Tristram Shandy
by Laurence Sterne · first published 1940
15mentions
3recommended by
13HN commenters
2016–2025first – last mentioned
23% recommend77% neutral
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As is often the case, the word "Books" is used when they apparently just mean "Novels". Tristram Shandy difficult?! Strange. Would you call Monty Python 'difficult'? It is, however, hilarious, and still seems very modern, despite the first part dating from 1759. The humour is quite Pythonish, but goes further…
on “Why We Need Difficult Books” ↗A fellow Sterne fan! Also, Mike Lesk, who wrote uucp at Bell Labs, is a committed Tristram Shandy aficionado with a first edition. The funereal page is great. Back in the 80s Mike talked about font emulating for old letterpress and how one could introduce pleasing asymmetries into the output. Is…
on “A Font Book of Squiggles in Tristram Shandy” ↗If you’ve never read Three Men in a Boat or Tristram Shandy you might try those too.
on “Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?” ↗I put together a nice PD ebook edition of Tristram Shandy last year for Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/laurence-sterne/the-life-a... (By nice I mean compatible as best I can with the latest ePub specs, images SVG traced for hi-dpi / dark…
on “Comedy of Heirs: Tristram Shandy” ↗It doesn't explain why it's "distinctively American", only that it's a modern Western belief. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism point out, for example, that "A passage of Laurence Sterne's 1767 Tristram Shandy, condemns plagiarism by resorting to plagiarism" At http://listverse.com/2014/09/18/10-of-the-worst-plagiarists-... we read: > "Few men have fallen further in the eyes of their scientific peers during…
on “Plagiarism is a distinctively American problem” ↗…now I also think that it could also be a matter of taste. Rushdie himself quotes Milan Kundera who said: "...that the novel descended from two parents, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy". The latter is a style of writing where all conventional rules of literature are broken, it's just wildly creative so to speak. Rushdie's Midnights Children and James Joyce's Ulysses fall into this category.…
on “Books I Loved Reading in 2024” ↗…confidence, it's not an AI. IF however comparison of the ASCII from Gutenberg, and an apparent "AI cleaned up" copy of their work diverge, what would we make of things like this? Is it material change? For "Tristram Shandy" it would be: Sterne deliberately told his printer to put some things into the text, such as a black page, and some other printer marks. If they get elided out, or magnified up, thats dicking with the…
Plowing my way through Tristram Shandy at the moment, and I would definitely agree that it's "difficult". Not so much the contemporary vernacular (though that doesn't help), but rather the discontinuous hyperactivity with which the author…
on “Why We Need Difficult Books” ↗Great page. Gee, I wish I'd read that before I read Tristram Shandy. Ravelins, hornwork, glacis etc etc get a lot of mentions from Tristram's fortification-obsessed Uncle Toby. Somehow the joke never gets old, even not knowing what they are.
on “Star Forts” ↗Thanks. I have read Three Men in a Boat and I enjoyed it. I started reading Tristram Shandy a long time ago but couldn’t get into it; I should give it another try. Speaking of unread books, this year I compiled a list of fifty nineteenth century novels that nobody seems to read anymore [1].…
on “Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?” ↗…mother's stuff, including a lot of books. I discovered in one of them he'd written a fake dedication from the author "To ____ who could have written this far better than I". And in the front of a copy of Tristram Shandy he'd written: "This is the 3rd copy I have bought. All the others have been STOLEN. If I ever get to read it I may find out why!" Makes me miss him more.
on “What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?” ↗Did you read Tristram Shandy to the end? I read the first 400 pages and then I gave up. And up till this moment, I'm the only person I knew who got that far.
on “Star Forts” ↗I used FlowWise[1], LM Studio[2], the llama2[3] model, and Ollama[4] (for embeddings) to create a local-only RAG chatbot so I could chat directly with Tristram Shandy, Gentleman[5]. For the context document I used the text of the novel of the same name, downloaded from Project Gutenberg. Primarily it was a PoC to see if a document based chatbot could work without…
on “Ask HN: What have you built with LLMs?” ↗…writing with the em dash for many years, because it looks better and is very accessible on Mac OS (long press on dash key), while carrying a different tone than the simple dash. That, and I read some Tristram Shandy.
on “A 10x Faster TypeScript” ↗…classes. They asked why, claiming that reading was a particularly important skill for this school. I gave a mild response, but said that recently I had started reading a lot more, and pulled out a copy of Tristram Shandy. The president of the college was one of my interviewers, and his eyes lit up. He asked me why I was interested in the book, and I said something along the lines of "I heard it was incredibly boring."…
on “My Visit to Deep Springs College (2009)” ↗