Hacker News Reader

Comment by niels_olson | Hacker News Reader

I highly recommend William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life, then reading Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, et al.

As an aside: I listened to Irvine on audiobook immediately after listening to Sherry Turkle's Alone Together. It was like reading about a disease and then the treatment. Recommend, would do again.

View on HN

I’d recommend skipping Irvine’s book and just going straight to the sources. I didn’t feel like he added much, and thought his book was poorly structured and overly didactic; too close to the style of the popular self-help book for my taste. I also felt like he projected many of his own opinions/conclusions back on the authors he was discussing.

Maybe my impression is biased by the uninspiring quality of his prose on a sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph level though: I’m pretty sensitive to bland fuzzy writing.

I disagree. I thought that his book framed the larger issues of stoicism well, so I could better understand the source material as the next step. (Particularly since some of the translations use language that's not particularly accessible).

I agree completely. The subject matter in the book is worth review but I found his style so distracting it was difficult to finish. It has the feel of a first writing assignment where the suggested format was followed very closely chapter after chapter. Not a book you get lost in reading.

Also, the meditations are available on LibreVox.

Link: https://librivox.org/the-meditations-of-marcus-aurelius/

My first book about Stoicism and I loved it. Read it multiple times afterwards!!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com