[aresant]

The Alchemist

Heard about it for years, always wrote off as too esoteric but as an entrepreneur it seriously resonated and somehow made it all seem a little more manageable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alchemist_(novel)

[lionhearted]

Fantastic book. Either that, or Eliezer Yudkowsky's fanfiction "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" was the best fiction I read this year.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...

HP&TMOR didn't sound like the kind of thing I'd have liked... massively mistaken. Very good. Highly recommended.

[adaml_623]

I don't see the point of having a no procrastination setting on Hackernews if irresponsible people link to captivating etexts like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

That's book is really grabbing me at the moment.

[lionhearted]

> I don't see the point of having a no procrastination setting on Hackernews if irresponsible people link to captivating etexts like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

There goes the next two weeks of your free time.

Sorry.

[jtheory]

Hmm -- and unfortunately for you, even though it masquerades as "just" a online fan fic, it's actually already the length of multiple books; the chapter count is in the 60s, and the downloadable "book-format" PDF is over 1K pages.

It's great fun, but yeah, you have to figure out a way to spread it out over a few weeks or you'll accomplish little else. :)

[Estragon]

Yeah, I loved Methods of Rationality, too.

[sydd]

I hated this book. It was like a kitschy, easy digestable, consumer friendly version of other (much) better south american writers.

It was like a Borghes book told by the author of Harry Potter.

[alatkins]

Could you recommend some of these other writers? Because I quite liked The Alchemist, though I'm dubious of some of Paulo Coelho's philosophical ideas at times.

[Kutta]

Borges and Marquez are the two I latin americans I'm acquainted with and they are overall the most famous too. Borges is always very brainy and philosophical in a very good way; sometimes he even ventures into flat-out mindfuck territories. He mostly wrote short stories that are consistently good. Marquez has a lovely vivid and very visual prose and writes either in a realist or slightly magical realist style. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera" are the pivotal points of his bibliography.

[alatkins]

Hey I just noticed this comment - thanks, I'm going to check out the authors you mentioned.

[naradaellis]

Yeah, brilliant. A great illustration of gumption and willingness to pursue self-knowledge giving rise to amazing opportunities.

Along the same lines, Siddartha by Herman Hesse was my favorite book this year. Quite similar to the Alchemist really, viz. understanding yourself and being conscious and receptive to your environment.