Stats for nerds
1recommend
4mentions
4people
2011–2022years
25% recommend75% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- If you haven't read "Diamond Age" yet, I highly recommend it. I loved "Snow crash" too, but DA is arguably his best book. Let me know if you ever finish anything he wrote later than that, to be honest I think he is in dire need of a strict editor that cuts his books in at least half.
I see we disagree on "The Unberable Lightness of Being", but that is fine, I guess.
I think Murakami is at his best in "Norwegian Wood" and "South of the Border" -- in different ways. You might also enjoy "Chrome Yellow" by Huxley.
For something a bit different, try: "American Essays" edited by Shaw (http://www.amazon.com/American-Essays-Charles-B-Shaw/dp/B000...).
If you enjoyed the books on Steve Jobs, you might enjoy "The new new thing" by Lewis (on the founder of SGI and Netscape).
I don't know if you've read any William Gibson, if not, at least read "Burning Chrome" (and everything else he's ever written ;-).
Finally, you should read "The Code Book" by Singh.
- Great read! And a great share!
It's fantastic when the article pushes my appetite for knowledge and offers a keyhole to aristocracy of days gone by. It's like shaking hands with one of it's participants while they momentarily bore themselves of their usual lavish life with my existence lol...
Though it is articles like this that make me ponder about such aristocratic life today, and how the modern proliferation and consolidation of wealth is a usurper of such relations and events to spawn current literature, in the now.
Having read the seminal Huxley work, I'm now looking forward to consuming Chrome Yellow, with verve.
- > Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce. The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium. At present people in search of pleasure naturally tend to congregate in large herds and to make a noise; in future their natural tendency will be to seek solitude and quiet.
Chrome Yellow, Aldous Huxley
- I can't tell if bookstores have gotten markedly worse or if I've simply become more discriminating in what I'm looking for. When Barnes and Noble, Borders, et al first swept through the US I thought it was wonderful. I've spent an inordinate amount of money and time in big-box bookstores.
I moved to Germany some 9 years ago. In my first trips back to the US a bookstore was one of the detours I was most excited about. I'd typically return to Germany with a couple hundred bucks worth of books stuffed into my bag. My family, noticing this, started a habit of buying me B&N gift certificates (a pattern that's continued to this day).
But now, 9 years and thousands of dollars of Amazon.de purchases later, I can't say that I'm terribly excited about visiting the big box stores. I struggled to spend my most recent gift certificate. Struggled! I went looking for books on Chinese history, and in a two story Barnes and Noble in an upscale Houston neighborhood there were two books on the history of the most populous country in the world. There were huge aisles of random throwaway junk, games and other silliness and two books on Chinese history. Nor did they have Bertrand Russel's Principles of Mathematics or Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow.
I love books. Paper books. I have around a thousand of them. But I won't cry for the passing of the big-box stores if they're bent on becoming the Wal-Mart of reading.
