Stats for nerds
3recommend
7mentions
5people
2019–2024years
57% recommend43% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Forester’s longer fiction is well worth it too. It’s been years since I read Howard’s End and Leonard Bast still haunts me.
- Love reading about the Bloomsbury Set in London early 1900s. I think the finest novelization of that world is the E. M. Forester *Howard's End". Movie & TV versions work as well. One of those stories you can set in any generation and it holds sort of true ;)
- Howard's End, EM Forster, is one, along with all of Forster.
Arcadia, a play by Tom Stoppard, is fantastic. Good for many re-reads (and re-watches).
Ursula Le Guin (maybe The Left Hand of Darkness is my favorite?) might be the best sci-fi/fantasy ever written, as much as I love Lois McMaster Bujold (three worlds to choose from, each offering many more or less independent novels and novellas), who is also great.
A few more:
Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey.
My Antonia, Willa Cather.
Bluebeard, Kurt Vonnegut.
- Howard's End. From observations on the alienating experience of automobile travel, to the nature of the corporation, to the precarious lot of the low-end knowledge worker, Howard's End feels shockingly, jarringly modern. I'm fascinated by the character of Leonard Bast and his almost self-destructive pursuit of self-improvement. HN likes to recommend "The Machine Stops," but if you think everything else Forster wrote is just costume drama, you're missing out.
- I would add:
The Machine Stops (1909,1928)
A rare sci-fi story from E. M. Forster, more famous for period dramas - A Room with a View, A Passage to India, Howard's End.
- Although mistrust can sometimes be warranted, as a way to prevent others from poisoning your life, I agree that it's also something to be careful about.
This reminds me of a quote from EM Forster's novel Howard's End:
> “You remember ‘rent’? It was one of father’s words— Rent to the ideal, to his own faith in human nature. You remember how he would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say, ‘It’s better to befooled than to be suspicious’—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.”
This quote links back to this article and mentions the cost of closing yourself off and growing distrustful, which is really losing faith in human nature and kindness.
Interesting read!
