“Labyrinths” by Borges is a good read. And it’s only, y’know, 50 years old. Not LW-related even a little, except by analogy in the vocabulary department. It’s fun, interesting, and “culturally uplifting.”
Borges is pretty much my favorite writer of fiction. When I first read him, I frequently experienced a genuine sense of wonder that fiction hadn’t ever evoked in me before (and hasn’t really since, although Blindsight, Italo Calvino, The Book of the New Sun and some of Nabokov came close).
I recommend picking up his Collected Fictions. All his short stories, very well translated. Beautiful beautiful stuff.
Borges and Calvino are 2 of my favorite authors, and Invisible Cities is my favorite Calvino collection. (And, as seems inevitable for me, I wrote some Calvino fanfiction.)
Seconded. All of Borges is a good read, but “Labyrinths” is the best place to start for non-Spanish speakers. And while there is nothing in Borges about concrete LW-topics like cognitive biases, or futurism, it is full of the geeky fun, the play of abstract concepts and ideas, that I think most LW-ers enjoy. Think of it as Hofstadter, but with math and AI replaced by philosophy and literature.
Labyrinths is THE best “idea book” I know, where the author has interesting, important ideas, and presents them both quickly and artistically. I confuse this book with Ficciones a lot, but that doesn’t matter, as you should read them both.
Read “The Stars My Destination” by Alfred Bester and am torn between liking it and not. It was recommended as a ‘must read’ for anyone who liked HPMOR by someone on r/hpmor. It really has no rationality in it to speak of—the character spends more time punching his way through problems then out-thinking them. There’s a couple cool sequences where the character pushes himself to learn in harsh environments, but that’s about it. At several points through the book I was severely tempted to put it down and not finish but at other times I was quite caught up in it. It reminds me somewhat of Ayn Rand’s works in that the author has decided their character is going to be really good at things and so spends a fair amount of time telling the reader how awesome their character is. It seems to have worked though, given that the version I read has a gushing intro from Neil Gaimman about how gripping and powerful the main character is. I wasn’t convinced.
I reread “Dune” by Frank Herbert. It’s even better than I remembered and has some fun rationalist themes (though without enough details in those themes to make it comparable to HPMOR). I tried reading the second book years ago and got tired half-way through. I might try again.
I also read some of Oscar Wilde. I was a little disappointed in “The Importance of Being Earnest”, probably due to my having read P.G. Wodehouse who has pretty similar story lines. I was expecting by his reputation more cleverness in the story. That said, his writing is quite entertaining and I found myself laughing out loud several times.
I have to say, as a more-or-less lifelongish fan of Oscar Wilde (first read “The Happy Prince” when I was eight or nine), that the ending to Ernest is especially weak. I like the way he builds his house of cards in that play, and I like the dialogue, but (and I think I probably speak for a lot of Wilde fans here), the way he knocks the cards down really isn’t all that clever or funny. For a smarter Wilde play, see “A Woman of No Importance”, although his best works are his childrens’ stories, “The Picture of Dorian Grey”, and “Ballad of Reading Gaol” (although it is not, in fact, the case that “Every man kills the thing he loves”.)
(Also I should mention that I recently reread “The Code of the Woosters” and laughed myself inside-out.)
“The Way of Cross and Dragon” by George RR Martin has some relevant themes.
You can either read it in the anthology “Dreamsongs,” or just click here
Excerpt (mildly spoilery):
“We Liars, like all other religions, have several truths we take on faith. Faith is always required. There are some things that cannot be proved. We believe that life is worth living. That is an article of faith. The purpose of life is to live, to resist death, perhaps to defy entropy.”
...”We also believe that happiness is a good, something to be sought after.”.… “The Liars believe in no afterlife, no God. We see the universe as it is, Father Damien, and these naked truths are cruel ones. We who believe in life, and treasure it, will die. Afterward there will be nothing, eternal emptiness, blackness, nonexistence. In our living there has been no purpose, no poetry, no meaning. Nor do our deaths possess these qualities. When we are gone, the universe will not long remember us, and shortly it will be as if we had never lived at all. Our worlds and our universe will
not long outlive us. Ultimately entropy will consume all, and our puny efforts cannot stay that awful end. It will be gone. It has never been. It has never mattered. The universe itself is doomed, transitory, and certainly it is uncaring.”
Not really new, but I found China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station really good. It’s a mix of steampunk, fantasy and horror, and Miéville is a magician with words. He also looks at the motivations of all the actors, good and bad (and human, non-human).
Not really new, but I found China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station really good. It’s a mix of steampunk, fantasy and horror, and Miéville is a magician with words. He also looks at the motivations of all the actors, good and bad (and human, non-human).
I’ve read a good few of Miéville’s novels—I found Perdido Street Station to be the weakest in terms of prose though I guess that could be cause it was only his second novel, or it deliberately homages Lovecraft (whose prose I’m not keen on either) in its style.
I think I’m three behind on his books at this stage, not even counting his children’s book… but the other books set in Bas-Lag (the Perdido Street Station world) are very good. The Scar is probably my favourite of the three. Iron Council is also pretty good—among other thing, it’s a clever pastiche of a number of different kinds of story—but a lot of people get turned off by how heavily political it is. (Miéville is very very Marxist, as far as I know.) It didn’t bother me too much.
The City and the City is very good. I’ve heard it described as a police mystery by Kafka (I’ve not read Kafka, but I’ve heard this a few times). It’s set in contemporary Earth, rather than a fantasy setting. His short story collection is also good—there’s one Bas-Lag story, and a few horrors. I started Embassytown and it seemed promising.
The main issue with Miéville is he adds a lot of concepts and doesn’t explain them clearly until well into the book, if he even outright explains them at all—that works to the book’s advantage sometimes but I found it a little tough in Embassytown.
Huh, that means I’ve read only half his adult books! Better catch up!
My first reaction upon finishing the book was, “Well, if his previous work wasn’t enough to merit a Nobel Prize, this one isn’t going to help.”
Good things: Murakami is still the only currently living master of magical realism, and this could be his last major work. The most charitable interpretation of the book is that it is the culmination of all of his work on loneliness and alienation. It takes very traditional Western magical elements like the fae, doppleganger, and immaculate conception, and weaves them in with traditional Japanese cultural elements like NHK fee collectors, filial piety, and the hikikomori. The title’s connection with Orwell’s 1984 is subtle and mostly well-done.
Bad things: Too often do characters say or think that something that was clearly arranged by the author happened “by coincidence”; in general the writing is somewhat lazy. No explanation is given as to why, e.g., a policewoman in ’84 would know who Marshall McLuhan is. Egregious abuse of Occam’s razor (by name) in the third part to mask the author feeding the plot-so-far into the mind of a character he needlessly recycled from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
Even after a couple months, this comment still puzzles me.
Yes, Rushdie is arguably a master of magical realism, but the original comment heavily implied that I don’t think so. What good is repeating his name a couple times, then?
I find this very interesting. My model of most LWers doesn’t like Murakami very much. I read Kafka on the Shore for an English class, and it was OK, but I wouldn’t exactly say it was in line with much of LW philosophically.
I haven’t read HPMoR before, so I’m genuinely curious about your reasons for disliking it. I would appreciate it if you could enlighten me—I usually seek out critical reviews before I read favourable ones.
First, I don’t think highly of the original story, and I imagine this predisposed me to not liking fanfiction based on it.
While I enjoy EY’s other fiction—in particular, Three Worlds Collide, and the short beisutsukai stuff—HPMoR doesn’t have the same punch. It’s a bit like Atlas Shrugged in that he tries to sum up the entirety of LW philosophy in fictional form, and the result is a text that drags on and on with little thematic unity. I enjoyed parts of the Ender’s Game chapters, for instance, because they were more or less on topic the whole time.
All in all, I would rather reread “Shinji and Warhammer 40k”, “To the Stars”, or other really good fanfiction than bother rereading HPMoR.
Fiction Books Thread
“Labyrinths” by Borges is a good read. And it’s only, y’know, 50 years old. Not LW-related even a little, except by analogy in the vocabulary department. It’s fun, interesting, and “culturally uplifting.”
Upvoted so hard.
Borges is pretty much my favorite writer of fiction. When I first read him, I frequently experienced a genuine sense of wonder that fiction hadn’t ever evoked in me before (and hasn’t really since, although Blindsight, Italo Calvino, The Book of the New Sun and some of Nabokov came close).
I recommend picking up his Collected Fictions. All his short stories, very well translated. Beautiful beautiful stuff.
If you haven’t read much other Italo Calvino, “Invisible Cities” is really, really, really great.
Borges and Calvino are 2 of my favorite authors, and Invisible Cities is my favorite Calvino collection. (And, as seems inevitable for me, I wrote some Calvino fanfiction.)
Seconded. All of Borges is a good read, but “Labyrinths” is the best place to start for non-Spanish speakers. And while there is nothing in Borges about concrete LW-topics like cognitive biases, or futurism, it is full of the geeky fun, the play of abstract concepts and ideas, that I think most LW-ers enjoy. Think of it as Hofstadter, but with math and AI replaced by philosophy and literature.
Labyrinths is THE best “idea book” I know, where the author has interesting, important ideas, and presents them both quickly and artistically. I confuse this book with Ficciones a lot, but that doesn’t matter, as you should read them both.
I love Borges’s essays as well. At least as far as ideas go, they’re even better than the stories.
Read “The Stars My Destination” by Alfred Bester and am torn between liking it and not. It was recommended as a ‘must read’ for anyone who liked HPMOR by someone on r/hpmor. It really has no rationality in it to speak of—the character spends more time punching his way through problems then out-thinking them. There’s a couple cool sequences where the character pushes himself to learn in harsh environments, but that’s about it. At several points through the book I was severely tempted to put it down and not finish but at other times I was quite caught up in it. It reminds me somewhat of Ayn Rand’s works in that the author has decided their character is going to be really good at things and so spends a fair amount of time telling the reader how awesome their character is. It seems to have worked though, given that the version I read has a gushing intro from Neil Gaimman about how gripping and powerful the main character is. I wasn’t convinced.
I reread “Dune” by Frank Herbert. It’s even better than I remembered and has some fun rationalist themes (though without enough details in those themes to make it comparable to HPMOR). I tried reading the second book years ago and got tired half-way through. I might try again.
I also read some of Oscar Wilde. I was a little disappointed in “The Importance of Being Earnest”, probably due to my having read P.G. Wodehouse who has pretty similar story lines. I was expecting by his reputation more cleverness in the story. That said, his writing is quite entertaining and I found myself laughing out loud several times.
I have to say, as a more-or-less lifelongish fan of Oscar Wilde (first read “The Happy Prince” when I was eight or nine), that the ending to Ernest is especially weak. I like the way he builds his house of cards in that play, and I like the dialogue, but (and I think I probably speak for a lot of Wilde fans here), the way he knocks the cards down really isn’t all that clever or funny. For a smarter Wilde play, see “A Woman of No Importance”, although his best works are his childrens’ stories, “The Picture of Dorian Grey”, and “Ballad of Reading Gaol” (although it is not, in fact, the case that “Every man kills the thing he loves”.)
(Also I should mention that I recently reread “The Code of the Woosters” and laughed myself inside-out.)
Well stated about The Importance of Being Ernest. Thanks for the other suggestions!
(There’s also a wonderful BBC version of several of the Jeeves and Wooster stories staring Hugh Laurie and Steven Fry which I would highly recommend.)
“The Way of Cross and Dragon” by George RR Martin has some relevant themes.
You can either read it in the anthology “Dreamsongs,” or just click here
Excerpt (mildly spoilery):
Not really new, but I found China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station really good. It’s a mix of steampunk, fantasy and horror, and Miéville is a magician with words. He also looks at the motivations of all the actors, good and bad (and human, non-human).
Not really new, but I found China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station really good. It’s a mix of steampunk, fantasy and horror, and Miéville is a magician with words. He also looks at the motivations of all the actors, good and bad (and human, non-human).
I’ve read a good few of Miéville’s novels—I found Perdido Street Station to be the weakest in terms of prose though I guess that could be cause it was only his second novel, or it deliberately homages Lovecraft (whose prose I’m not keen on either) in its style.
Still a wonderful book though.
I haven’t read any of his other books—is there any you could recommend? Maybe one of the recent ones, like Embassy Town and Railsee?
I think I’m three behind on his books at this stage, not even counting his children’s book… but the other books set in Bas-Lag (the Perdido Street Station world) are very good. The Scar is probably my favourite of the three. Iron Council is also pretty good—among other thing, it’s a clever pastiche of a number of different kinds of story—but a lot of people get turned off by how heavily political it is. (Miéville is very very Marxist, as far as I know.) It didn’t bother me too much.
The City and the City is very good. I’ve heard it described as a police mystery by Kafka (I’ve not read Kafka, but I’ve heard this a few times). It’s set in contemporary Earth, rather than a fantasy setting. His short story collection is also good—there’s one Bas-Lag story, and a few horrors. I started Embassytown and it seemed promising.
The main issue with Miéville is he adds a lot of concepts and doesn’t explain them clearly until well into the book, if he even outright explains them at all—that works to the book’s advantage sometimes but I found it a little tough in Embassytown.
Huh, that means I’ve read only half his adult books! Better catch up!
Oh, thanks a lot for the information! I’ll check those out!
I finished reading 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami.
My first reaction upon finishing the book was, “Well, if his previous work wasn’t enough to merit a Nobel Prize, this one isn’t going to help.”
Good things: Murakami is still the only currently living master of magical realism, and this could be his last major work. The most charitable interpretation of the book is that it is the culmination of all of his work on loneliness and alienation. It takes very traditional Western magical elements like the fae, doppleganger, and immaculate conception, and weaves them in with traditional Japanese cultural elements like NHK fee collectors, filial piety, and the hikikomori. The title’s connection with Orwell’s 1984 is subtle and mostly well-done.
Bad things: Too often do characters say or think that something that was clearly arranged by the author happened “by coincidence”; in general the writing is somewhat lazy. No explanation is given as to why, e.g., a policewoman in ’84 would know who Marshall McLuhan is. Egregious abuse of Occam’s razor (by name) in the third part to mask the author feeding the plot-so-far into the mind of a character he needlessly recycled from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
I’ve been meaning to start reading book one. May I ask what version you reviewed?
The United States’ single volume.
Salman Rushdie. Salman Rushdie Salman Rushdie Salman Rushdie. Salman Rushdie.
Even after a couple months, this comment still puzzles me.
Yes, Rushdie is arguably a master of magical realism, but the original comment heavily implied that I don’t think so. What good is repeating his name a couple times, then?
I find this very interesting. My model of most LWers doesn’t like Murakami very much. I read Kafka on the Shore for an English class, and it was OK, but I wouldn’t exactly say it was in line with much of LW philosophically.
I’ve read some of his short stories and thought they were meh. They had a few interesting points, but didn’t really connect.
Meh. I don’t particularly care what LWers in general like. They have the poor taste to tend to enjoy HPMoR.
I haven’t read HPMoR before, so I’m genuinely curious about your reasons for disliking it. I would appreciate it if you could enlighten me—I usually seek out critical reviews before I read favourable ones.
First, I don’t think highly of the original story, and I imagine this predisposed me to not liking fanfiction based on it.
While I enjoy EY’s other fiction—in particular, Three Worlds Collide, and the short beisutsukai stuff—HPMoR doesn’t have the same punch. It’s a bit like Atlas Shrugged in that he tries to sum up the entirety of LW philosophy in fictional form, and the result is a text that drags on and on with little thematic unity. I enjoyed parts of the Ender’s Game chapters, for instance, because they were more or less on topic the whole time.
All in all, I would rather reread “Shinji and Warhammer 40k”, “To the Stars”, or other really good fanfiction than bother rereading HPMoR.