The Silence of the Lambs

What Hacker News says

1. chrisgdDec 2013
   The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
   thread
2. apocalypstyxDec 2016
   Fiction:

   Inherent Vice --- Thomas Pynchon

   The Great and Secret Show --- Clive Barker

   Jurassic Park --- Michael Crichton

   The Mothman Prophecies --- John A. Keel (1)

   The Wind in the Willows --- Kenneth Grahame

   Ender's Game --- Orson Scott Card

   All Quiet on the Western Front --- Erich Maria Remarque

   The Drought --- J. G. Ballard

   The Dead Father's Club --- Matt Harris

   Children of Men --- P. D. James

   The Islanders --- Pascal Garnier

   Silence of the Lambs --- Thomas Harris

   Inherit the Wind --- Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee

   The Butt --- Will Self

   Inside Outside --- Philip Jose Farmer

   The Panda Theory --- Pascal Garnier

   Fanshaw --- Nathaniel Hawthorne

   The Scarlet Letter --- Nathaniel Hawthorne

   This Census-Taker --- China Mieville

   The House of the Seven Gables --- Nathaniel Hawthorne

   The A26 --- Pascal Garnier

   The Blithedale Romance --- Nathaniel Hawthorne

   The Weird --- Edited by Jeff VanderMeer & Ann VanderMeer (2)

   Front Seat Passenger --- Pascal Garnier

   Non-Fiction:

   The Wealth of Networks --- Yochai Benkler

   Field Notes from A Catastrophe --- Elizabeth Kolbert

   What Ever Happened to Modernism? --- Gabriel Josipovici

   Escape Velocity --- Mark Dery

   What We See When We Read --- Peter Mendelsund

   (1) Author described as non-fiction, publisher hedged bets and labelled in as such, supposedly.

   (2) If only this book could be picked by Subterranean or Centipede press so it'd be a better printed and bound book than Tor ever seems to want to do.

   I always recommend Ballard, even when not wanted. Relevant quote:

      A story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don't
      think. One begins with characters who regard the physical universe
      as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of
      trying to understand its actual laws. Furthermore, in order to be
      the protagonist of a J.G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a
      very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from
      the entire body of scientific education. In this way, when the world
      disaster — be it wind or water — comes upon you, you are under
      absolutely no obligation to do anything about it but sit and worship
      it. Even more further, some force has acted to remove from the face
      of the world all people who might impose good sense or rational
      behavior on you, so that the disaster proceeds unchecked and unopposed
      except by the almost inevitable thumb-rule engineer type who for
      his individual comfort builds a huge pyramid (without huge footings)
      to resist high winds, or trains a herd of alligators and renegade
      divers to help him out in dealing with deep water.  Algis Budrys,
      Galaxy magazine (December 1966)
   
   

   I'd recommend Pascal Garnier for anyone who likes sickly dark humor + surrealism + noir + a kind of Ballardian-air. Also Pynchon. Hawthorne might be the stand-out this year, in the sense of his works' subtle, implicit ability to question the authorial mode, the nature of the text itself, and the instability of it.

   In non-fiction I'd recommend Dery's Escape Velocity; It's from the 90s but still deals too presciently with many of the issues around the near-religification of modern electronic technology. And Josipovici if you lean toward depressive jolts of existential anxiety (it deals mostly with the arts, but I think there's a broader life applicability).

   Show morethread
3. raamdevAug 2016
   I read Story by Robert McKee after I read The Story Grid and I found Shawn's explanations and descriptions more precise and to the point than Robert's. I also really like how Shawn, for the most part, uses a single story (The Silence of the Lambs) in his examples and how he keeps going back to it. Using a single story, I felt, helped me better grasp the context of each example and allowed me to 'grow' with the dissection of the entire story. The grid itself was also extremely useful as it provided me with a framework, a cheat sheet that I could reference at any time to understand where I was in his overall analysis of the story.
   Show morethread
4. acabrahamsJul 2016
   1. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

   2. One L by Scott Turow

   3. The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

   4. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

   5. Believer: My Forty Years in Politics by David Axelrod

   6. The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

   7. Augustus: First Emperor of Rome by Adrian Goldsworthy

   8. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (re-read)

   9. I, Claudius by Robert Graves

   10. Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

   11. The Fear Index by Robert Harris

   12. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris (re-read)

   13. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris (re-read)

   14. Hannibal by Thomas Harris (re-read)

   15. Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (re-read)

   16. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (re-read)

   17. Claudius the God by Robert Graves

   Re-reads take hardly any time at all, so I'm not sure whether to count them. If you're not, then 11 books read so far.

   Show morethread