Around the discussion in slashdot today about Stephenson’s new book I found it strange how many people are afraid of thousand pages to read and how many weren’t able to read Cryptonomicon and Quicksilver. I fing it strange that a book can scare someone with its size, so I decided to write something for these stressed people – about some really great (and big) books and why they deserve to be read. <\/p>\n
1) “The name of the rose” and “Foucalt’s pendulum” by Umberto Eco. They may be 10-15% of notes, but are incredibly well written, full with interesting things and it’s not a coincidence that they’re classic.<\/p>\n
2) Cryptonomicon and the Baroque cycle by Neal Stephenson – maybe the second by depth writer after Umberto Eco. Incredibly interesting, covers all kinds of topics, reading him is an incredible pleasure.<\/p>\n
3) “I, Claudius” by Robert Graves – the best book on the topic of Rome that I’ve found.<\/p>\n
4) All that’s been published in the “Malazan book of the fallen” – until now (7 out of 10) there’s no weak book. Humongous world, lots of stories, lots of characters, it’s almost at my limit of remembering and co-relating stories and threads :)<\/p>\n
5) “The GULAG archipelago” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn – the great historical significance aside, the book is really fascinating and well written. <\/p>\n
7) “In absentia reports for Bulgaria” by Georgi Markov – I’ve already written about it…<\/p>\n
7) “Requiem for Homo Sapiens” by David Zindell – depth, ideas, style… Although the action is somewhat linear, the series is incredible.<\/p>\n
8) “The fountainhead” by Ayn Rand – mostly because of her philosophy and the incredible description. <\/p>\n
9) “IT” by Stephen King – one of his best books.<\/p>\n
I can go on and on, but I’m a bit constrained by the minimal size to be no less than thousand pages (or around that) – and there are some incredible things that are 500, 100 or even 10… It seems far easier to read than to write about the things I read, and writing about all that I read will be somewhat hard…
\n(I can do a posting on the topic of “my favourite books”, but remembering and writing them will take a week or two :) ).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Around the discussion in slashdot today about Stephenson’s new book I found it strange how many people are afraid of thousand pages to read and how many weren’t able to read Cryptonomicon and Quicksilver. I fing it strange that a book can scare someone with its size, so I decided to write something for these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vasil.ludost.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vasil.ludost.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vasil.ludost.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vasil.ludost.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vasil.ludost.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vasil.ludost.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vasil.ludost.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vasil.ludost.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vasil.ludost.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}