Anna Karenina

I put The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in that category, a pleasure to read from front to back. The association with work made it take me decades to get to some of the books assigned for class in high school, like these. A few were so good that I tried to read Anna Karenina again. Maybe in a few decades more I'll like that one too.

Fiction: - "The Dark Forest" by Liu Cixin and the whole Three Body Problem/Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. Truly massive, grand SciFi. Would recommend 10/10. [HN] - "Anna Karenina" by Tolstoy. Made me face deeper parts of my mind. Attempted to answer some questions I had. Great story. Huge book. Historical fiction is something I like across languages. - "Candide" by Voltaire. Genuinely fun and entertaining, besides it being- you know- Voltaire. - "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson. Very good story, world buulding, nice technology. Great thinking by the author. Non Fiction: - "Fermat's Last Theorem" by Simon Singh. Was very happy to see a Popular Math book where there are so many Popular Science books. Great book. Goes over FMT's solving history, with many many fun anecdotes, short biographies, etc. Truly enjoyable to read. - "Code Book" by Simon Singh. Genuinely fun and learned a lot. Cryptography's history, progress, and so much more. [HN] Self-Help:…

Anna Karenina would be my recommendation. I had a lower oppinion on novels in general before reading this, but Tolstoy is just phenomenal with his characters. It made me realize how great books should help improve your empathy towards others, and being more understanding to behaviour you'd normally just vilify.

Anna Karenina - I'm an eastern european raised in the US. It was really eye opening. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Anna Karenina, 3x in two translations Skunk Works Intelligent Investor Man Who Was Thursday

i recently re-read the wisdom of crowds, ~15 years now since i first read it. still good, still relevant. there's even a section on how quickly SARS was identified in international collaboration despite no central, coordinating entity. it's covertly a book about statistical reasoning, but with no dry statistical language, subversive in a way. we need more statistical reasoning in the world, particularly around risk assessment, to subdue fear and panic. edit: as for fiction, james clavell's asian saga[0] series is entertaining historical fiction, which i've read twice. pat conroy's southern portraits, particularly the lords of discipline and the prince of tides, both wrenching, haunting, and beautiful. also in the historical/cultural fiction realm: anna karenina, crime and punishment, a tale of two cities, les miserables. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asian_Saga

If by positive impact you mean most enjoyable, then: The Godfather, Mario Puzo (Film good, Novel excellent) Anna Karenin, Leo Tolstoy (Best novelist ever IMO) Rendezvous With Rama Series, Arthur Clarke (Great) Replay, Ken Grimley? (Cool story)

He is, perhaps, my favorite contemporary author. I have a fairly predictable "best novels ever written" list which includes _War and Peace_, _Anna Karinina_, _Brothers Karamazov_ and _Dune_ ... but I would also place _SevenEves_ on that list. I found _Fall Or: Dodge in Hell_ to be terrible, however.

- Anna Karenina: Tolstoy knows people better than they know themselves - Brave New World: Aldous Huxley is a genius and a wordsmith - Dune: a sci-fi masterpiece, highly recommended to anyone into sci-fi - Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: not purely fiction but an amazing book I will surely re-read during my lifetime

A solid contender for the title "best book of the 19th century". Together with Madame Bovary. Which wins, IMHO. But still: great book.

I second the votes for War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Brothers Karamazov ... but I think I can add a unique (and very special to me) entry with: Chesterfield's Letters to His Son: "Begun in the 1737 and continued until the death of his son in 1768, Chesterfield wrote mostly instructive communications about geography, history, and classical literature, – with later letters focusing on politics and diplomacy – and the letters themselves were written in French, English, and Latin, in order to refine his son's grasp of the languages."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Stanhope,_4th_Earl_of_C... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Stanhope,_4th_Earl_of_Chesterfield#Letters_to_His_Son)

Anna Karenina For a lighter, but still interesting read, anything by Saki is good - Sredni Vashtar was the first story of his I read and I still come back to it decades later. http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/vashtar.html

Anna Karenina.

If you liked War and Peace you would probably also like Anna Karenina. Although I might not need to tell you that ;-)

Anna Karenina and a selection of other classics. Anything from David Mitchell. At least a couple of the more well-known Haruki Murakami novels. Some history from the more scholarly end of the layman accessible works. Little bit of classic philosophy. More of my colleagues speak two (or more) languages than are monolingual, but if that weren't the case, I'd wish more of them read in another language.

Anna Karenina, A Suitable Boy, and the like. Excellent books but after college it's been difficult to start and keep at them in a acceptable period of time given the time (or lack of it) is an issue now. I also wanted to read Ulysses. I am stuck around the ~20% of Dostoyevsky's Idiot since a long time. Off late I've had better success with shortner ones. For me the reason is simple - it's just the daunting number of pages and it is a shame that I have not read/finished these books.

Leave it to Psmith - 10/10 Anna Karenina - 8/10 The Code of the Woosters 8/10 Fooled by Randomness 7/10 Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life 8/10 How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia 9/10 Reluctant Fundamentalist 9/10 The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes 8/10 The Last Question - Asimov - 9/10 The Magic of Thinking Big - 6/10 The catcher in the Rye 8/10 Models 7/10 High Fidelity - Nick Hornby 8/10 The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman 7/10 The Surrender Experiment - 10/10 Untethered Soul - 9/10 The Autobiography of a Yogi - 7/10 Raja Yoga - Swami Vikekandanda - 7/10 Something Fresh, something new - 7/10 Karma Yoga - Swami Vikekandanda - 8/10 Thinking, Fast and Slow - 9/10 Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates 10/10 The Pearl by John Steinbeck 7/10

I first read it when quite young, so probably it provided an emotional education, but also a lesson that literature can be more than just a clever plot - it's full of wonderful observations of human character, even characters that Tolstoy was not particularly sympathetic to (e.g. Stiva, who chooses his opinions as he chooses his hat, from the selection available, or Anna, the tragic focal point of the novel) - there are no villains and no heroes, only bumbling humans dealing with problems entirely of their own creation. I also liked Madame Bovary from the same period, another riff on doomed attempts to escape unhappy circumstances - perhaps all happy novels are alike, whereas every unhappy novel is unhappy in its own interesting way?

I also read Anna Karenina (I am a big fan of Russian literature) - but none the less (or maybe rather b/c of that) I am curious to learn how this book did change your perspective on your life?

Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoy. Absolutely amazing, I highly recommend it.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius - a wonderfully simple explanation of what is truly important in life. The Order of Things or Madness and Civilisation by Michel Foucault - a look at how our culture and time limit the horizons of our world view. Anna Karenina by Tolstoy - a complicated set of love stories set in 19C Russia - brilliantly observed. Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter - an exhilarating skip through the wonderland of western maths, art, music and philosophy. Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston - a great insight into the first computer revolution - interviews with a lot of very interesting people.

Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoj

Gravity's Rainbow - took 4 months out of my year, but and it's still mostly a whoosh, but every time I started reading another book after that, it was just amazing how much better Pyncheon writes. Will revisit it for sure, though not very soon. Anna Karenina - just a whole different level, Tolstoy's writing in a way I don't feel many contemporary writes could. Feels creepy how similar the people's lives in the 19th Century was to ours. Creepy but fun too. If On A Winter's Night A Traveller - Italo Calvino will just punch you in the face, this is a book for people who love reading books. The Magicians - adult magic fiction, and somehow it feels that if magic was indeed real, it would be like it is depicted here, not like anything in Harry Potter's (no matter how much I loved the storytelling, the magic theory was just so full of plotholes). The Casual Vacancy - JKRowling's not-Harry-Potter-book. It's very gritty, and feels very real. Still having my cold shivers thinking of small-town living after this. (Except for the last one the others are older releases, don't usually jump into the newest ones, I just take it casual)

Here are two fiction books that I really enjoyed and learned from: 1) Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. This book is an emotional roller coaster. After reading it, you will better understand what life is like for the mentally challenged. 2) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. You will get a glimpse into the life of Russian aristocracy in the 19th century. More importantly, you will learn about love and human relationships.

I got myself a Sony Reader mid-2009 and started reading about twice more than I had been before. 2009 was also the first year in which I wasn't too lazy to document which books I read (I'm really glad I wasn't). Here're some of the favourites this year: Classics: Kafka's The Process and America - both stunning novels that deserve to be read as much as his most famous, The Castle. Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - a trippy collection of tales organised in multiple nested frames. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. Still as breathtaking as I'd remembered it from the previous reading five years ago. Science Fiction: Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe, whom I hadn't read before, turns out to be in a class of his own. It's literary SF, overwhelmingly masterful and beautiful in its prose and characters, yet it could give any hardcore SF novel a run in terms of its ideas. It demands and richly rewards a close reading. I'll be reading more Wolfe in 2010.…