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Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to do something a bit different from everyone else and suggest some poetry.

1) Songs of Innocence and of Experience from William Blake.

2) The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde

3) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I've started to enjoy reading poetry again. The education system managed to extinguish any love I had for poetry. It's been a bit over half a decade since I was in school, and I've started to enjoy reading poetry again.

Turns out it's possible to just read a poem and enjoy it without having to go through line by line and word by word analysing the thing to death.

I actually prefer poetry to long form text right now. I don't have the time or attention span to sit down and read a whole book, but poems are like a shot of literature. I've been enjoying reading sci-fi short stories for the same reason.

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Many years ago I collected short stories I enjoyed in an Evernote list. Here it is if you want some inspiration. :)

Asimov, Isaac - "Nightfall"

Asimov, Isaac - "The Last Question"

Barthelme, Donald - "Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby"

Beckett, Samuel - "That Time"

Bisson, Terry - They're Made Out of Meat

Boyle, T. C. - The Hit Man

Carver, Raymond - Little Things

Chekhov, Anton - "The Bet"

Dick, Philip K - "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" Gibson, William - Dogfight ("...he had nobody to tell it to. Nobody at all.")

Hemingway, Ernest - The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

Hemingway, Ernest - Hills Like White Elephants

Makkai, Rebecca - "The Briefcase"

Bradbury, Ray - "The Veldt"

Saroyan, William - "Seventy Thousand Assyrians"

Excellent choice with Blake, and of course, there’s nothing quite like Reading Gaol. The latter is some of the best written word art ever created.

I would point others to Robert Browning’s Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came. It’s a late romantic poem about the time after Camelot’s glory has faded and all hopes have been dashed by man’s weakness and the inexorable hunger of time. A fitting poem for those of us who live in an age whose greatest promises lay unfulfilled. These were not the robots we were promised.*

*Tagline stolen from a truly stellar Op-Ed from last year available here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/09/opinion/sunday/household-...

The podcast 'In Our Time' by the BBC did an hour long discussion on William Blake's poems:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07gh4pg

If you want a poetry anthology, can I recommend "Other Men's Flowers" by Lord Wavell - poetry that he momorized that saw him through WW1 and WW2. You won't like everything, but there is lots of good stuff in it.

Reading your comment suddenly made me remember about the "Voyage to India" by Gonçalo M. Tavares; maybe you would enjoy this recent book written in verses. Unfortunately I couldn't find any link to some good review online

Blake is indeed great summer reading - a retreat from the rational mind. In that vein, my two summer picks are A.R. Ammons' "Still" and the fragments of Friedrich Holderlin translated by Michael Hoffman.

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