one of the most interesting points, though the writer didn't spend much time on it, was how the serialised nature of some of the famous older novels meant everyone was much more likely to be reading them at the same time, and how serialised television fiction plays the same role today. i'd add to that novel series like harry potter - it wasn't just that the first book was wildly popular, but that as the series progressed it swept up more and more fans who were waiting together for the next book. standalone novels don't have that sort of forcing function, and it doesn't seem to work for multiple books by the same author (e.g. no one talked about dan brown's novels after 'the da vinci code')
1. Certain standalone authors had that strength. Stephen King certainly did in the 80s-90s.
2. I think this is why certain fiction series tend to have very strong followings. Regardless of the HBO Series, people were hungry for "Dance with Dragons" when it came out.
The internet certainly helps with TV series. Much of the popularity of "LOST" was the skillful manipulation of that popularity by the production. Compare "LOST" with "Heroes" (poor quality rapidly squandered popularity) and "Firefly" (utter failure to leverage the growing fandom.)
i think the first time i experienced it was with robert jordan's "wheel of time" novels. before that, my friends and i used to wait eagerly for each new discworld book, but that was mostly a matter of "yay, new pratchett". with wheel of time, we were suddenly waiting to see what happened next, which is a very different feeling.
Also, related to series you have a few film directors who command some of that strength. Tarantino comes to mind, though it's an interesting example because there's a sort of common universe underlying the movies. However as you go more niche/cult you'll probably find small communities who wait dearly on the author's next work, be it a film or a book.
They are uniformly excellent. They are distinguished by their honesty and lack of posturing.
For instance, this piece addresses how changing reading habits (more short intervals of time, possibly interrupted) are changing how we can appreciate longer fiction:
" one of the most interesting points, though the writer didn't spend much time on it, was how the serialised nature of some of the famous older novels meant everyone was much more likely to be reading them at the same time"
Hmmm… I thought that the point being made there wasn't so much the serialisation, but the delivery mechanism. The newspaper then, and the television now, is in everybody's home. It's not something special that needs seeking out.
Add to that DVRs even for broadcast shows and, generally, much more fragmented audiences in general. To a first approximation, there is no longer the equivalent of the ability to have a general shared cultural experience the morning after a network broadcast airs to the degree it was in the days of Seinfeld, for example.
There are some exceptions. Something like Game of Thrones comes close--at least among certain subcultures and groups. But it's much more diffuse and less immediate.
A side effect of using books to explore the shared ground between people is that it needs to start with some name dropping, which I have felt is really disliked by Americans in general. As a French, I see name dropping as a quick way to find which books can be talked about with some people you don't know well, but it is perceived as snobbish and may trigger some inferiority complex. Not sure why: it is ok to not read books, it is ok to not have read Proust or Celine, it is ok to be very picky. Having different tastes and cultural background is what makes discussion interesting (but it helps if some common ground can be found).
/r/books with its 3 million subscribers is really, really bad.
/r/literature is much smaller and therefore better. Way more interesting content, but still extremely entry-level though. And plagued with stereotypical redditisms (one of the top posts right now is Tao Lin translated to Latin).
Try looking for small genre-specific subreddits, like /r/printSF for science fiction books etc. More focused and insightful discussion seems strongly inversely correlated with subreddit size.
I've curated my list of Facebook friends to be something like that. The list of real-life friends who make up a core part of my list of Facebook friends includes a lot of people from a membership organization gifted children, whose parents then form a mutual support network. This, to be sure, is a hard strategy to replicate exactly, but over time I think that your professional or other affinity groupings will help you find people who like to discuss books you like thoughtfully.
I get good book recommendations here on HN all the time, most recently a set of books about German history,[1] but we hardly ever have extended book discussions here.
Would you pay for this? Like a couple of bucks per discussion or something?
I've thought about the same thing before but can't figure out how economics would work. Everyone expects things to be free free free nowadays.
I think it could grow into something really cool where you could have authors & other respected thought-leaders participate and have very deep, insightful conversations.
i think, psychologically, i wouldn't value something i had to pay for. i'd feel more like a "consumer" than a participant. (and from an economic standpoint, the users would be generating a lot of the value but capturing none of it)
it's just a psychological thing. i'm sure different people have different psychologies around it. (and yes, i'd probably value my house more if i were not paying rent on it)
as for capturing value, i'm referring specifically to the monetary aspect of things - assuming the company adds value by providing the platform and gets paid for it and the users add value by providing the content but do not get paid for it, the explicit introduction of money into the ecosystem has introduced a situation where one party is seen to be asymmetrically rewarded for the overall success of the ecosystem.
This is also an issue for me. The answer is a book group if you can find like minded individuals, or people willing to read. Too many people just don't read anything any more so the possibility of just 'running into someone at a party' who does read has been greatly reduced. It might make for an interesting meetup at a maker space I suspect.
If the books you want to discuss are still under active copyright (Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, etc) instead of the public domain (e.g. Mark Twain, Shakespeare, etc), how do you envision the shared annotations feature to work?
For example, google books doesn't show pages 43-44 (and many other pages are missing) in Blood Meridian:
It seems that to create a website to fulfill your idea, we would need to have a blanket license to not only store 100% of the text digitally on the servers' harddrives but to also display any part of the complete text to all members so they can annotate it. A giant like Google Inc. was not able to get such terms from publishers.
I don't think you need copyright-free access to the whole book. Interesting quotes/passages are few and should be OK to provide under fair use (e.g. seehttp://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/fair use-explain.html).
Well, I wasn't limiting it to meme-friendly fragments such as "To be or not to be" from Hamlet. To go back to the premise mentioned by theswan, it was "good college-level literature course".
That means most of the text like Hamlet is discussed and annotated front to back. A literary guide such as Norton Critical edition of Hamlet will have annotations for every single line of the play. Hamlet is easy to digitize into RapGenius because it's 400 years old and public domain.[1],[2]
For a recent book still under copyright such as Twilight or Harry Potter, the rabid fans could conceivably want to discuss every page of the book. Therefore, a thousand fans "sharing annotations" leads to reconstructing the entire book. If the entire book isn't presented by the website to annotate, what exactly would they be annotating?
For literary and difficult books such as Ulysses by James Joyce, the entire book begs to be annotated. If a permissive license doesn't exist to present 100% of book for thousands of professors and students to share annotations, I'm not sure what the value is.
What do those stored annotations point to if members are providing the books?
This isn't RapGenius where all of the lyrics and annotations are shown on the same screen.
If the data structure of the stored annotations includes "pointers" to a specific book, what does it "point" to? A page number? Many epub/mobi books don't have absolute page numbers. For dead tree books, even the page numbers can change between the printing of the 1st hardback cover to the 2nd paperback edition.
When I think of "shared annotations", I'm thinking of virtual comments written in the margins of a book that anyone else can see. How would members "provide" books for that scenario? Upload epub & mobi files?
I guess it would be easier to quote (copy&paste) a particular passage a book and then follow up with some commentary but that type of thing can already be done today in any book discussion forum. To me, that's just quoting/citing and not annotating.
For epubs from the same source, epubcfi[1] can be used to point to a passage. It is somewhat resilient to editing, as long as the gross structure of the document remains the same. (Parent tags, file name, ids.) iBooks uses this standard for annotations, but doesn't expose it anywhere.[2] I don't know if any other book readers use epubcfi for annotations.
I think mobi files loose enough structure in translation that it wouldn't be possible to locate an epubcfi pointer within them. However, it might work with the newer "format 8" files, if they are converted from an epub. (I haven't investigated how much structure is lost.)
[2]: some records in my database don't have an epubcfi, but I haven't investigated whether they're user-created annotations or internal ones. (e.g. current location)
This could presumably be handled similar to how patch does it. When you make an annotation, you store an approximate location and say a hundred words of context. When someone loads your annotation, even if they have a slightly different edition, you can look for almost-the-same text, searching outwards from an appropriate point.
So the title starts "The books ...", and reading the
article shows that by books they mean just
fictional novels. but, the books we talk about on HN
have included:
Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming.
Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L.
Rivest, and Clifford Stein, Introduction to
Algorithms.
Jeffrey D. Ullman, Principles of Database Systems.
Jacques Neveu, Mathematical Foundations of the
Calculus of Probability.
David G. Luenberger, Optimization by Vector Space
Methods.
Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, The C
Programming Language.
Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne, Algorithms.
Sorry, NYR, my house, nearly every room, is awash
in books in mathematics, science, engineering,
music, none of which would be of interest to the
NYR, and a few others but likely less than 2% are
fictional novels.
So, the claim of the title "the books we talk about"
appears not to apply very well to HN and the same or
much less so to me. That is, the title is
presumptive.
Why do I say this? Maybe not everyone at HN will
agree with me, but in grades 1-12 and the first two
years of college, I felt force fed like a Strasbourg
goose with books that were fiction. It wasn't until
the last two years of college that I got to
concentrate on what I really cared about,
non-fiction, that is, science, mathematics,
engineering, etc.
So I remain torqued: For years and years I was
force fed with I didn't want and largely blocked
from what I did want.
And, now that I have more understanding of
fiction, I have to conclude, with this force
feeding and blocking, some of my best years for
learning were seriously wasted. Thus, I'm torqued.
I have to be reminded of C. P. Snow, The Two
Cultures and find, (with irony) with that favorite
word of the literary set, irony, a post in the
culture of engineering, math, and science by the
culture of fictional novels, belle lettre,
literary art, etc.
The meaning of a word is determined by its context, so it's not particularly significant or objectionable that "books" is used to mean fiction here. I think you're being a bit dramatic with regards to having to read fiction in school. Society has decided that reading fiction is part of a well-rounded education. The same objections you make could be made about having to learn algebra; most people can object that they will never directly use it in later life and that they could have spend the time learning other things. In both cases an argument for teaching it is that it exercises the mind, developing a sense of abstraction in the case of algebra, and imagination and empathy in the case of literature, I would argue. It is not useful to compare the value of fiction versus non-fiction, they have completely different functions, and there's no reason for it to be a case of either/or.
> The meaning of a word is determined by its
context, so it's not particularly significant or
objectionable that "books" is used to mean fiction
here.
While I believe that books should mean, say, what
is sold on Amazon or what is in a large public or
academic library, for "context," here on HN books
are more like the ones I listed, e.g., Knuth, and not
what is emphasized in NYR. Gee, is there some
irony here?
> I think you're being a bit dramatic with regards
to having to read fiction in school.
But being "dramatic" is heavily what fictional
literature is about, right? More irony here?
> Society has decided that reading fiction is part
of a well-rounded education.
Well, if not "society" then a lot of people in K-12
education, people, who, a guess, were English majors
in college. There's some social-academic field
self-perpetuation here, maybe?
> The same objections you make could be made about
having to learn algebra; most people can object that
they will never directly use it in later life and
that they could have spend the time learning other
things.
in this tread. There I mention that in the grade
1-12 school I went to, algebra was optional. I took
it, sure, along with all the math that was offered.
In that post, I also explained that much of my
objection to fictional literature was the amount of
it required with significant math and science having
many fewer years and all those optional.
So, in grades 1-12 I want to, and as I explain at a
comparatively good school, the dichotomy is not just
fictional literature versus algebra but 12 years of
such literature, required, versus just four years of
math (beyond trivial arithmetic), one year of
chemistry, and one year of physics, all optional and
none very advanced. Bummer.
> It is not useful to compare the value of fiction
versus non-fiction, they have completely different
functions, and there's no reason for it to be a case
of either/or.
Well, we can compare years required, and this long
after the Age of Reason and the rise of the STEM
fields, the 12 years of English as essentially
just fictional literature, with, say, just one year
of physics, is way, way too much. We should be in
line for some disruption. At the very least the
12 years should teach a lot of writing, no, not
creative writing or how to write fictional
literature but writing for business, law, medicine,
politics, and the STEM fields. Maybe eventually
such writing lessons could actually leak over into
journalism?
> In both cases an argument for teaching it is that
it exercises the mind, developing a sense of
abstraction in the case of algebra, and imagination
and empathy in the case of literature, I would
argue.
I can have some agreement with such an argument, but
there is much more to consider. And, as simple as
your argument is, it was never clear in the 14 years
of English I was force fed. In fact, no reasonable
purpose was made clear.
Yes, it was suggested that some of fictional
literature could teach about people. Hmm ....
Eventually I did learn some about people, via
experience and some well respected materials out of,
say, the clinical psychology field, especially E.
Fromm, The Art of Loving, i.e., love and emotions,
psychology, and religion.
Now that I have learned, I can return to some of
fictional literature and see that, yes, some lessons
were there as examples of, say, candidate human
behavior.
E.g., can watch the movie In Harm's Way where
there are four women: One is really a total slut;
she is married but, still, when her husband is not
around, likes to go to a party, get drunk, pick a
man, go to a beach, go skinny dipping, and spend the
night. Another woman wants to be a slut but hides
it even from herself, E.g., she is engaged and there
behaving with high propriety but, when her fiance is
not around, goes to a party, undresses to her
undies, and tempts her escort, whom she suspected
needed no tempting, to rape her. The third is an
excellent version of a wonderful, perceptive,
supportive, devoted, loving wife and mother to be.
And the fourth is an excellent example of a woman
for a man past being a father again. So, Otto
Preminger gave a nice range of possibilities. But,
unless walk into the movie already knowing these
lessons, possibilities, fairly well, will likely
miss the significance. Thus, the movie is more
entertainment, say, to reinforce what the audience
already knows, instead of a way to learn more.
Really, mostly, over the years, I've had to conclude
that fictional literature is a poor way to learn
much of anything significant about people; I will
grant that there are a lot of examples that might
provide more on your "empathy"; even here, if that
is one of the intended lessons, then it is taught
indirectly and ineffectively.
Background 1 -- Seriousness: When I read some
fiction and take it seriously, I want clear
presentations of the points being made and good
evidence for the reality, correctness, and practical
relevance of the points.
Background 2 -- Art: Or, I can like some of art,
and one definition is the communication,
interpretation of human experience, emotion.
Conclusion: Instead of such seriousness or even
such art, I finally concluded that the content of
nearly all of fictional literature is just
presenting to the reader vicarious, escapist,
fantasy, emotional experience entertainment.
Teaching good, solid lessons about people? Not very
much.
So, here we have a case of literary criticism of
literary criticism.
Net, for the teaching of English, I suggest: (1)
Cut way back the required time spent on fictional
literature. (2) For the fictional literature
taught, be much more clear on just what the content
is supposed to mean and why we should take it
seriously. (3) Do much more in teaching writing
other than creative writing.
Easily half of the NYRB writings are about non-fiction, FYI.
Above, you have confined yourself to technical non-fiction, and a narrow range of technical non-fiction at that (math and computer science). So the same observation you make about Parks (unconsciously assuming "books" equals fiction) could be made about you.
but that's not Dyson's science, e.g., what he did to
clean up Feynman's math, what he did in
operations research in WWII, etc.
I also saw that they describe themselves as "a
literary and critical journal". So, it's about
fictional literature.
> Above, you have confined yourself to technical
non-fiction
Really, I just gave some examples, but from long
reading of HN I do have to conclude that my computer
science examples are really typical of some of the
best of what is of interest here at HN. So, the
"books" of the NYR are not much like the books of
HN.
> So the same observation you make about Parks
(unconsciously assuming "books" equals fiction)
could be made about you.
Not about me but maybe about HN.
I didn't see mention of the Weinberg articles.
Really, the several categories of books, fiction,
non-fiction, humanism, literature, etc. aside, the
more clear dichotomy is C. P. Snow's Two Cultures
-- just two. There HN is firmly in one of these two
and the NYR, the other.
There are only 4 works of fiction reviewed there. Everything else is either world politics, finance, or historical events. Science and philosophy are very heavily reviewed also.
If you never read an issue of the NYRB I highly encourage it. It is one of my favorite publications and it's bi-monthly so the quality is very high.
Daniel Mendelsohn's pieces alone are worth the price of a subscription
I'm big on long tail Web sites and much
more in specialization, regard these,
via the Internet, as potentially major
sources of progress for civilization, literally.
So, the NYRB should change their "a literary and critical journal" which, in my case, of course,
takes me back to senior English with the teacher
leaning back, gazing at the ceiling in some
state of ecstasy about some belle lettre thing
and, thus, makes me want to reach for a
fire ax and swing at anything related, for art
as communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion.
If the NYRB has some non-fiction, i.e., some stuff
that is actually true, then terrific.
"Easily half of the NYRB writings are about non-fiction" means that easily half of the books reviewed are non-fiction books. And, looking over the books listed in the current issue (http://www.nybooks.com/issues/2014/oct/23/), there certainly seems to be a solid majority of non-fiction books.
Seems like your best years of learning were seriously wasted at least partially because you either refused or seemed incapable of learning from the books you were forced to read.
Its great that you have a love of learning from nonfiction, I wish more people had the desire you do, but there is a lot to learn from fiction if you are open to it.
The books they forced me to read, just what the heck
were the intended lessons? Tough to say. Since
then I saw that I should have just gotten the
CliffsNotes; they make it clear and explicit just
what the heck the really big lessons are supposed to
be. The books and teachers didn't.
> but there is a lot to learn from fiction if you
are open to it.
Being "open to it" is not nearly enough. Knowing
about people is important, darned important, and I
knew that in quite clear terms in the fifth grade
and since.
A big problem is, the works of fictional literature
just do not make clear just what their points are or
give solid support for their points. Instead, it's
all just a definite maybe. For any intended
lessons, the works of fictional literature just are
not solid enough to take seriously, and there are
now much better sources, ones that make clear just
what they are claiming and provide relatively solid
support for their claims.
It's a shame that you have such disdain toward capital L literature because some of the best writing on fiction is done by people who share your criticisms.
I fail to see the difference between your dismissal of fiction and a mathephobe's statement "when will we ever use this stuff in the real world." I don't know how an intelligent person can argue in good faith that fiction is not only meritless but basically useless. It takes very little effort to look around and see how untrue that statement is.
> "when will we ever use this stuff in the real world."
No. The complaint is more "why are we studying this instead of something else", and the various values of 'something else' have made a better case than Literature has.
Not just practical utility, but mind-expansion (pure math), understanding the world (history, especially recent history), and understanding fellow human beings (sociology and psychology).
> "when will we ever use this stuff in the real world."
That can be tough to see, even when
there is a lot of value in the real world.
Some of what some such math has going for it is
being part of a rock solid directed acyclic graph
of theorems and proofs that are about the highest
quality thinking. e.g., little risk of being wrong, on the planet.
Next, much of the math is both quite abstract and
general, both so much so that in principle, and
sometimes in practice, a lot of applications are
possible.
Next, some of the intention is to prepare for the
future, and, since that future is not here yet,
now we have to guess at what the most solid tools
will be.
> I don't know how an intelligent person can argue in good faith that fiction is not only meritless but basically useless.
That claim is stronger than I made, but, still,
my main criticism is that, according to 20th century
standards of intellectual safety and efficacy,
fictional literature looks poor in comparison,
in particular, because it (1) does not make
clear just what it is claiming to be true and
(2) fails to give solid evidence for much
in such claims. So, as information or knowledge
we don't much know what we have.
To be a little nicer to fictional literature, at times
it can describe situations in human experience,
say, suffering. But, for one, the experiences, e.g.,
the suffering, are not given a solid description, that is,
are not documented with good facts and references. E.g., we have famous fictional literature about the French Revolution, but from all that literature I read, and, indeed, the history courses, it was never explained that due to The Little Ice Age there had just been three years of crop failures so that many peasants were starving. Should have been mentioned. For
another, solid solutions are rarely even considered, much less often presented. So, such fictional literature can
make a reader feel some pains but be helpless at
alleviating the pains -- incompetent.
I said long ago in high school, if a writer of
fictional literature actually has something
important to say, then they should write an
essay.
I had one course each year in 1-12 that had me reading fiction, that was English/Language Arts. My math, science, history and other courses focused almost exclusively on non-fiction. Where did you go to school that they only provided fictional science and math texts?
I will try to be still more clear: For 14 years,
that is, grades 1-12 and the first two years of
college, English, nearly all just fictional
literature, was required, and math and science got
nowhere near as much time and mostly were just
optional. I took all the math and science that was
available, but that was just six years of math, two
of chemistry, and two of physics. Moreover, the
math and science were too simple.
You mentioned history: There I saw too little in
detail and attention to causality to take the
content seriously. Also the history courses spent
far too much time on the really old stuff, including
2000+ years ago, and not nearly enough time after
1800. And for the old stuff, they neglected the
roles of domestic animals, masonry, military
technology, metals, open ocean sailing and trade, the
longitude problem, coal, steel, and steam. For
after 1900, eventually I learned that from TV, e.g.,
the series Victory at Sea.
So, I was effectively blocked from anything
significant in non-fiction until math and physics
in my last two years of college; there I was a
double major in math and physics but at the last
moment dropped physics as a major and was only a
math major.
From grade 5 on, I very much wanted the math and
science. Being force fed fictional literature for
14 years was a really big bummer -- I was torqued
and still am.
During those bad 14 years, at one point I did push
ahead: My last three years in college were in a
relatively good school with, actually, a quite good
math department. But, to save money, my freshman
year in college was in a state school I could walk
to. There they wouldn't let me take calculus but
forced me to take a math course beneath what I'd
already covered in high school. So, I got a
respected calculus book, dug in, and learned
freshman calculus on my own. Then, in my sophomore
year in the better college, I started with their
sophomore calculus, using the same text as Harvard,
and did well. So, I taught myself freshman calculus
and, actually, never took it or got course credit
for it.
Bad high school? Not comparatively: It was by a
wide margin the best public high school in the city
and, really, better than the few, small private
schools. MIT came recruiting, and the year before
me three guys went to Princeton and ran against each
other for President of the Freshman Class.
I see a problem: English, as essentially just
fictional literature, was required and got pushed
hard for 14 years with nothing else even comparable.
I was and remain torqued.
Now, here on HN, fictional literature is very much
not the source of "the books we talk about". Good.
It's unfortunate that the math and science that you took apparently weren't up to your abilities and interests. It's also unfortunate that you didn't like your history either--certainly a lot of history taught in schools is overly focused on dates and kings although I'd argue that learning about the scope of history rather than just post-1800 is valuable.
That said, you seem to lay the blame for all that on having to take what I assume was more or less an English literature class throughout that period (though I doubt it was such in 1st grade). Yes, high school literature in particular can be biased toward writers I didn't like then and (mostly) don't like now. But I personally think there's a lot of value in appreciating great literature (as well as other fiction). I'm sorry you apparently prefer to only read programming books.
> I'd argue that learning about the scope of history
rather than just post-1800 is valuable.
So would I. But much more is known about the years
since 1800 than before year 1000, yet my
most serious history courses spent so much time
before year 0 they never made it to 1800 although
they were supposed to.
Moreover, drawing from a Markov assumption, which
commonly does hold over time, for understanding
1900, what the situation was in 1800 is important,
but, given what that situation was in 1800, what the
situation was, in addition, in year 1000 or 1000 BC
is next to irrelevant.
Of course, what we really need to care about from
history is what it can tell us about now and 10, 50,
100 years from now. For that, sure, can even just
start in 1800 and lose very little from ignoring
1000 BC. Still, sure, I'd go along with a fast pass
to year 1000, a little slower to year 1800, and then
dig in.
The academic study of history seems to be more an
infatuation with the past than a source of lessons
for the future, or from just a movie, "a passion for
antiquities."
> That said, you seem to lay the blame for all that
on having to take what I assume was more or less an
English literature class throughout that period
(though I doubt it was such in 1st grade).
No, I was careful not to say "class" or "course".
They taught English in grades 1-6, and there the
reading was essentially all just fictional
literature, and the writing assignments were all
essentially just versions of story telling, but the
actual separate courses in English didn't start
until grade 7.
> But I personally think there's a lot of value in
appreciating great literature (as well as other
fiction).
If that stuff is to be required, then the claims and
support for them should be made clear.
For appreciation, I'm a big fan of classical
music. E.g., last night it was the von Karajan
recording of the R. Strauss Ein Heldenleben. To
me, passionate stuff. Highly meaningful. Still,
very few people will get much out of that music.
But, I do appreciate it, but just how and why are
long stories. Net, I couldn't recommend that a
music appreciation class with such music be
required.
Similarly for a class in appreciation of
great literature. STEM subjects? Sure.
> I'm sorry you apparently prefer to only read
programming books.
Take a pass through either of, say, Jacques Neveu,
Mathematical Foundations of the Calculus of
Probability or David G. Luenberger, Optimization
by Vector Space Methods I listed, which I have
done, especially the first, and still claim that
these are "programming books". Both have as
prerequisites a solid undergraduate pure math
background; the first is heavily about measure
theory, especially the Radon-Nikodym theorem; both
are heavily about functional analysis, e.g., Hilbert
and Banach spaces; and the second is heavily about
the Hahn-Banach theorem.
I take it that you like fictional literature. Well,
I don't. And, whether I like it or not, since there
is no common and very good case for the value other
than just entertainment, I suggest that less of it
be force fed.
The original article was about books people discuss with friends in real life, not online. How many of these books do you actually talk about?
Although it's commonly recommended, I can't remember ever actually talking with someone else who's also read *The C Programming Language" about the contents of that book, though if they're a programmer we might discuss something about C if it comes up.
By talking about, I was including on HN, and all of
those books so qualify.
For K&R, sure, I've talked about it, yes, orally.
E.g., for that book, what's with the idiosyncratic syntax?
And why the case of x+++++y? And some cases of
declare statements can be real puzzles that can
need talking about -- there is even a sparse, too sparse, discussion
in the book. And to talk, should mention why the
language was designed to run in about 8 K bytes on
a DEC machine (helps explain y =+ x). And, in one
discussion, I got led to where in K&R actually can
find the actual memory allocation technique used
by MALLOC and FREE. We should talk about what
we are paying now, when we use C (or really C++ which
was originally just a preprocessor to C), due to the
original 8 KB constraint when now main memory
goes for about $10/GB and motherboards commonly
support 32 GB of ECC main memory. So, yes,
we do still talk about C and K&R.
C stands to
be around for a long time, and I'm sure that
students new to programming will do a lot of
talking about K&R. While in college, they may do the talking
in person at some social gatherings.
I've talked about, in person, the contents of K&R with people who were learning C; why did they choose to present things in that order? What kinds of practical aspects of the language are omitted? et cetera.
I guess it depends on your friends, but I'll support the parent's case of some of those being great in-person discussion books, especially Knuth. And lots of great math books. Knuth's little "romance novel", Surreal Numbers, is a great example of a highly discussable math book.
Recently I watched via YouTube all of Winds of
War, right "historical fiction". I wanted
to learn more about WWII. Well, the lessons
about what really happened in WWII, except for
the holocaust, were a bit low on solid credibility,
e.g., the meeting with Mussolini.
