The Books We Talk About (and Those We Don’t)

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.

/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).

How is valuable, insightful discussion not worth paying for?

Give me an example of an ad-funded discussion medium that does well. Even reddit isn't profitable.

Guess I won't be touching this concept with a 10-foot pole.

I'd be more interested in a format more suited toward discussion/annotation - like what you'd get out of a good college-level literature course.

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.

I explain more in

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8410549

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.

So, it's non-fiction mostly because it is reviews? But nearly all the reviews are about fictional literature, right?

Before I posted, to learn more about the NYR I went to their Web site and to their page "About the Review" at

http://www.nybooks.com/about/

and read.

There, yes, I saw

"Freeman Dyson described the scientist as rebel"

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.

> 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.

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.

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 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.