anthill" and "Biophilia"
Freeman Dyson, "A Many-Colored Glass"
Annie Dillard, "Holy the Firm"
Ray Bradbury, "The Martian Chronicles"
Douglas Coupland, "Kitten Clone". His writing style felt unique to me.
- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm. Dillard has a way with words that is both eloquent and a little violent, and she influenced how I write just as much as Strunk and White's Elements of Style.
Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach for its captivating presentation of some very complicated ideas (at least to the 17 year old kid who read this for the first time). This book was published around the time that I was growing from hobby programming to writing software as a career, and it exposed me to non-trivial proofs, LISP, and recursion in general.
Vernor Vinge's The Peace War. It's a bit stupid, but . . . I want to make the tech in this book become reality :-) Bobbles are sheer fantasy, of course, but the Tinker tech stack would be a lot of fun.
- "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hopfstadter. I was in high school when it came out, and it really opened my eyes up to the field of computability. The philosophy was interesting, too.
"Holy the Firm" by Annie Dillard. Not really about religion, more about our relationship to the world. A beautifully written little book.
"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. This one works on me at several levels: The physics (which are explained well), the sheer titanic scope of the Manhattan project, and the meta-knowledge that someone was able to write a book this good.
"The C Programming Language", by Kernighan and Ritchie. Probably the single most influential book on programming that I've read.
- Just finished The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry (who died last month). Such beautiful writing. It's a short book but it took me a while to get through it because I would keep re-reading paragraphs to savor them. The chapter about Jack's marriage to Ruth was so poignant - he says that the marriage failed in the courtship. Jack's desire blinded him to Ruth's ambition to turn him into something that he wasn't and couldn't be. (an age-old story)
Just started On The Equality of All Things by Carlo Rovelli and Holy the firm by Annie Dillard
