Midnight's Children
#685 of 2,654 all-time
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
10 people recommended it in 5 threads, 2009–2025.
2 commenters pushed back on it — worth reading the threads.
What people on Hacker News said
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.
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie which is absolute verbal wizardry
i thought children was wonderful, but everything i've read since by rushdie has been a disappointment (often flat our boring).
Midnights Children and Moors Last Sigh are so non-linear that one cannot expect to get the hang of it till they are atleast 50 pages through. It's usually on the second reading that the amazingness of those initial pages is felt.
And then a thought occurred that maybe it is because of those things- as tirumaraiselvan (sibling comment) put it 'all conventional rules of literature are broken, it's just wildly creative'- that this book was loved.
Where it comes up
- Books I Loved Reading in 2024 2025 · 5 recommendations
- Ask HN: Great books you read in 2009? 2010 · 2 recommendations
- A visual book recommender 2023 · 1 recommendation
- Ask HN: Which books have you read more than once? 2020 · 1 recommendation
- Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books. 2009 · 1 recommendation