Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2016–2021years
67% recommend33% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- If you're interested in the topic of peasants of Europe a great book comes to mind: 'The Peasants' by nobel laureate Władysław Reymont.
It describes the life and customs of peasants during the four seasons. We're talking 19th century but the life and customs of peasants in that era haven't changed much except for extra rights they acquired in that century.
About the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peasants
- > I can't even fathom how someone who hasn't lived in any time but now can make that statement. Literally any time in human history? How was it like, I don't know, 200,000 years ago? Tell us. You will mention lower life expectancy. That is mostly due to infant mortality rates. Many people lived until they were 70. They had actual lives, not sitting at a computer typing shit all day.
For an account of living in agricultural (pre-industrial) society, I wholeheartedly recommend "The Peasants" by W. Reymont - the Nobel prize winning, extremely realistic account of how life was in a small village in central Poland around year 1900. In short: everyone was working pretty hard, but only the peasants who owned land were living a decent life. The others (a majority) worked on farms owned by the village's "elite" and always feared about their future (not to mention they sometimes didn't even own homes so they slept in for example their master's stable, next to the piles of horse shit). On the other hand, the work was more varied that most jobs today and there wasn't that much to do in the winters so everyone rested then.
- So this is a weird question, but I am actually serious....
Isn't all "good" literature meant to be "long dull and badly written[to the untrained eye]"? The more I think about what you said, the more I realize that the image of "nobel winning" literature that I have in my mind is by definition long, boring, impossibly allegorical and it must feel like you have to be superhuman to read it and understand it. Equally, in my mind anything that's easy and pleasant to read must be trash(because anything I have ever read that was enjoyable was dismissed later as easy-reading garbage). My only experience with "great works of literature" is of that by Polish writers since that's where I grew up, anything by Sienkiewicz or Mickiewicz is considered almost sacred, literature with the "big L" as they say, those are big names with international renown, yet their books are the most soul destroying thing I have ever read, it's just so dull. Hell, Władysław Reymont won a nobel prize(!) for his novel "Chłopi"("Peasants") yet I'd rather stab myself with a fork that try reading that again. Same with more modern authors, Umberto Eco is impossible to read unless I'm actively trying to sleep, and he's considered a "good" author.
So my immediate thought after reading Lord of The Rings was....wow, it must be good(because it's so dull to read). It's almost like pavlov's instinct at this point, years of education has trained me to think dull book = great work of art.
