The Moonstone
One of the first English detective novels, this mystery involves the disappearance of a valuable diamond, originally stolen from a Hindu idol, given to a young woman on her eighteenth birthday, and then stolen again. A classic of 19th-century literature.
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5recommend
10mentions
8people
2018–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- My Dickens is pretty lacking as well; I vaguely remember not liking A Tale of Two Cities in high school. Bleak House is probably the one on my list. I did read and enjoy the two obvious Wilkie Collins novels (Moonstone and Woman in White) and have also seen the latter in what I think is an underrated musical. I've heard rather mixed things and haven't tried other works.
- I read an article a few years ago about how authors have had to restructure stories because so many plots have hinged around people being out of touch except when at known locations. A lot of mystery/misunderstanding of plots (think: PG Wodehouse) no longer works.
I was struck by this article (within the last decade) as mobile phones and texting have been ubiquitous since the mid 90s (early 00s in the US). Funny that popular literature took a while to catch up.
Detective stories survive this the best (nothing is “real-time”) and historical fiction (no phones in Ancient Rome).
Ironically this traces a thread of literature. “The Moonstone” by Wilkie Collins was the first mystery story and also the first technologically “modern” story as it was the first in which people could telegraph to London and have a detective arrive by train later in the day! Still a great novel even though Collins has gone from the height of fame (Far more more famous than his contemporary Dickens) to obscurity today. Like the telegraph and landline.
- Certainly, the majority of books are not worth your time; the same is of course true of YouTube videos, podcasts, blog posts, or any media you may consume. But the best books do offer things you can't get elsewhere.
Crucially, reading book is not just about information intake! Really great books don't just teach you things, they open you up to new ways of thinking, expose new corners of the universe and of experience, stretch your mind, and so on.
If you're reading books filled with "fluff" — read better books! If a book bores you, find a different one! Reading a great book should be a joy.
It's true that most books don't age well — but the converse to this is that books that have been around for a long time and are still popular are usually well-known for good reasons; they've endured on their merits for far longer than any bestsellers of the decade.
Challenge: don't read any more self help books. Instead, read books on education, economics, science, technology, nature, history. Read epics, read science fiction, read poetry.
Do some research on the areas that most interest you, and take time to find the very best books you can find — based on Amazon/Goodreads reviews, suggestions from friends, best-of lists, whatever — and pick just a few to spend time with. And keep in mind it's always a better use of your time to read 10 really amazing books than 100 average ones; take your time and have fun :)
I recently took up a Twitter challenge to post 100 opinions about books and reading, and I wrote a lot about the concept of the "antilibrary" — basically, the value of knowing about books even if you don't necessarily read them, and getting good at curating your reading list. You may find some of this useful for how to think about reading:
https://twitter.com/schlagetown/status/1206268052498780160
A handful of these book thoughts that may be particularly relevant here:
1. Every curious person should be a serious reader. Ever serious reader should build an antilibrary.
(Essential vocab for this thread: your antilibrary = all the books you know about but have not read, designating a sort of potential energy for learning / knowledge / reading)
2. An antilibrary should exist in both physical form (books on your shelves; books browsed but unpurchased at your favorite bookstores) and virtual form (in digital lists; in tweets and reviews scanned; in your memory).
3. An antilibrary should have many levels: books you have an urgent desire to read, books you definitely want to read someday, books you find intriguing but may never read, books you've lost interest in entirely
Categorize not only by topic but by priority / importance / status
8. We should all be more aware of (& deliberately apply) the many different levels of reading that exist — the spectrum from close reading to skimming a book quickly for major themes / ideas.
Different books + different contexts demand different approaches for optimal reading.
17. There aren't that many truly great books you definitely need to read.
While there are infinitely more good books than you can ever read in a lifetime, you can probably get to a surprisingly high portion of those that are both excellent & a good match for you personally.
24. Building your "read really big books" muscle is helpful for practicing sustained attention & deep engagement. Living with a text for months on end, whether a particular story or set of ideas, creates a special type of relationship!
45. You should have a "non-reading practice" — being intentional about not-reading certain books (just as some authors should not-write certain books!)
Abandon more books. Browse many; read few. Choose to engage w/ books & their ideas outside the text itself.
52. Best books I've read in the last year: Underland—Robert Macfarlane How to Do Nothing—Jenny Odell Go Ahead in the Rain—Hanif Abdurraqib Daemon Voices—Philip Pullman Carceral Capitalism—Jackie Wang So Many Books—Gabriel Zaid The Collected Schizophrenias—Esmé Weijun Wang
53. Best books I've read in the last 10 years: The Moonstone—Wilkie Collins Moby Dick—Melville Infinite Jest—DFW Pilgrim at Tinker Creek—Dillard Impro—Johnstone Time and the Art of Living—Grudin Le Ton beau de Marot—Hofstadter Death and Life of Great American Cities—Jacobs
72. There are many books we should know about for reasons other than the story or info (etc.) of the text itself.
Reasons like: important cultural context, influence on future books, significance to people you love… Such books are prime candidates for antilibrary inclusion!
- A thousand times yes to Trollope, and I think there are a lot of nineteenth-century novelists who are like that (not quite as well known as the biggest names, but absolutely superb). Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone, The Woman in White) is another good example from that category.
- Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone and G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories.
- The Hyperion Cantos is a masterpiece which every scifi fan ought to have read, but I would like to recommend a lesser known title of Simmons for readers who have read at least some works of Charles Dickens (self-explanatory) and Wilkie Collins (such as The Woman in White or The Moonstone).
Simmons wrote Drood (2009), which takes these two classical authors and places them in a mystery novel. What struck me as particularly masterful is that Simmons managed to write his prose in such a way that as a reader you soon forget that this book was not written in the 1800s — his tone and style match that of Dickens and Collins so convincingly.
