Crossing to Safety
This novel is perfect for anyone who’s been in a long-term relationship, or realized that the majority of their social time is spent with other couples. A great reminder that marriage is a marathon, not a sprint.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
4people
2010–2019years
60% recommend40% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- You might enjoy On Moral Fiction by John Gardner, who argues that good literature is about the characters, especially their decisions and transformations, rather than cleverness in language and plot. His model is Anna Karenina, and I think it's people like Pynchon he has in mind for his critique. And he was not just a stodgy critic, but a flowering author himself. His book Grendel is short and fun---the story of Beowulf from the monster's perspective. Sadly he died young in a motorcycle accident, so we didn't get many examples of his approach. Another modern writer that I think he would have approved of is Wallace Stegner. Crossing to Safety and Angle of Repose are both wonderful.
- East of Eden is my favorite book I've read in the last several years. Beautiful end to end and very moral. If you've read it it's totally worth reading Journal of a Novel: a collection of letters Steinbeck wrote to his editor every day as he was writing East of Eden. It's a fascinating window into the mind of a master deliberately creating a masterpiece.
Other favorites: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, In Our Time by Hemingway, The Magus by John Fowles, 100 years of solitude, Moby Dick (perhaps a precursor to all modern fantasy?) Stranger in a Strange Land, and Infinite Jest. I've also loved both of DFW's big essay collections: Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll never Do Again.
- Another lovely counterpoint to Ayn Rand is "Sewer Gas and Electric" by Matt Ruff. It is absurdist science fiction that is hilarious and full of fascinating characters.
I really enjoy Atlas Shrugged as well, I've read the whole book twice, actually. But I don't believe it is a good code to live by. My favorite quite about her books comes from The Daily Show. On the back of America The Book there is a fake blurb from Rand: "just like one of my books, reading this book will make you an asshole for two weeks."
Her books are seductive because they intentionally oversimplify life. Her characters are not realistic and are completely binary. Everyone is either a superhero or a weasel. This makes for entertaining reading, but not much else.
Read "Crossing to Safety" by Wallace Stegner. It is a brautiful book about an intense relationship forged between two couples. It's my favorite thing I've read recently.
- Good list. Nit: Crossing to Safety is Wallace Stegner
- "This is the perfect article to be submitted to HN. Because it brings out the worst in HN. The saturated, self-congratulatory, better-than-thou crowd that is smug about their income, prospects and worth. Many here already believe that everything that isn't programming or engineering is virtually worthless and should be killed. This reinforces them."
Wow. Not judging, are we?
I was a liberal arts major the first time through the mill. I agree that the charlatanism tends to fail quicker in the scientific and technical fields--you need a Stalin behind you to get as far as Lysenko did, but fad upon fad in the humanities has a long run in the academy. That said, I don't know of anything more worth doing well than the humanities.
A problem that I see is that US academia had a long run as a successful pyramid scheme. All those undergraduates showing up during the GI Bill years and then the baby boom kept the colleges expanding. Somewhere after 1980 the rate of expansion slowed down, and the graduate students were scrambling for positions. But everyone's expectations had been set by the boom. The days of genteel academic poverty in the 1940s and before were forgotten. But if you look back at books about that time--Jacques Barzun's essays in Teacher in America, Ulam's memoirs, parts of Wallace Stegner's novel Crossing to Safety--you'll see that it wasn't an especially secure life, and not always a contented one.
I work as a programmer. I am not obsessed with money--a very easy thing to say if you've been comfortably solvent most of your life. But I do need to make a living. Academia was never really an option. I've enjoyed schools as a student, but found them to induce a bit of claustrophobia even when I knew that I was just passing through.
