Beloved
by Toni Morrison · first published 1987
36% recommend57% neutral7% critical
Why HN recommends it
Its prose and opening are beautiful and striking. It ranks among the most admired American novels of the past fifty years, suited to readers who value literary craft.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a s
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Heck, the Virginia governor-elect cashed in on this "faux outrage" because a high school senior was so mentally injured by the book Beloved, one of the most regarded pieces of American fiction in the past 50 years.
on “A Texas School District Banned My Book. Then Things Got Ugly” ↗I love this opening and it’s one I think about more than I should. I recently read his Chronicle of a Death Foretold and it’s opening felt drawn from this one. Toni Morrison’s Beloved opening is breathtaking as well.
on “How to Start a Novel” ↗Beloved by Toni Morisson. Such beautiful prose.
on “Ask HN: Best books you've read in 2015” ↗My first intro to Morrison was thru 'The Bluest Eye'. Afterwards I read many of her books incl 'Beloved'. I loved all of them. One thing I could however never understand was how a person with such deep insights into the African American experience could call Bill Clinton, 'the first Black President'. I…
on “Toni Morrison Has Died” ↗My heart is breaking. Toni Morrison was one of the greatest writers of our time. I loved Beloved, but The Bluest Eye is my favorite.
on “Toni Morrison Has Died” ↗…seem like it. Those sorts of novels tend to be challenging to read, but most things worth doing challenge us. If you've never read something like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or Toni Morrison's Beloved, or Gabo's 100 Years of Solitude, or many of the other great artistic achievements in literature, you really should challenge yourself to do so. They make us better.
on “TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning” ↗…Mist and Fury (series) by Sarah J. Maas Monday's Not Coming by Tiffany D. Jackson Tricks by Ellen Hopkins Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood Beloved by Toni Morrison Looking for Alaska by John Green The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini Crank by Ellen Hopkins Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time…
on “Iowa using AI to automatically scan and ban books” ↗…job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game." –Toni Morrison (Nobel Author, for Beloved (a novel) [1987]) ...quoted with no shade to you... ---- >"Just remember Neo, all I'm offering is the Truth" –Matrix >"They hated him because he told the Truth" –Galatians 4:?
on “'I've applied for 300 jobs. My 25 years' experience is worthless'” ↗…Lewis Carroll Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Lord of the Flies by William Golding The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Melissa by Alex Gino (previously published as George) Beloved by Toni Morrison The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Persepolis…
on “Banned and Challenged Books Everyone Should Read” ↗…recieved graduate degrees (some that they paid for), stuck failed novels in drawers, produced multiple drafts, been rejected hundreds of times, etc. I.E. labored over each page and fought for each step. Beloved was Toni Morrison's 5th book, not published until she was 56. That's decades of work to get to that point. Try looking at any page of James Joyce Ulyssess. That book alone spawned the PhDs of hundreds…
on “E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians” ↗…"Ms. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, 'Beloved' will put them to rest." From the 1987 review of Beloved. Sure, maybe I was a bit hyperbolic, but it is essentially unarguable that Toni Morrison is one of the most important, respected, and lauded…
…books are now mandatory reading in every university in the country. I read one Morrison book, but I cannot remember anything from it. The people who I go to for book recommendations mostly say that Beloved was tedious. Also, this goes back to my point about intellectual diversity. If you really want to get a full picture of what life was like under slavery you need to read books like "Roll, Jordan, Roll:…
on “Colleges Consider 3-Year Degrees To Save Undergrads Time, Money” ↗…GNU"), there shouldn't be an issue. Think about what copyright to a play, or a novel, or a screenplay is. Now imagine a comment in the text/source: "This is how Toni Morrison did her characterizations in Beloved". This obviously isn't a copyright violation, unless you're copying the actual expression or a translation of the actual expression found in Beloved.
on “The First Stable Release of a Rust-Rewrite Sudo Implementation” ↗…comes to Toni Morrison, its not like she only won a couple of isolated awards. She won a long string of them, and is one of the most decorated American writers of the last 80 years. One of her books, Beloved, was made into a movie by Oprah. There are plans to make a second book (Sula) into a movie or series as well.
on “Toni Morrison's Rejection Letters” ↗Beloved by Toni Morrison. Lisp in Small Pieces by C. Queinnec
on “Ask HN: What are you reading right now?” ↗