Stats for nerds
0recommend
5mentions
5people
2011–2023years
100% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > If you have to imagine what bookstores are like
Come now, did you really take that to mean I had to imagine the bookstore and not the customer?
But sure, a few examples:
- People who adorn their bookshelves with ornate "leather-bound classics" or other esteemed novels that that they haven't read and have no intention of reading.
- People who conduct all of their Zoom meetings in front of said bookshelf.
- People who make recommendations to others about how they should read such great works of Western Canon, e.g. the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, despite themselves having never read anything of Shakespeare beyond the required Romeo and Juliet in high-school.
- >Come now, did you really take that to mean I had to imagine the bookstore and not the customer?
If you went in bookstores all the time and never ran into customers behaving that way then why would you be imagining it and confirming a general pattern? Seems like you would have contrary evidence in that case.
>People who adorn their bookshelves with ornate "leather-bound classics"
Decorators use fake books. And fake flowers. And fake fruit. People are so used to fakery that they get upset when it's missing. Like when someone is interviewed and the transcript has lots of "um, er, ah". Because they're not reading prepared remarks from a teleprompter, the smartest person will never be that smooth extemporaneously.
Most of the books I put out on shelves are real books that I've read, but they're not there because I need them close at hand to reread at any moment. Also, I tend to skim a lot when something doesn't engage me, so I might fail a pop quiz on something I did read once.
>People who make recommendations to others about how they should read such great works of Western Canon, e.g. the Complete Works of William Shakespeare
The problem with Shakespeare's plays is that they're written in a foreign language, and it's often inflicted on people without even acknowledging that let alone trying to help them understand it.
I wonder if there are any adaptations to film with modernized subtitles and notes overlaid.
- You cannot walk into Barnes and Noble and take a copy of Penguin Publishings' The Complete Works of William Shakespeare off of the shelf and walk out with it without paying just because the work is in the public domain (Note: lets not get into the digital vs. physical depriving anyone of content argument for the 10000th time).
Time and money was spent organizing and publishing the book / article, so they do have a right to charge for it. If you want wholesale free access to public domain documents, then you find a place which will provide these to you for free. You don't get to ignore a companies right to charge for something just because you disagree with the premise.
- You're right, it's a pretty damn non-ideal list. Another problem is that some of the "books" are vast. I really have to read the whole goddamn Bible plus the complete works of William Shakespeare?
But that's okay. My goal isn't to read one hundred books I'll really like, it's to complete an arbitrary set of tasks. If all of the books are enjoyable then there's no sense of achievement when I get to the end. I figure that whatever happens, I'll know a lot more when I finish than when I started. (Do you know what "Timon of Athens" is like? I sure as hell don't...)
