Notes From the Underground, The Nausea, The Silent Cry, To the lighthouse, Chekov’s Stories, Nassar’s Ancient Tillage.

Not what you asked for but what I feel it’s really lacking over there.

This is my challenge to any self-identified rationalist reading this. The above are all stories. They’re widely regarded as great stories by people who like to read stories; they’ve won prizes and admiration etc. I know y’all think this is just obscurantism and some sort of weird social signaling where people pretend to like boring things for status. You’re wrong. I read those and had a great time. I also hand-picked a list where everything is an easy read, avoiding linguistic experimentation like Naked Lunch or Finnegan’s Wake (much as I like it), and avoiding poetry (much as I like it) because poetry, while awesome, is exhausting. These ones are straightforward. You’re smart, I’m sure you can understand them, too. It’s certainly much easier than learning Clojure or electrodynamics. If any paragraph doesn’t make sense at first read, it will if you read it again. I made the list much shorter than I’d like, you can go over it easy enough in your free time. And then you can feel free to brag and prove me wrong and claim to be charitable and willing to learn about the other side.

If you read these stories, I’m sincerely interested to know your answers to the following questions:

• 1. Can you understand why these books are considered "great'?
• 2. Do you think there’s a difference between this kind of fiction and HPMOR or SSC fiction posts? How would you describe this?
• 3. Do you have any hypotheses about why these authors, and not only them but this entire category of human achievement, were all simply left aside from all Lesswrong discussion? Why do LW-adjacent communities appear indeed to be downright hostile to this kind of thing that the rest of the world consider one of the great achievements of civilization?

N.b. I’m only interested in answers if you actually read the books; please respect this point.