Tess of the d'Urbervilles
An intimate portrait of a woman, one of literature's most admirable and tragic heroines...Tess Durbeyfield knows what it is to work hard and expect little. But her life is about to veer from the path trod by her mother and grandmother. When her ne'er-do-well father learns that his family is the last of a long noble line, the d'Urbervilles, he sends Tess on a journey to meet her supposed kin—a journey that will see her victimized by lust, poverty, and hypocrisy. Shaped by an acute sense of social injustice and by a vision of human fate cosmic in scope, her story is a singular blending of harsh realism and poignant beauty. Thomas Hardy created in Tess not a standard Victorian heroine but a woman whose intense vitality shines against the bleak backdrop of a dying way of life. The novel shocked contemporary readers with its honesty and remains a timeless commentary on the human condition.
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What Hacker News says
- Someone else mentioned Thomas Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbirdge". It's the one of his 5 major novels I haven't read. "Far From the Madding Crowd" and "Return of the Native" are okay, but the two that really are magnificent are:
"Jude the Obscure" - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/153
"Tess of the D'Urbervilles" - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/110
You can sense his fury at the society he was depicting. You might not want to read either of these, particularly "Tess", if you're prone to depression.
Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Frontier in American History" (1921) - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22994
This collection leads off with Turner's essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893). It's considered by some the most influential historical essay about America ever written. Historians went back and forth on his claims for decades, and people pointed out many issues with them. It seems like the critics predominate now. But it's still worth reading, particularly since (right or wrong) his ideas influenced the way we think of ourselves. Turner was a very good writer - he was a noted orator, and his essays have an oratorical quality - and the other essays in the collection are pretty good, too.
Owen Wister, "The Virginian" - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1298
Zane Grey, "Riders of the Purple Sage" - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1300
And the sequel: "The Rainbow Trail" - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5067
"The Virginian" (1902) and "Riders" (1912) established many of the themes and tropes for the "standard" western, and they're still fun to read. But the genre comprises many other kinds of writing - e.g. A. B. Guthrie, Elmer Kelton, and the next writer.
Willa Cather's novels:
The "plains trilogy" (the stories are set in Nebraska and Colorado, but otherwise unrelated):
"O Pioneers!" (1913) - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24
"The Song of the Lark" (1915) - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44
"My Ántonia" (1918) - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19810
And not quite a hundred years ago, but a wonderful novel:
"Death Comes for the Archbishop" (1927) - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69730
A few brief mentions: James Joyce's "Ulysses", though I had a tough time getting through it; some of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories (e.g. "The Minister's Black Veil"); "Njal's Saga" (I liked the Penguin edition with the translation by Magnusson and Pallson); the great works of classic fantasy (Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, William Morris, Arthur Machen); the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
- "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" by Gabrielle Zevin, fantastic writing, touching and insightful
"Tess of the d'Urbervilles" by Thomas Hardy. I'm huge Hardy fan but hadn't read his masterpiece until this year
- I grew up before the Internet, and I used to read a lot more. Being online has made me have very little focus for reading anything of length. I have spent time recently trying to undo this. I would say you are missing out and encourage you to make time to read some of the classics. I know it's hard to find which ones to read, it will just have to be some trial and error (not all the classics are good imo -- it's impossible for me to get into any of the Russians). I tend towards American or English classics, I suggest one of my all time favourites, it's a short one "My Antonia" by Willa Cather. I'm currently reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy and enjoying it very much.
- That's an event in "Tess of the d'Urbervilles": a cow at a dairy has eaten some wild garlic and the entire batch of milk is ruined. Everyone has to go out and walk the fields in a line to root out any garlic they come across.
Full disclosure: I never finished the book (my attention wandered elsewhere), but I did get as far as this scene.
ETA: Around this part of the book the words "hagrid" and "dumbledore" appear, suggesting J.K. Rowling was reading this around when she named the characters in Harry Potter.
- I thought the end, where Nussbaum compared the British version to the American version, was especially insightful:
Effortlessness like this takes craft. Drunkenness is not enough, which we know for certain, since the experiment has been tried across the Atlantic. The British “Drunk History”—which you can catch in clips on YouTube—is terrible. It’s depressing. It’s not funny, but that’s not really the problem... No one responds. It’s hard to create chemistry with Big Brother.
I love Drunk History for all the reasons she articulated. I've never watched the British version. She has persuaded me not to waste my time.
Her appreciation of Drunk History reminds me of a line from Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles:
And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.
It's a quality Nussbaum seems especially atuned to in her reviews. The show High Maintenance shares a similar tenderness for the human condition, "sweet, filthy, and forgiving". It was her review of the show, years ago when it was still a web series, which turned me on to it.
As humans, sometimes we need humanity. Even Steve Jobs recognized it:
- Yeah, part of the reason I don't buy so many books anymore is because my wife said we don't have physical space for them. That, and having the ebooks all on the kindle is nice. I read the wizard of oz to my son over the last few weeks, and it was nice to pop out of his room at bedtime and switch over to reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles. For novels particularly, the kindle is super nice, and I think it'd be nice to do most of my for-fun reading there.
For reference stuff I'm still not sure if it will work because the "note" making stuff is not great, and definitely is not as easy as flipping through the book to find the page you want.
