Gone Girl

What Hacker News says

1. krannerAug 2020
   The Unreliable Narrator is an old trope. [1]

   Gone Girl has stellar writing. I don’t think commercial success in fiction has much to do with being first to market with a novel idea.

   [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator

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2. _bxg1Oct 2019
   > The first impulse of each mystery I write is some crime — or occasionally some enigmatic and ominous image — that gets a grip on me. (A good test I use for these is whether I’d listen to a whole season of Serial about whatever I just made up. If not, I scrap it immediately.)

   > But writers often falter when they simply ride that feeling without trying to shape it, which is why Gone Girl is better than nearly every novel that’s been published since it came out. I’m not a complete inspiration skeptic — once in a while, as Hemingway said, you get lucky and write better than you know how to write — but it’s a rare novel that can survive on it exclusively.

   Seems like good writing advice in general

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3. mlentDec 2015
   "The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared" by Jonas Jonasson (Love it -- hilarious, witty, a pleasure to read)

   "Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami (Strange good -- but I'm not sure if I liked it as much as liked "The Wild Sheep Chase")

   "One hundred years of solitude" by Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez (Very slow, had a hard time honestly)

   "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn (A fast, exciting read but found the ending unsatisfying. But would recommend)

   "Still Life with Woodpecker" by Tom Robbins (Fantastic prose, fantastical characters and situations. Will read more from him)

   And for technical books, I read "The Art of Agile Development". Was alright.

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4. peterspathDec 2025
   I read 52 books this year:

   - Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger

   - Discipline Equals Freedom by Jocko Willink

   - Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink

   - The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

   - The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff

   - When the Body Says No by Gabor Maté

   - Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke

   - The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer

   - Standing Strong by John MacArthur

   - The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

   - We Who Wrestle with God by Jordan B. Peterson

   - I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek

   - The Holy Bible

   - Son of Hamas by Mosab Hassan Yousef

   - I Am Giorgia by Giorgia Meloni

   - 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup

   - The Two-Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren

   - The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray

   - The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray

   - The War on the West by Douglas Murray

   - Porn Generation by Ben Shapiro

   - The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro

   - The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

   - In Farleigh Field by Rhys Bowen

   - Darkest Hour by Anthony McCarten

   - Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

   - The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown

   - Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

   - Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming

   - Moonraker by Ian Fleming

   - Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming

   - From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming

   - Dr No by Ian Fleming

   - Goldfinger by Ian Fleming

   - For Your Eyes Only by Ian Fleming

   - Thunderball by Ian Fleming

   - The Spy Who Loved Me by Ian Fleming

   - On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming

   - You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming

   - The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming

   - Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

   - Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

   - Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

   - The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

   - The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

   - The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

   - Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

   - 1984 by George Orwell

   - The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

   - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

   - The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

   Next year I will read more books of the Russian writers on this list. I enjoyed those books very much.

   After seeing this list, what books do you recommend for me?

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5. lelanthranAug 2025
   I think that humans do executive decision making better than LLMs.

   So, yeah, your "Meeting a dragon" story was about a single point - an attempt at a humourous twist ending; you built your story around that.

   My approach would be having the Dragon in the title be a metaphor, for something powerful, dangerous and scary:

   1. Comedy: new g/friend meeting MiL (the Dragon) for the first time

   2. Thriller: guy finds out what his wife (The Dragon) really is like, basically the plot to Gone Girl

   3. Drama: An alcoholic anthopormorphising the addiction (The Dragon) as an uncontrollable beast within himself

   4. Historical: An author examining the events of the Tuskagee Syphilis experiment in the legislated-racism (The Dragon) period of the time.

   5. SciFi: "The Dragon is a Harsh Mistress" (enough said)

   6. Action: The dragon is a legendary elder of a mystical martial arts sect ("Enter the Dragon" stuff)

   7. Fantasy: An actual, literal Dragon!

   This is before I've considered a single line of plot, a single character, or character motivation. It's before I considered tone and presentation (Narrative? First-person narration? Dialog-driven narration?)

   I mean, before getting to actual plot, characters, setting, tone, etc ... I've already got my message figured out. That's executive decision making.

   The LLM will not, when given the directive "Write the story 'Meeting the Dragon'" perform any executive decision making. You have to baby it through every step. Basically micromanage it.

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6. thewhitetulipAug 2020
   True originality will be so different that barely anyone will like it.

   Evolution is the way to go.

   I'm an aspiring writer and when a random internet person comments on my short stories, they're focused on "oh it is like X Y" "oh it is like Z movie"

   They're obsessed with finding which story it relates to rather than enjoying the story (and it isn't like I'm a pathetic writer)

   I'm not saying I'm the best writers ever, but why I don't like such morons is that they don't have any otger constructive criticism like "your character sucked ass" or "dogs don't fall in love with cows"

   No. Their entire problem is "oh I saw a movie like this and that's why this is a shitty story"

   These morons fail to realise that LoTR derives heavily from Mythology, GoT is literally a fiction version of War of Roses

   But these snobs will love and swear by LoTR because "that's original" and other books are "copy cats"

   The idea doesn't matter, execution does.

   Sure Gone Girl came first but girl on the train is also a good book. It isn't "copy cat" just because it has a untrustworthy narrator. Gone girl wasn't the first one to have untrustworthy narrator, I think

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