= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Manfred comments on August 2012 Media Thread - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (55)
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.