If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
A beautiful hardback edition of Calvino's genre-switching masterwork. A book of surprise and adventure but you, the reader, are the hero. You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But alas there is a printer's error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be a totally different story. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again. This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest. But the real hero is you, the reader. 'Breathtakingly inventive' David Mitchell 'A writer of dizzying ambition and variety, each of his stories is a fresh adventure into the possibilities of fiction' Guardian VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Bound to be beautiful
Stats for nerds
5recommend
11mentions
9people
2007–2026years
55% recommend45% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Love Italo Calvino. For people interested in getting into it, "If on a winter's night, a traveller" is probably the best place to start and isn't a tough read.
- The collected short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Particularly: "The Library of Babel", "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and "The Immortal".
Italo Calvino's, "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller".
Melville's "Moby Dick" (I do not think this is a good book but it had a significant impact.)
Cormac McCarthy's, "Blood Meridian".
Together these works revealed a vanity in traditional intellectualism that is propped upon a facade of 19th century values which are easy to idolize. These works also made me keenly aware of the folly of of reactionary anti-intlectualism (which is easy to fall into once the shine has come off the collegiate apple). I know a lot of my contemporary peers did not need this same transition of values but I very much did.
It has become my life's philosophy to revel in the power of intellectual activity to reveal and rejoice in the beauty and complexity of life but to shun any intellectualism that will not connect itself to life in a fundamental way.
- "I'm the disreputable dog. I'm your friend" <3
- Discworld is an obvious thing here.
- Anathem has a distributed network of libraries of most knowledge with an interesting time-limited distirbution scheme.
- Snow Crash has A Librarian -- and also a hypercard knowledge system.
- If On A Winter's Night, A Traveller by Italo Calvino features books and libraries prominently. They're not exactly magical, but they're not...not magical, either.
edit: it's not a novel, but the library in the sands in Avatar is another fine example of this trope.
- The author of this piece is, himself, eminently worth reading.
“If On A Winter’s Night, A Traveller” is just amazing.
- Gravity's Rainbow - took 4 months out of my year, but and it's still mostly a whoosh, but every time I started reading another book after that, it was just amazing how much better Pyncheon writes. Will revisit it for sure, though not very soon.
Anna Karenina - just a whole different level, Tolstoy's writing in a way I don't feel many contemporary writes could. Feels creepy how similar the people's lives in the 19th Century was to ours. Creepy but fun too.
If On A Winter's Night A Traveller - Italo Calvino will just punch you in the face, this is a book for people who love reading books.
The Magicians - adult magic fiction, and somehow it feels that if magic was indeed real, it would be like it is depicted here, not like anything in Harry Potter's (no matter how much I loved the storytelling, the magic theory was just so full of plotholes).
The Casual Vacancy - JKRowling's not-Harry-Potter-book. It's very gritty, and feels very real. Still having my cold shivers thinking of small-town living after this.
(Except for the last one the others are older releases, don't usually jump into the newest ones, I just take it casual)
- (I'm going to ignore the prohibition on "programming/technical books".)
- GEB
- SICP
- anything by Paul Auster or Hermann Hesse
- most Haruki Murakami, especially "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle"
- Joan Didion, "Where I Was From"
- Richard P. Gabriel, "Patterns of Software"
- Durbin, Eddy, Krogh, and Mitchison, "Biological Sequence Analysis"
- Italo Calvino, "if on a winter's night a traveller"
