Rendered at 15:07:05 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
steve_adams_86 2 days ago [-]
Thinking In Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows
My 17 year old son bought it for me for my birthday. I've been enjoying it a lot. I do in fact like thinking in systems and learning more about it, and reading it in a more generalized fashion than I tend to in the computer science world has provided a refreshing perspective. It's all very approachable, nothing very complex, but gives names and discreet patterns to things I intuitively understood but previously wouldn't articulate easily. Definitely one of my favourite gifts in a long time.
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
I read bits of this to my wife at night occasionally. One of the first trips we went on together was camping on a little island, and I had Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami) with me which I suggested I read to her in the evening. She really liked it and I've done it since. I wish I did it more often. Anyway, Stories of Your Life and Others is a wonderful collection. I've read it a few times, not always completely, and I enjoy it. Story of your life is the standout. It's what the movie Arrival is based on, which I consider one of the best scifi movies of all time. It's a beautiful story.
Silo series by Hugh Howey
I've been watching the show and decided the books deserve a shot. If the show is as good as it is, the books must be great, right?
atulatul 2 days ago [-]
> Thinking In Systems... gives names and discreet patterns to things I intuitively understood but previously wouldn't articulate easily
I liked the observations like:
'long-term behavior provides clues to the underlying system structure. And structure is the key to understanding not just what is happening, but why'*
'Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.'
'Large organizations of all kinds, from corporations to governments, lose their resilience simply because the feedback mechanisms by which they sense and respond to their environment have to travel through too many layers of delay and distortion.'
This book made me start focusing on flows vs stocks, a distinction humans tend to get backwards and the make several related mistakes.
The book gets some valid criticism, but it's a primer and a good one at that.
vintermann 2 days ago [-]
> Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.
A light rewrite of the slogan "the purpose of a system is what it does".
I hate that slogan. It's supposed to be profound, but it's actually really, really dumb.
The whole point of the word purpose - its purpose if you will - is to be able to talk about the difference between what a system does and what it ought to do. To say the purpose of a thing is what it does, is to render the word completely redundant.
If the stated goals of a system don't match what it does, then either you have a dysfunctional system that needs to be fixed, or those stated goals are lies.
In these days of AI, it's all the more important to think clearly about purpose. Just because a system does a thing, there's not necessarily anyone who wants that thing. And there's definitively not any "spirit of the corporation" or "spirit of the nation" or "spirit of the language model" which wants it. Only persons want things.
harshreality 2 days ago [-]
If it bothers you, you could work around the semantics and talk about its empirical purpose or observed purpose, vs intended purpose, rather than using purpose and expecting it to be interpreted in a particular way.
I think the jarring alternative definition of "purpose" is an intentional mental hack: to break people out of orienting themselves around design intent, when processes often go out of alignment with that. It's easy for humans to fool themselves. Taking a dispassionate, empirical view when considering what a process is doing, or analyzing what its range of behaviors is, can illuminate many problems.
jodrellblank 2 days ago [-]
> or those stated goals are lies.
Yes, that's part of the point. If the stated purpose of a system is to "improve vehicle fuel efficiency" but the observed behaviour is to give car companies a way to avoid doing much of anything about fuel efficiency, or if the stated purpose is to "encourage EV adoption" but the observed behaviour is "funnel money to certain rich people" then you are better off assuming that the behaviour you observe is the intent, and the publicly stated purpose is marketing spin.
On the other hand, things change over time. Google started out organizing the world's information, and gradually turned into surveillance advertising. They got rid of "don't be evil" so there are no explicit lies. They aren't a dysfunctional search company, they are a functional surveillance-advertising company, that thing they do - update your expectations so you believe that's their purpose and don't believe that they are "trying to be good but misguided".
collinmcnulty 2 days ago [-]
I’ve always interpreted this saying to point in the direction you’re actually going. That a machine does not have a “purpose”. Its creator might have had a purpose in mind, but when talking about the machine one should focus on what it actually does. This avoids needing to fend off attacks about how noble the creator’s intention for their machine may or may not have been, which could otherwise consume the rhetorical oxygen better spent.
svnt 2 days ago [-]
They do not need to be lies, but they may be. They may also just be a mismatch between the level a statement is generated at and the level it is consumed at, the “level” here being something we could call a system’s functional context.
Additionally, a statement is generated by a system and reflects itself a separate purpose in its generation. A system can exist without statement of purpose, so why was it made? The statement has an intent and an audience. It is therefore necessarily more constrained than the system itself, and for the systems we are referring to, it is markedly less complex than the system itself. It cannot hope to capture the full function, which is what can serve (or not) a purpose.
atulatul 2 days ago [-]
The quote you replied to is used to educate a reader how to understand an existing system. For example, it helps one understand why a system is in a state when as you say 'there's not necessarily anyone who wants' it that way. Rivers are polluted because there are some factors in the system which enable it.
Also, as the video I linked in the previous comment says:
'our first instinct is to blame people in the system and that is a low leverage response...actions people take are possible, feasible, and rational because of the universe in which they exist.'
I am not sure if you've read the book. But even though you've not used terms like feedback loops, etc. I think what you are saying is not much different from what the book says.
> The whole point of the word purpose - its purpose if you will - is to be able to talk about the difference between what a system does and what it ought to do. To say the purpose of a thing is what it does, is to render the word completely redundant.
as it takes normal every day systems that we think we can depend on (banks, the army, phones) and sarcastically highlights some of the worst things those systems do vs what we're told they do. The chorus is that slogan.
dan-bailey 2 days ago [-]
Chiang's stuff is fantastic. I'd love to live in a timeline where he writes novels instead of just short stories, but I'll take what I can get. (Big fan of Arrival, too -- even hit the GitHub repo of all the glyphs and got one tattooed.)
freggeln 2 days ago [-]
Can you please point me towards the repo? Quick search didn't yield any results on my end. Thanks.
aanet 2 days ago [-]
If you loved Thinking In Systems: A Primer, you may want to read Business Dynamics by John Sterman [1], one of the proponents and pioneers (after Jay Forrester) of systems dynamics. It's a textbook, but even so it is readable and engaging.
Systems thinking changes the way people think about solutions, often for the better (but not always). There's a tendency to think: "uh... it's the system, nothing's gonna change unless we change the _system_ per se". And that's correct. But individual actions also change systemic outputs. So. Case in point: climate change and all that...
[fun fact, I took a class with Sterman at MIT. He's fantastic, very engaging!]
To me, Systems Thinking material always reads as if written by philosophers who wish they were engineers.
ashout33 2 days ago [-]
Can you tell me more about reading to your wife? Is she listening intently, or like falling asleep? or is she doing something and listening in the background? (knitting / on her phone)
steve_adams_86 9 hours ago [-]
A bit of intent listening and a bit of passing out, depending on the mood and day. I have reread many pages due to her passing out without me noticing.
I also read to my youngest perhaps 5 days per week, and used to read to his two older brothers for many years. I’m realizing I spend a lot of time reading to people. They definitely fall asleep quite often.
patcon 2 days ago [-]
Not the OP, but my partner and his wife have done this for years.
I was inspired, and I did a variation of it with a partner at one point. It was really nice. Feels kinda like a synthetic version of an engaging conversation with someone you care about, but perhaps with words you can't muster yourselves at that time of the day. If you've chosen the book together, it's guaranteed to be the right thing between you. It's nice to feel like you're hearing or learning something interesting from the person you care about, even when one of you perhaps don't have the conversation or the story in you. (I have a high appetite for connecting over ideas, but sometimes people I care about can run out of capacity before me, so it feels like a hack for my relationships.)
I imagine swapping reader-listener roles is another variation.
cloudhead 2 days ago [-]
Did you start the silo book? Loved the show as well.
steve_adams_86 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
adamcharnock 3 days ago [-]
Two of Vernor Vinge's books in particular (science fiction): A Fire Upon The Deep, and A Deepness In The Sky.
They have a special place in my heart. Vinge didn't write much, but what he did write I think is very special indeed.
I've also taken to buying hardbacks of my favourite books from ebay.
Great series! Give Children of Time a go next if you haven’t already.
emaro 2 days ago [-]
I second that. The 3 body problem is also great!
arethuza 2 days ago [-]
I sometimes wonder if we are living through something that looks a bit like the prologue of A Fire Upon the Deep...
xoxxala 3 days ago [-]
I just finished my umpteenth reread of AFUtD. It’s one of those books I can pull off the shelf every few years and enjoy from beginning to end.
The Cradle series by Will Wight, starting with Unsouled. Kind of hard to describe, but it’s an sci-fi/Asian fantasy martial arts cultivation epic. If you liked Dungeon Crawler Carl, it may be of interest.
askvictor 3 days ago [-]
If you haven't read about his (technical) system for writing, do so. Very geeky. He described it (including notes) in my ebook copy of Fire Upon The Deep
Metacelsus 2 days ago [-]
Oooh those are really good! (I'd say more but I don't want to spoil anything)
mattoxic 3 days ago [-]
They have a special place in my heart.
I recently described finishing Fire Upon the Deep as saying goodbye to a very dear friend. A great book.
pelican0 3 days ago [-]
Don't miss out on his "The blabber", a novella in that universe with an adorable character.
kstrauser 3 days ago [-]
Just finished: "Lonesome Dove", by Larry McMurtry. From the name, I'd somehow assumed it was a romance novel. No, it's absolutely not. If it were released today, I think I'd describe it as "horsepunk": instead of cyberpunk's high tech low-lifes, it's basically horseback low-lifes. That's not entirely fair because there's a lot of moral strength in some of the characters, but they're all living on the brutal edges of a society where any random event might bring death, or worse.
Now reading: "null: $cat /dev/null_", by Dienw Neb[0]. I don't know what it's about yet. I heard about it in an ad in the back of "2600 Magazine" and it caught my attention. Initial impressions are that 1) Neb is really good at dialog, and 2) their recreations of IRC chats is so perfect that I know they had to've spend many hours online in the middle of the night. Basically, the author knows how to write things I want to read. I do so hope they stick the landing and that the story turns out as wonderful as the writing.
Good lord, I nearly died at “horsepunk.” It’s a western, yo. I agree that it’s a great read.
kstrauser 2 days ago [-]
Well, sure! But most westerns don’t give you that much insight into each person’s motivations and inner lives. And others tend to be more optimistic, with a common theme that truth and justice are destined to win out. Lonesome Dove’s freaking grim. The world seems out to get them, but it’s worse: the world just doesn’t care.
People who haven’t read it: Lonesome Dove won a Pulitzer for a reason. It’s very good.
ablation 2 days ago [-]
I'm not sure I'd call it grim, per se. Blood Meridian takes that label for me, almost at the exclusion of all else in what could loosely be called the "western" genre. Lonesome Dove is more just very... gritty. And packs a serious emotional heft. Great book either way.
shoobiedoo 2 days ago [-]
Gonna grab myself a copy. I love neo western films, so this sounds right up my alley.
gainda 2 days ago [-]
i read it last year. its a bit slow in the beginning but by the halfway point i was reading it voraciously. I think I finished the final third in one sitting. Followed it up with the sequel and now on the first in the series.
rudolftheone 2 days ago [-]
"Lonesome Dove" was the most surprising book in years for me - I do not like westerns, and that book is a western - but guess what: I loved it!
One of the best books and simply the best imho in its genre.
nephihaha 2 days ago [-]
There are several westerns I can think of which are classic novels by any standard. I got my book group to read "True Grit" by Charles Portis. ("Masters of Atlantis" by the same author is another underrated work, and sends up secret societies.) There was some resistance to it based on its genre, since the group had not read a western before, but it has a strong female lead character, and some of the members were very impressed by it.
Roald Dahl: "True Grit is the best novel to come my way for a very long time. What book has given me greater pleasure in the last five years? Or in the last twenty? What a writer."
Donna Tartt: "I cannot think of another novel—any novel—which is so delightful to so many disparate age groups and literary tastes [as True Grit]."
The more recent film is more faithful to the novel than the 60s/70s one.
"Butcher's Crossing" is another one that springs to mind.
maherbeg 2 days ago [-]
You might like Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy then! Easily one of my favorite series (first 2 books are better than the last one IMO)
creature_x 3 days ago [-]
Oh I've got some recs for you if you want meaty! I've been reading classics this year. It started with East of Eden; if you've got a philosophical leaning and appreciate your characters deeply fleshed out, you owe it to yourself to read this book.
The next one was Lonesome Dove, this was my first time reading a western and I didn't think I'd enjoy it as much as I did. The book is also absolutely hilarious and has one of my favorite characters in a book(shoutout to Gus).
I'm currently reading The Count of Monte Cresto and, boy, it's turning out to be quite the epic tale of revenge(no spoilers please!).
UncleOxidant 3 days ago [-]
I started the year reading Demons by Dostoevsky. Seemed prophetic in a lot of ways about what was coming about 40 years later in 1917.
At the beginning of the summer I read All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. I'm not into westerns, but I really liked that one. A modern classic.
Just finished The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry. Such a gorgeously written book.
raddan 3 days ago [-]
I don’t know if this is considered a classic, but I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed Daphne Du Maurier’s “Rebecca”. I think I might have read it in a single sitting.
I was lead to Rebecca after I found and read a discarded copy of Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History”. I wanted more and Googled “books like
Rebecca”. Sadly, I thought Tartt’s “The Goldfinch”, which lots of people raved about, was not very good.
aanet 2 days ago [-]
Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again...
I first read _Rebecca_ as a teen, years ago. Still recall the thrill of the book. Few writers wrote so engagingly as Du Maurier. Hitchcock's movie was fine, but the book is the real deal.
bookofjoe 2 days ago [-]
Diff'rent strokes. In the depths of a 1.75-year-long major depressive episode in 2015-2016, one of the VERY few books that completely made me forget my misery while I read it was "The Goldfinch." The others: Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey–Maturin series.
hodgesrm 2 days ago [-]
> I'm currently reading The Count of Monte Cresto and, boy, it's turning out to be quite the epic tale of revenge(no spoilers please!).
Once you get done, try The Three Musketeers. It's both romantic (like Monte Christo) and also really funny, not dark at all. Dumas was an amazing writer, backed by August Maquet, who wrote the first drafts on both novels.
bumbledraven 3 days ago [-]
I tried multiple English translations of The Count of Monte Cristo, and the Robin Buss translation was the only one I enjoyed. (Unfortunately, there is no audiobook of this translation, but I had Codex create one for me.
If you're unconvinced, try comparing a few random passages to see which one you prefer, or just check the beginning of Chapter 1. You could also show a few translations of a passage to an LLM and ask it which one best conveys the nuance of the original French.
thisoneisreal 3 days ago [-]
This was eerie to read, you just named my 3 favorite works of fiction in the reverse order that I read them. All brilliant books.
creature_x 3 days ago [-]
We must be kindred spirits! Any recs for me ?
thisoneisreal 3 days ago [-]
Apparently! I'm mostly a non-fiction reader but a few fictions I really like:
- The Friends of Eddie Coyle
- A River Runs Through It
- Stoner
- The Tartar Steppe
- Siddhartha
And a very cliche recommendation but will still make it, the first 3 Game of Thrones books. I also like the Dark Tower series.
criddell 2 days ago [-]
I'm halfway through Stoner right now and think about it quite a bit when I'm not reading it. I really don't know what to think about William Stoner (or Edith!).
OnACoffeeBreak 3 hours ago [-]
I am halfway through my second read of Stoner, and I still don't know what to think of William Stoner, and I think that's deliberate to portray a complex human that can be in the world in contradictory ways. That's all I will say out of fear of spoiling anything.
This sentence from the first page is what piqued my interest in the book: "Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers." I thought, "Why write about him then? There must be something here.". I was not disappointing. :)
andsoitis 3 days ago [-]
> Siddhartha
I also loved The Glass Bead Game, and Steppenwolf
Triphibian 2 days ago [-]
Narcissus and Goldmund has a similar shape to Siddhartha -- covering similar ground with two protagonists instead of one. Also great.
nephihaha 2 days ago [-]
I love a lot of Hesse's work but the Glass Bead Game was unreadable.
andrew_lettuce 2 days ago [-]
The stories in A river runs through it - and the movie - move at a slower pace than modern life, but then sometimes hit at just the right place when that's exactly what I need.
bpshaver 3 days ago [-]
Kindred spirits or these are just about the top 3 most often recommended books on Reddit and similar platforms. Nothing wrong with that.
simpaticoder 3 days ago [-]
Also read Lonesome Dove this year, also my first Western. I'd watched the amazing miniseries I thought it was great. I'm honestly not sure the book has much over the miniseries which is a rare statement.
If you liked Lonesome Dove and attempted to read the prequel and sequels I strongly recommend against it.
creature_x 3 days ago [-]
Dern! I was really looking forward to reading the prequels, in no small part because how much I love Gus's character.
gainda 2 days ago [-]
I'm partway through Dead Man's Walk and it's held up well so far. Streets of Laredo was tough at first but by the end I found it enjoyable overall. Still, I'm not sure how much of it was McMurtry being willfully antagonistic to readers with the decisions he made for the plot based on how well received Lonesome Dove was.
simpaticoder 2 days ago [-]
Dead Man's Walk was the best of the rest...but it even it was flawed, with all the brutality of Lonesome Dove without the beautiful interstitial moments.
donkeyboy 2 days ago [-]
One of the prequels (Comanche Moon) is actually quite good and featurs more Gus and Caul banter
teekert 2 days ago [-]
John Steinbeck's East of Eden is from 1952, and on Archive.org [0], I assume that is the one? It's not on Gutenberg (as a nice epub), but there is another one from Isa Glenn [1]. Since Netflix has a miniseries based on Steinbeck's novel I'm going to assume it's that one :)
The Count of Monte Cristo was my introduction to classics. I remember being intimidated yet excited by it's length. It's a great adventure, a page turner, and has interesting characters and sub-plots. I had the honor of visiting Dumas' tomb in the Pantheon this summer. Notably, his tomb was raised above the others who shared his room, including Victor Hugo.
sotix 3 days ago [-]
I'm also reading The Count of Monte Cresto. It's taken me forever! I made the mistake of reading the public domain version, which uses Victorian English. Switching to the Penguins classic version has been a lot easier for me to read. But I'm also listening to the Victorian audiobook while I work out narrated by Bill Homewood, and it's fantastic!
I'm going to need a nice, short book after this one.
emmelaich 3 days ago [-]
... how did you both misspell the title? It's the Count of Monte Cristo .. unless this is a different language.
4ggr0 2 days ago [-]
actually, it's "Le Comte de Monte-Cristo" ;D
sotix 2 days ago [-]
A simple copy and paste haha
KerryJones 3 days ago [-]
I am also reading the Count of Monte Cristo -- I suggest reading up on its origin, it's fairly interesting.
fyskij 3 days ago [-]
Read The Count of Monte Cristo for the first time this year too. Kinda obsessed with it for a month
Everything that could ever be said about America is in East of Eden.
NorthSouthNorth 2 days ago [-]
I've read The Count Of Monte Cristo thrice. Best book ever. It's one of the few books that made me really feel like I was there with the protagonist.
genghisjahn 3 days ago [-]
I like a good thick book but I could not finish Monte Cristo. After about the 40th character introduction I just had to put it down. The problem is me, not the book.
kreyenborgi 2 days ago [-]
Hm, I could not put it down. Was sneaking in reading while waiting for gcc to finish or bank web site to load.
Now I want to read it again.
JKCalhoun 3 days ago [-]
Do the audiobook then. That’s how I read it.
mcv 2 days ago [-]
There was a great TV show on BBC recently. Not as detailed as the book perhaps, but really drove the point home very effectively.
JKCalhoun 2 days ago [-]
Oh, yeah, the BBC/PBS (?) series was well done. Took a little license with the story, but, as you say, "drove the point home very effectively".
iamagurgle 3 days ago [-]
Wow, Instarted the year reading that as well. Truly a good read, although after finishing it I was craving some more family friendly stuff
tstrimple 2 days ago [-]
The Count of Monte Cristo is probably the worst "popular" classic I've ever read. It was trash. So repetitive. It's clearly a product of its time and not a proper "novel". It's a series of newspaper serials aggregated into a book where Dumas was paid by the word. And he used as many words as he could to say as little as possible. One of the rare examples of where many video adaptations are better than the original written version. My favorite part of the movies was him learning to be the Count and that part is basically non-existent in the books. It just skips over to him being a master of everything.
mindcrime 3 days ago [-]
Fiction:
I'm on Book Two of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series.
Non-Fiction:
More than I can count, as far as "I've read at least some, put a bookmark in it, and intend to finish it eventually." But in terms of the books I'm really actively engaging with right now, the top one is:
Neuroscience: Exploring The Brain[1] by Mark F. Bear, Barry W. Connors, and Michael A. Paradiso
And sort of in parallel with that, is
Analog Computing: Development, Programming, Applications, and Future Directions[2] by Bernd Ulmann
I just started book 6 of Dungeon Crawler Carl. You are in for a treat.
Trufa 3 days ago [-]
I really enjoyed them as audiobooks.
There was a particular "Prepotente" moment that made laugh so loud i was honestly embarrassed of the sound I made in the caffe, I'm really not easily embarrassed.
shawn_w 3 days ago [-]
Should have screamed instead of laughing.
rocketpastsix 2 days ago [-]
Im bummed they are Audible exclusives since I deleted my entire Amazon account this year. But I've heard really good things about the audiobooks
These are amazing but they've only done the first three books so far. Once they release them all it will be a good reason to revisit the series!
tstrimple 2 days ago [-]
Jeff Hayes is probably the best narrator I've experienced in audiobooks. Technically there are spoilers in this reading, but it's so isolated nothing will really make sense but still give you a feeling for his voices.
I've also been enjoying Dungeon Crawler Carl like many here. To scratch my neuroscience itch, I recently read:
Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience by Michael S. A. Graziano (https://link.amazon/B0fbKBxEU)
The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science by Erik Hoel (https://link.amazon/B05TPjEY6)
Greatly enjoyed both. Made me think about the thinking-machines future and our ever-increasing understanding of the human brain.
mindcrime 23 hours ago [-]
Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience by Michael S. A. Graziano (https://link.amazon/B0fbKBxEU)
The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science by Erik Hoel (https://link.amazon/B05TPjEY6)
Awesome. I had Rethinking Consciousness on my list as well, but haven't gotten to it yet. I'll check out The World Behind the World as well. That sounds right up my alley. :-)
godshatter 3 days ago [-]
I'm on Book Seven of DCC. Very fun. Looking forward to reading Book Eight.
JKCalhoun 3 days ago [-]
Ha ha, you might enjoy my analog computer kit [1].
I think of it as an analog computer primer.
In fact, I sent one to Dr. Bernd Ulmann. He enjoyed it. :-)
Wow, super cool. I wish I had the time to dig into one of these. If I do, I will buy one in a heartbeat. Thanks for making this!
mindcrime 2 days ago [-]
Very cool. I'll probably pick up one up. Thanks for the heads-up!
kinow 3 days ago [-]
I'm reading Matt's latest movie from Dungeon Crawler Carl series. A great fun way to unwind after programming all day! Will check the two other books you mentioned, thanks!
dpkirchner 3 days ago [-]
I hope they never try to make a movie -- I don't think it'd be possible to make one that doesn't, say, force a romantic Carl/Katia subplot and doesn't look like garbage.
Ah well. I'm going to try to not let this ruin my evening.
gwbas1c 2 days ago [-]
The seventh floor of Dungeon Crawler Carl is my favorite so far. It's a very fast read.
jesuslop 3 days ago [-]
What drove you to an analog computing book, may I ask?
mindcrime 3 days ago [-]
I have a longstanding general interest in what might be term "unconventional computing architectures" (or at least "non mainstream computing architectures"). And, frankly, a general interest in "unconventional" things all around.
In regards to analog computers, it's that, plus an awareness of the constraints of the Von Neumann Bottleneck[1] and a vague notion that analog computing might (keyword, might) offer some potential to avoid that, and/or avoid the insane power consumption of modern digital computers (relative to a given workload).
And that in turn ties back to the Neuroscience book, as I'm reading that mainly because of my interest in neuromorphic computing[2]. And neuromorphic computing and analog computing, while separate topics, seem like they may have some interesting touch-points.
Nice. I too have an interest in "unconventional computing" (analog/quantum/biological etc.) since i think that we are reaching the limits of conventional Von Neumann architectures and discrete mathematics in terms of efficiency, power consumption etc. Nature is analog and continuous with efficient energy consumption and while we have come very far by imposing discrete and boolean algebra on it, it is inherently only an approximation. Note also that at the quantum level nature is both continuous and discrete i.e. wave/particle duality and we again have a need to model continuous wave-like characteristics.
A few books that i am currently looking at which you might also find useful;
1) Principles of Neurobiology by Liqun Luo - Uses an integrated approach to neuroscience.
2) Handbook Of Unconventional Computing in 2-vols (Vol1-Theory, Vol2- Implementations) - A comprehensive resource.
mindcrime 2 days ago [-]
1) Principles of Neurobiology by Liqun Luo - Uses an integrated approach to neuroscience.
Just ordered a copy, thanks for the pointer. In the meantime, I have a copy of Neurobiology by Professor Gordon M Shepherd, to work through.
2) Handbook Of Unconventional Computing in 2-vols (Vol1-Theory, Vol2- Implementations) - A comprehensive resource.
Yeah, I have those in an Amazon list waiting to be purchased "sometime soon". :-) Unfortunately, copies are currently going for around $448.00 USD. :-(
rramadass 1 days ago [-]
I was recommended Liqun Luo's book by user periheli0n here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28743804 But since it is somewhat advanced, i pair it with beginner-friendly Neurobiology: A Functional Approach by Georg Striedter for better understanding. I also find reading pop-sci books on Neuroscience/Brain a good supplement since these give a nice top-level overview (and thus stimulate motivation) before diving into the details in a textbook. Two i have found useful are The Accidental Mind by David Linden and Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter.
You can get pdfs of the Handbook of Unconventional Computing if you ask Google and/or Anna ;-)
> You can get pdfs of the Handbook of Unconventional Computing if you ask Google and/or Anna ;-)
Agreed. In fact, I may have them downloaded already somewhere in my massive pile of <strike>pirate</strike> cough grey-market cough e-books. :-) But honestly, sometimes I still prefer reading off of paper. It's easier on the eyes in my experience.
> Neurobiology: A Functional Approach by Georg Striedter for better understanding. I also find reading pop-sci books on Neuroscience/Brain a good supplement since these give a nice top-level overview (and thus stimulate motivation) before diving into the details in a textbook. Two i have found useful are The Accidental Mind by David Linden and Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter.
Cool, I will look into those. I have a whole pile of similar pop-sci stuff to churn through already, but the more the merrier!
> One more book that i hope to get my hands-on is Peter Kogge's The Zen of Exotic Computing
Ooooohhh.. Now that sounds interesting. Thanks for the tip!
qiqitori 2 days ago [-]
Analog computing, one thing I'm glad I learned a little about! Also made part of the tennis for two game, and occasionally think about adding features. (Course, knowledge of digital electronics keeps interfering. In fact I used two 74-series logic chips in there.) Here's my build log, with everything that makes me cringe after a few years left in tact: https://blog.qiqitori.com/2024/08/implementing-tennis-for-tw...
jesuslop 2 days ago [-]
Nice, we have some fat problems ahead in this Moore law dying world that need new ideas.
wise_blood 2 days ago [-]
20 years ago I read a The Guardian article about the "top geek novels". I immediately read a bunch of those.
Recently I managed to find the list again, and it's been endless pleasure:
- American Gods -- Neil Gaiman
- Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley
- The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett
- Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks
- Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson
- Cloud Atlas -- David Mitchell
- The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson
- The Dispossessed -- Ursula K Le Guin
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick
- Dune -- Frank Herbert
- Foundation -- Isaac Asimov
- Giles Goat-Boy -- John Barth
- Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon
- The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams
- I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov
- The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
- The Left Hand of Darkness -- Ursula K Le Guin
- The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick
- Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland
- Neuromancer -- William Gibson
- Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell
- Orlando -- Virgina Woolf
- The Shockwave Rider -- John Brunner
- Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson
- Stand on Zanzibar -- John Brunner
- Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein
- Trouble with lichen - John Wyndham
- UBIK -- Philip Dick
- Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
- Woman on the Edge of Time -- Marge Piercy
(I am creatively interpreting "The Colour of Magic" as "all Discworld", "Dune" as "the six Dune books", etc.)
ericol 2 days ago [-]
> Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks
I started The Culture series a while ago. I read both "The Player of Games" (amazing book), and "Use of Weapons". Also amazing, with a Memento-like storytelling that was also incredible. I did enjoy both books a lot for different reasons, I can't vouch for any over the other really.
I then moved to "Consider Phlebas" and honestly, got bored to death. So my recommendation is to go for these two as well.
I recently (This month, bought a recent "deluxe edition" of sorts [1]) re read Neuromancer, and then jumped to "Count Zero" but at some point got bored mid way with Gibson's endless descriptions of non things.
I agree! I read "Consider Phlebas" first and was turned off the series until I was recommended "The Player of Games" - much more compelling in my opinion.
ericol 2 days ago [-]
Both Player of Games and Use of Weapons are incredible good books.
I was actually surprised when I finished UoW regarding how different it was from PoG, while maintaining the quality (If not better, but PoG IS THAT GOOD anyway).
For the record, the series was recommended to be by Claude of all things, and it told me that Phlebas was not up to quality but I gave it a shot just for the sake of completeness of the series. Nop, not worth it.
artifix 2 days ago [-]
Wow; didn't know about this list but I've read quite a few of those on it. For sci-fi, Robert Heinlein and Ursula Le Guin are my absolute favorite authors. I've read all I could find of both authors. They have seen me through many train rides commuting to clients.
kvgr 2 days ago [-]
Read: American Gods, Consider Phlebas, Neuromancer, The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Dune 1, Nineteen Eighty-Four listened to Foundation and I definitely recommend all.
But for me Consider Phlebas is the best. Currently on 4th book in series, but cant get through it.
Nineteen Eighty-Four doesnt feel geek novel, just political. Also great.
I keep reading outputs from LLMs all day and don't have energy to focus on Eng written books in the evening.
andrew_lettuce 2 days ago [-]
1984 and brave New world make a good duo read, presenting distopyian futures from very different causes. Until about 2016 it looked like Huxley was right, but Orwell has had a surge in the past 10 years!
kvgr 1 days ago [-]
I have Brave New world by my bed. But last year i cannot pick up any book for more than 2-3 pages...
fragmede 2 days ago [-]
The advancements in cameras behind the screen technology is amazing!
ZeroGravitas 2 days ago [-]
I would also recommend all of discworld but thought I'd throw in the standard warning that it really warms up after the first few books.
There are various online guides as to the best place to jump in if you start at the very beginning and wonder what all the fuss is about.
heckelson 2 days ago [-]
I've heard a recommendation that Guards, Guards! is one of the easiest books to enter the Discworld universe, although I haven't had the chance to read it yet.
globular-toast 2 days ago [-]
Thanks, I've added them to my list. I've only read 9 of these!
Rendello 3 days ago [-]
Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer [1].
I don't tend to be great at finishing (or starting) books, and this is a big one. I've also never had any interest in Medieval or Renaissance history, for me it's been a black hole between the fall of Rome and the modern age.
But recently I saw some Youtube videos of Ada, and her enthusiasm is totally infectious [2]. She's fun and paints these vivid pictures of Florence and renaissance Europe that are incredible, absurd, and relatable, which makes sense since given she's also an accomplished sci-fi writer. She also reminds me of one of my favourite high school teachers. So I ordered the book right away.
The book is in the same tone as her videos, so it won't be for everyone, but I've really been enjoying it and now I'm fascinated by Renaissance Italy, Machiavelli, merchant republics, etc.
I'm currently reading her Terra Ignota series and it's great, so I was already planning to tackle this one next.
Rendello 3 days ago [-]
I'm considering checking it out despite not really being a science-fiction reader. Though I've been reading this terrifying slow-burn about superintelligent autonomous swarms breaking containment and stopping at nothing to complete the impossible tasks given by their feckless masters.
flpm 2 days ago [-]
She is amazing, thanks for sharing
Rendello 2 days ago [-]
No problem, I've been talking about her work to everyone I know in real life.
On Youtube, you'll probably come across a lot of her podcast appearances like Dwarkesh Patel's (which is how I first came across her), but she also just started her own podcast 3 weeks ago that might not pop up in the results yet [1]. The latest episode [2] where she's talking about the church bells of Florence, which still ring today, was so cool to listen to. The way their schedule carried (and carries) the rhythm of life, the blood of tradition, and when something wasn't right in the city, the call-to-action (defence or riot, for example). So neat, it made me want to live there for a few years (something she did during her studies, in a tower that the medieval Florentines had ripped the upper levels off so noblemen couldn't garrison it and burn the city around them).
I am not, looking it up it seems to be a Boston rationalist meetup, if that's the what you're referring to. I'm not in the US or even very rational!
pw4001 2 hours ago [-]
Just finished Annie Jacobsen's "Nuclear War" book last week. Well put together, the timeline is interesting as is the idea that North Korea would use 1MT weapons, and that Russian missile detection is so poor that they can't tell the difference between something overflying them to detonate elsewhere and something aimed at them. I hope that's an incorrect US evaluation.
About to start her Biological War.
rdoherty 3 days ago [-]
I love reading, here's a few meatier books I've read recently:
* Seeing Like a State - great overview of how states (and corporations) lose visibility into reality due to the abstraction levels they operate at
* Normal Accidents - all about how things like nuclear reactors, ships and large systems naturally have accidents
* Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty - great easy read about how high reliability organizations manage complexity and dangerous, high tempo situations.
siddboots 3 days ago [-]
I'm also reading Seeing Like a State, and finding it fascinating. A lot of Scott's theory seems to apply equally well to any large organisation, like a corporation. I think it is fundamentally about how in any unwieldy system, the people in charge tend want to have some sort of comprehensible map of that system to make decisions, and they also want more effective apparatuses of power in order to steer the system, and the fundamental complexity of reality has to be smoothed over to achieve those things.
For example, business intelligence systems provide ways to impose consistent measures on an organisation, which makes the org more legible to executive decision makers, but that consistency also tends to erode local team autonomy and undermine specialist knowledge. This type of tension shows up everywhere once you start noticing it.
Very facinating book.
biophysboy 2 days ago [-]
I enjoyed the book too, but as I read it, I felt more and more like he could have just as easily found examples where making a system simpler and more legible led to massive improvements.
trismus 2 days ago [-]
It helps me when thinking about how to present information to a decision maker - what level of abstraction does this perspective actually care about? Why? Both in programming and in life.
bookofjoe 2 days ago [-]
"Normal Accidents" is a profound, mind-bending book. I lectured on it during Anesthesiology Grand Rounds [University of Virginia School of Medicine], using it as an armature with which to view the making of disasters in the OR.
wepple 3 days ago [-]
Seeing like a state is my next book to read. Weirdly, I cannot recall the chain of interests that led me to it.
waldothedog 3 days ago [-]
P sure mine was Dawn of Everything + Why Nations Fail
__m 2 days ago [-]
I loved normal accidents. Probably even got the recommendation from hn
pchristensen 3 days ago [-]
I’m also reading Seeing Like a State!
cl42 3 days ago [-]
[dead]
jppope 3 days ago [-]
"Collapse" - A friend gave me the book in a bag he was going to donate. its been great. Theres obviously a huge undertone of preachy "humans struggle with sustainable resource utilization" but the views into failed societies are just fascinating. Really enjoying it, though I've slowed down and might not finish.
"7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy" - Recommended by @pc in an interview. I'm ~50 pages in and not really blown away. Its a nice accumulation of Alpha creating strategy... but I think its really missing some nuance. I do LOVE that they take an economist approach and actually provide the math/algorithms behind the concepts. Theres some good stuff in here but so far it feels like 30 pages stretched out to make a book.
"Monetizing Innovation" - dropped this book, do not recommend. I was expecting a really nice accumulation of how pricing should work with companies who are innovating... and it came no where near that hopeful concept. The case studies were weak, the hypothesis were weak, the writing was weak.
cinntaile 2 days ago [-]
Business and self-help books are always 90% fluff and 10% content, not much to do about that.
andrew_lettuce 2 days ago [-]
Full agree - and I've adopted a similar reading strategy. Full read of first and last chapters, skim the rest and should be done in no more than an hour. If there's a systems diagram or algorithm you want to dig into, make a note and maybe do that later.
Most of these books should be blog posts; ironically (?) the ones that were blog posts extended into full books tend to be the better ones!
jppope 2 days ago [-]
Good observation. Off the top of my head all the 37 signals stuff (which started as blogs) were great when they became books. Morgan Housel too.
indraneelpatil 2 days ago [-]
I have been reading "Design of Everyday things" By Don Norman. A friend recommended it to me because I have been trying to learn more about Design thinking and also just get in a habit of not taking things / products around me for granted as they are but noticing the tiny design decisions that someone made, understanding them, questioning them etc..
melvinroest 2 days ago [-]
Yea that's a good book. I haven't fully read it but even reading a little of it or checking out the Norman Door on YouTube [1] is awesome.
I'm jumping across several short story collections:
- "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang
- "Ficciones" by Borges
- "I have no Mouth and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison.
I'm also slowly plowing through "The Big Book of Science Fiction" edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer.
I love short speculative fiction. And the above are among my favorites.
dcminter 3 days ago [-]
I generally prefer novels despite having originally got into SF via collections of Asimov stories, but I read the "Stories of your life" collection recently and it was quite stunning. I think "Tower of Babylon" was my favourite but they were all excellent in different ways.
I should get Exhalation.
nomagicbullet 2 days ago [-]
"Tower of Babylon" is an excellent story.
jppope 3 days ago [-]
"Exhalation" was very good. Not every story was great, but as a whole is was lovely
nomagicbullet 2 days ago [-]
Agree with that assessment
Joe_Boogz 3 days ago [-]
Ted Chiang is such an amazing scifi author. I find his work incredibly refreshing and thought-provoking. Personal favorite is the short story Exhalation, I think about it all the time and I highly recommend it.
simpaticoder 3 days ago [-]
Isn't it called Stories of your life and other stories? Ted Chiang is my favorite living science fiction author. Everything I've read by him ranges from very good to sublime.
shawn_w 3 days ago [-]
That's a different, older collection.
upupupandaway 3 days ago [-]
Are you me??????
I read these exact three in the past six weeks. For a follow-up, I recommend "Earthlings" and "The Memory Police".
alastairr 2 days ago [-]
I'm in a similar boat :D I love Borges and Chiang has some great short stories. I'd love hear if you know other authors that are similar?
nomagicbullet 1 days ago [-]
I would say Italo Calvino scratches a very similar itch like Borges and Chiang.
nomagicbullet 2 days ago [-]
Wow! Nice coincidence. I've read "The Memory Police". I will add "Earthlings" to my queue. Thanks for the recommendation
bichiliad 2 days ago [-]
I opened this thread to post about Dungeon Crawler Carl. I just finished the fantastic Three Body Problem series, and reading something so pulpy in contrast feels like cheating, but it’s making me happy and that’s what I’m looking for anyways.
Some other bits I’ve read recently that I’ve loved:
- Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie” is a beautiful short story by the Three Body Problem’s translator
- Cryptonomicon feels like a great balance between heady reading (it goes into WWII-era crypto thinking) and pulpy humor. I loved reading it.
- “Stoner” by John Williams (not the Stoner you think, and also not the John Williams you think) is kinda in a different direction, but it’s a really well paced and beautifully written book about a farmer’s son who falls in love with literature. It’s one of those books that’s hard to sell in a sentence, but is effortless to read and makes you think a lot in a non-engineering-brained way.
Blackstrat 2 days ago [-]
I finished Stoner about 6 weeks ago. It was excellent and if you let it, it would make you think. Haven't tried Williams' Augustus yet but it's on the list soon.
vharuck 2 days ago [-]
Some of my friends are going to start a book club specifically for Dungeon Crawler Carl. I'm really looking forward to it.
thijson 2 days ago [-]
Also liked Dungeon Crawler Carl.
tstrimple 2 days ago [-]
Dungeon Crawler Carl is stupid in the best of ways. It doesn't take itself seriously until it does and those parts work as well as all the zany shit.
havblue 2 days ago [-]
After reading some of the manga Vagabond, I decided to go straight to the source material and read Yoshikawa's Musashi, a historical fiction account of Miyamoto Musashi at the start of the Edo period. Despite it having roots as a serialized novel with a few pages released every day in a Japanese newspaper almost a century ago, the book feels very modern. It's surprising to see how many ideas like recurring comical villains, kidnapping plots, younger boy hero prototypes and love triangles were already established. The spiritual quest of Musashi and his evolving understanding of warfare is probably the most rewarding part of it though. It's worth reading.
daoboy 2 days ago [-]
I just finished this and had the same thoughts. As an anime fan since Akira and Ninja Scroll days, it was easy for that entire book to play out in my head as an anime. I had no idea so many of the tropes could be traced back to that book.
havblue 1 days ago [-]
The funny thing about Musashi was for years I thought the cultural relevance was based on historical texts... But really it was thanks to Yoshikawa and the many subsequent adaptations that the swordman is relevant in pop culture.
It's the same thing with Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which has a ton of video games and shows based off of it. People in Japan weren't reading Guanzhong in Chinese, they were reading Yoshikawa's adaptation. Oddly, the Japanese Sangokushi hasn't been localized until now, and it's currently being released on Kindle. So if we wait just a little more we should be able to read it in print.
exposition 3 days ago [-]
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.
About halfway through- it’s really good so far. He makes a compelling case for how our culture has changed in many ways, often for the worse, with the introduction of television.
bawis 13 hours ago [-]
Do yourself a favour and read Informing Ourselves to Death.
pjmorris 3 days ago [-]
Last year I read 'Amusing Ourselves' and 'Technopoly'. A very interesting thinker.
sotix 3 days ago [-]
It's a great read and fun to pair with 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451.
ankkalinna 2 days ago [-]
I've been re-reading 1Q84 by Murakami. It left a very light and magical impression on me in high school, but I couldn't remember much at all of it anymore so decided to pick it up again and dust it off.
I'm also trying to transition into software development and have been watching John Ousterhout's talks and just yesterday started reading "A Philosophy of Software Design" - enjoying it so far.
cainxinth 2 days ago [-]
I just started 1Q84. I’m only on chapter 7. It was recommended to me by a friend who is a big reader, and the last book this person recommended was Parable of the Sower, which absolutely floored me, so I’ll read anything they suggest. That said, 1Q84 is a very different book. I definitely feel an ominous tension growing, but the pacing is very measured and unhurried. I haven’t decided if I’m liking the book or not yet.
plaidfuji 2 days ago [-]
Murakami has a very different style than Butler… unlike western novels there is less focus on plot and pace, but as you’re noticing there tends to be an ever-present mood that builds throughout. I couldn’t tell you a single plot point from 1Q84, but I remember the feeling of reading it very clearly.
I liked The Windup Bird Chronicle slightly more, and it’s an easier read than 1Q84 to get into him. He also does short stories that are phenomenal.
ankkalinna 2 days ago [-]
Added Parable of the Sower to a long and ever-growing list!
__rito__ 2 days ago [-]
I also started Murakami with 1Q84.
Also make sure to read Sputnik Sweetheart and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki.
Hard Boiled Wonderland is such an underrated Murakami novel. I recommend it to Murakami lovers.
Also, does that friend have a list of favourites?
domtoretto 2 days ago [-]
I finally read my first Stephen King book: "11/22/63". I could not put it down. The mix of historical details and the time travel concept kept me reading until the end. Another first this year for me was "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. Took me some time to get used to his writing style but after that I could not stop reading.
This year I also read "The Brothers Karamazov" after having read "Crime and Punishment", "The Idiot" and "Demons" in previous years. It was not an easy read but it stays with you for a long time (or maybe even forever).
Also did some re-reading this year:
"A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles
"Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius
serbuvlad 2 days ago [-]
"The Brothers Karamazov" is my favorite book of all time, and I always find it quite an easy and enjoyable read. Though this may be a culture thing, as I am Romanian and the cultures are closer to each other.
The thing I love most about Dostoievski is how real everything feels.
A lot of fiction nowadays is based on: how the character portrays himself/how he thinks about himself/who he really is.
And a lot of resolution is about finding out who he really is, or about other characters finding that out and accepting that (usually immediately). Followed by emotional chatharsis and resolution.
In Dostoievski it feels like a lot of the character are chasing that idea and simply finding out it's not true. They will give long speeches about who they really are, expectijg emotional chatharsis, only for none to come. And they react by feeling resentful towards their confidants, or towards themselves. Or shameful. And then they also react to their reaction.
There is no gold character core waiting to be resolved, and a reveleation is usually just a very awkward monologue.
domtoretto 1 days ago [-]
I think the hard bit for me was more the length and some parts where I found it a bit less interesting. I read it in German.
100% agree with your points. That's what brings me back to his books always. Since my first book of his (Crime and Punishment) I keep mentioning this to friends also. Spoiled many other books for me...
r-bryan 3 days ago [-]
My wife and I have been reading aloud to each other for years. We worked through Anthony Doerr, Dumas, Eco. Eight or so of Louise Penny's Gamache books. Currently on book 5 of Mick Herron's Slow Horses. Since I'm learning French, I'm on my third Jules Verne (in French). Just to prove to myself that I'm not over the hill - I was born in the first half of the previous century.
enobrev 2 days ago [-]
I just got to book 4 of the Slow Horses series. I've seen (and loved) the series and that would generally dissuade me from read them until I'd completely forgotten the show - but they're still a quick and fun read and I really enjoy having Gary Oldman's voice in my head while reading Jackson Lamb's insults.
r-bryan 14 hours ago [-]
We couldn't agree more!
nwhnwh 2 days ago [-]
Wow, some couples do that? You just gave me criteria for choosing my wife.
latortuga 3 days ago [-]
I stick mostly to fiction these days. Best books I've read this year:
- The Women by Kristin Hannah
- Jurassic Park by Micheal Crichton
- Platform Decay by Martha Wells
- The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
- Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the End of the World by Eric Jay Dolin
- All the Sinners Bleed by S A Cosby
- Project Hail Mary and Artemis by Andy Weir
- Cibola Burn and Nemesis Games by James S A Corey (the Expanse series)
vermilingua 3 days ago [-]
If you enjoy The Expanse, definitely pick up The Mercy of Gods, also by James S A Corey. It, and the recent sequel (The Faith of Beasts) are some of the best sci-fi I've read in a long time.
patrickdavey 3 days ago [-]
Thanks for that. Dune used to be my favourite sci-fi, but, The Expanse maybe trumps that now. I'll definitely check these out once I finish The Long Earth :)
__rito__ 2 days ago [-]
I read Jurassic Park last month. Will recommend as well.
It is a deep and profound book. Proper SciFi.
Much emphasis on philosophy, ideas. It is so far from the public opinion about the movie: a monster attack and survival movie.
sphars 3 days ago [-]
All the Sinners Bleed was a great novel, I've enjoyed all of Crosby's books. Subject matter is tough (especially this one), but a good thriller nonetheless.
stephen_cagle 2 days ago [-]
Children of Strife (Children of Time #4)
This may be my favorite "Children of Time" book yet (and I really liked the first and second book).
I'd say the biggest reason I enjoy science fiction is being exposed to new ideas. In book one of this series, I enjoyed imagining how a hunter spider species would evolve when imbued with a "brainiac-empathy" gene. In book two, I loved the idea of a central (Id) mind with a 8 distributed actuators (ego).
This one introduces the notion of a punchy, aggressive, status driven mantis shrimp.
I really enjoyed thinking about what it would mean to be an evolved mantis shrimp. Human beings have technically carried around deadly weapons since we developed tools. But a mantis shrimp is an organism that has two deadly weapon everywhere it goes. Imagine how much different human society/evolution/whatever would have been if we were constantly holdings blunderbuss' at each others heads at all times? Where being in range literally meant that either party (whoever fires first) can immediately and almost certainly kill the other. I suppose we have had potentially deadly weapons since we realized we could brain with rocks, but this is a risky (and messy) way to do things compared to the instant death that a mantis shrimp represents. What would that do to trust, to boundaries, to aggression and bluffing?
It is just such a fun humorous world, where 4 (5 with lowercase humans) species are learning to coexist despite their very different ways of looking at the world.
Sounds very interesting! I used to wonder what would the world look like if more species on earth had evolved like humans. Imagine Humans, Giraffes, and Ants competing in medicine and science. More wars? Less of them?
BeetleB 3 days ago [-]
Just got done reading The Wager - historical nonfiction - same author as Killers of the Flower Moon.
It's quite good - not as good as Killers of the Flower Moon. I won't spoil anything you won't learn from the first few pages. The Wager was a British naval ship in the early 1700s that was lost to inclement weather. All were presumed dead. Some time later a boat arrives in England with a small number of survivors. Then a while later, another boat arrives with some more survivors. They each accuse the other of terrible acts.
The book tells the story of what happened after the ship went down.
It's a good read.
mjcarden 2 days ago [-]
It is a good read. I 'borrowed' it from the Internet Archive and read it. The reconstruction of what happened from the various different and conflicting sources is interesting, as is the 21st Century expedition to seek the wreck.
jcubic 3 days ago [-]
Finally started reading "A Philosophy of Software Design". It was on my shelf for ages. I have the 1st edition; luckily, you can grab new chapters from the 2nd edition from the author's website.
p4ul 3 days ago [-]
This is an excellent book! We give a copy to everyone that joins our team.
3 days ago [-]
largePanda9 3 days ago [-]
Reading this now as well! Also was on the bookshelf for over a year, glad I finally cracked it open
jerkstate 3 days ago [-]
Just finished a David Foster Wallace kick. I listened to the new 30th anniversary audiobook of Infinite Jest (twice) and then The Pale King (twice). Then I listened to "Of course you end up becoming yourself" which is a long-form interview with Wallace by David Lipsky, traveling with him on the Infinite Jest book tour.
I had to listen to the books twice because there are a lot of details that you won't get the first time through unless you're extremely intentional and detail oriented, but I found it was worth it to listen again. I'll probably listen to Infinite Jest again sometime soon, even though it's 64 hours long. IJ is actually really great sci-fi with some important questions for our time.
simpaticoder 3 days ago [-]
I attempted infinite jest and really tried to like it but I hated it. The prose is extremely smart, interesting and insightful and wildly connective. But the overall tone is so oppressively nihilistic I decided life's too short and put it down.
nephihaha 3 days ago [-]
I have had about a hundred pages to go for three years now. I should knuckle down and finish it. It wasn't for me either. A shame because I have enjoyed some of Wallace's other writings.
jerkstate 3 days ago [-]
the last scene is absolutely bonkers, if that helps you get through it
wombat-man 3 days ago [-]
Yeah, I wouldn't say it's bad... but it's not for me. did not finish.
jerkstate 3 days ago [-]
it's not for everybody, but there were some specific things going on in my life when I started it that deeply connected to the subject matter for me
ex-aws-dude 1 days ago [-]
I finished it and thought it was overall good but I don’t know if I would say it’s good “bang for buck” in terms of what you get for the time commitment
jerkstate 1 days ago [-]
There are definitely long books I've read where I didn't feel like I got enough out of them for it to have been worth it, like I read (listened to) Gravity's Rainbow right after and a lot of the characters and plot lines just annoyed or disgusted me, but I'm sure that book means a lot to a lot of people. In the interview "Of course you end up becoming yourself," the author talks a lot about how in avant-garde literature you have to make the payoff good enough to reward the reader for doing the work, and that equation is going to be different for everybody.
cobolexpert 2 days ago [-]
Also reading IJ! Got to 50% this week, but it took me about 10 months. I’m a slow reader I think. However, I’m taking notes as I read to help me track how the different characters are connected.
haroldp 3 days ago [-]
I have become a huge fan of AudioBooks lately, but how in the /hell/ do you listen to Infinite Jest?? With the end notes? With end notes of end notes? With whole chapters hidden in an end note? It was challenging enough on paper. That would do my nut in.
jerkstate 3 days ago [-]
The end notes are interspersed throughout the book where they're referenced, and then a bell rings before returning to the main text. That's why I listened to it twice. I remember towards the end of the first listen-through, I sort-of recalled some of the earlier end-notes, like for example Himself's filmography, which I had basically ignored the first time through, but listened to intently the second time through.
stevenwoo 3 days ago [-]
The audiobook version I listened to had different narrators for main text and footnote with audio cue when footnote started as well.
pjmorris 3 days ago [-]
'Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States', Alex Wellerstein.
> "Over the course of this book, we have looked at some eighty years of this history. We have seen how the idea of nuclear secrecy was initially born out of a very specific fear—that the world’s worst nation could achieve nation-destroying power—that, over the course of many transformations, morphed into something more generalized. More than totalitarian regimes were the target of this secrecy: allied nations, private industry, democratic institutions, and “the public” more broadly became understood as targets as well, for reasons both justifiable and not. The secrecy problem moved wherever the problem of the bomb went, which was far indeed. The desirability of control over nuclear knowledge became totalizing because the threat of loss of control was tied to the almost unimaginable power of the bomb itself. These two forces—the desire for control, the fear of its loss—became locked in a vicious cycle, each driving the other."
motoboi 3 days ago [-]
that would probably be a great companion to 'Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety'.
pjmorris 3 days ago [-]
I agree so strongly that I moved it from my 'to buy' list to bought.
Also of note is Wellerstein's more recent 'The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age – The Anti-Nuclear President, the Bomb Decision, and Cold War History', which I read earlier this year and thought it was excellent.
A clipping from its closing pages:
> “What is the measure of a civilized man?” The proper answer, Lilienthal suggested, was to consider the sense that a “civilized man” was one who believed they had a responsibility to others. The invention of nuclear weapons had clearly magnified the problem: “One sees that the mark of a civilized man must be some quality that will help the world from destroying itself. He is most civilized who has those qualities and talents of leadership, by example and precept and character and ideas, that will help civilization to survive.”
To extend the reading list, I was completely floored by 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', Richard Rhodes, but that was 20 years ago. I need to re-read it, and add 'Dark Sun' and 'American Prometheus' to round out that part of my picture of the military-industrial complex.
alcover 3 days ago [-]
> The Making of the Atomic Bomb
I read it this summer. I learned a lot but got lost remembering who is who..
Could you recommend titles about discovery of radio-activity and after ? I'm fascinated by this subject.
If those titles were also a gentle introduction to the physics involved, I'd be delighted.
pjmorris 3 days ago [-]
> Could you recommend titles about discovery of radio-activity and after ? I'm fascinated by this subjec
I'm less than an amateur here, my recommendation would've been the first ~300 pages of Rhodes. Maybe re-reading that part for events and ideas rather than names would help, but hopefully someone more skilled can answer.
electroweak 3 days ago [-]
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Recently passed the bit where Ammianus complained the rich had bought up much of the property in Rome and turned so many into renters and gave stats to show it. Amongst his many other complaints.
Sadly found I could have been reading a better abridgement, which I'll get for the 2nd reading now.
akkartik 3 days ago [-]
Tell me more about the abridgements. Which one now, which one next?
electroweak 3 days ago [-]
I'm reading Dero Saunders penguin classic which I picked up from a used book store. It's fine, but I'm at the point where the last 6 books of the original should kick in and Saunders treats it as an epilogue. I didn't even realize there were multiple abridgements when I started, and reviews of the others seem to include more about that and retain more of that special "Gibbonness" that's been so much delightful effort to parse. It's been a slow and halting first read I'm looking forward to a more uninterrupted story the second run through. I'll probably go for the Wormesly one and try to spot the differences. You only really start to know a great book after the second reading anyway.
fasterik 3 days ago [-]
George Orwell's essays. I love his simple, matter-of-fact prose style and I'm trying to absorb as much of it as possible to improve my own writing. Many of them are available online if you don't want a full book. "Politics and the English Language" is a must-read.
I've been re-reading "Politics and the English Language" about once a month lately. There are so many parallels between what he saw in his era's bad modern writing and AI-assisted writing:
> As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit ... If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious ... By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself ... A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.
But his "6 rules" are brilliant too. I'll look into his other essays.
marcusverus 2 days ago [-]
"Killing an Elephant" is great.
marcusverus 2 days ago [-]
I second your recommendation of 'Politics and the English Language', it is absolutely essential reading. His prose is phenomenal. C.S. Lewis is another whose prose is a pleasure to read, with 'The Screwtape Letters' being his best IMO.
1potato 3 days ago [-]
I just finished Ra by qntm. It's available free on his website.
I'm guessing that many people here are familiar with this work already since HN was where I found out about qntm in the first place. If you haven't read Ra, though, I greatly enjoyed it and would strongly recommend it.
Joe_Boogz 3 days ago [-]
I just finished “There is no antimemetics devision”, qntm has my respect it was an incredible book.
specproc 3 days ago [-]
I've just started on There is no antimemetics division, and I'm underwhelmed. It risks not being read properly.
Have been on some good stuff recently: Whitt by Iain M. Banks was nice, lighter than a lot of his other stuff, and genuinely funny at times.
Best book this year was The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Couldn't put it down.
gnarlouse 3 days ago [-]
I enjoyed the book, but I "read" it on Audible which was possibly not the ideal experience. It was kind of fun though, they had static crackling for all the redacted bits.
1potato 3 days ago [-]
That one is on my list to read very soon!
einhard 2 days ago [-]
I am working through Paradise Lost right now for something to read studiously.
For reading before bed, I recently finished "The Mountain In the Sea" by Ray Nayler. I found it very good, with primary themes centered around the nature of consciousness, robots, AI, and corporatism. Highly recommended.
PaulRobinson 2 days ago [-]
There's a lovely and eccentric quiz show on the BBC called Only Connect. Last year the host as part of her bit to fill time tried to fill it with reading excerpts from Paradise Lost. It was funny, and the in-joke I think was to remind us all of what Samuel Johnson once said of it:
> "Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is."
"working through it" does indeed seem like the right phrasing from what little I've been exposed to. Good luck!
dhosek 2 days ago [-]
I’ve kept a log of every¹ book I’ve read for the last 31+ years at https://don.dream-in-color.net/books/ The most recent was Careless People. Currently reading Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel and The Stories (so far) of Deborah Eisenberg.
thestu 1 days ago [-]
You get through a lot of books! do you speed read? have a strategy for skipping some parts of the book? just have a lot of time to dedicate to reading?
dhosek 20 hours ago [-]
I read at a rate of 1–3 minutes per page, depending on the material. But here’s the thing: if you make time to read a bit every day, it adds up. Read 30 pages before bed every night, that’s almost 11,000 pages per year. When I commuted, I would read for about 60–90 minutes a day just riding back and forth on public transit. I’d guess my daily pace is maybe in the neighborhood of 30–100 pages a day depending on what I’m reading and what else is happening in life.
dhosek 2 days ago [-]
Just realized I never added the footnote which would have been:
1. Except most of the books I read out loud to my kids when they were younger.
wetwater 2 days ago [-]
This is such a good website. I love it.
pizzafeelsright 2 days ago [-]
Amazing. You have read many books. What about the best book? The Bible?
olingern 2 days ago [-]
What a sentence to read here.
Blackstrat 2 days ago [-]
I don't mind long novels. I finished Lonesome Dove earlier this year and it's extremely good. The Count of Monte Cristo was last year and I didn't particularly care for it. In fact, I thought it was one of the most overrated books I've read. My question is about Neal Stephenson. He gets a lot of recommendations here. Some years ago, I read Snow Crash and it was obviously pretty dated by then. My real question is what is the best entry point into Stephenson's longer fiction and any secrets to reading it. That is, he tends to digress a bit. Any recommendations?
__rito__ 2 days ago [-]
f you just want correct future predictions at a past point, then you are reading Stephenson wrong.
What if it's dated? Anything wrong with that?
You don't like the mythology of a culture being blended into a great story with futuristic tech?
I just loved that.
I see Stephenson as an unapologetic celebration of nerdy, intelligent stuff. It it definitely not the only way.
I have read Quicksilver. The way the novel portrays that time, and my Science heroes, is just fantastic. I don't care at all that it's dated.
My first book from him was Cryptonomicon. I care about History, Math, Computers, and that book blended all that in a coherent setup with proper environmental creation.
I also like the writing style. It's so clean and friendly.
pmg101 3 days ago [-]
Middlemarch, finally!
I'm 50% of the way through and it's good but I don't entirely see the hype. Brontë is more atmospheric, Austen funnier and more incisive, Dickens more immersive. But I've still got a way to go.
computerdork 3 days ago [-]
Middlemarch is so amazing. And for me at least, really like George Eliot's writing, maybe even more than Austen. I heard it said that George Eliot is the one author that writes for adults, think this is true. As much as I enjoy Austen, Eliot's world and characters are more real and true to life. The characters are more balanced, almost all with strengths and weaknesses, and in many cases, these weaknesses either leading to their downfall, or something they mightly struggle to overcome.
Also, Eliot's language is incredible. On one hand, it's a lot more difficult to read than Austen, but on the other, it's so descriptive while still often being laced with a sense of beauty. Really wonderful prose.
gtg239a 3 days ago [-]
I really loved this book, but it took me two tries over a few years to finally finish it. It's like a too-big slice of the world's greatest cake.
The character arcs of Lydgate and Causabon are some of the best depictions of the collision of personal ambition with social obligation I've ever read. As someone with their own ambitions, I'm a bit haunted by that part of the story.
It's also occasionally funny. The uncle is pretty funny and a good demonstration of someone who's mind is curious and too unshaped to ever utter a coherent thought.
It's less focused than a Bronte novel but I love its wider lens.
computerdork 3 days ago [-]
Agree with your take on it, the struggles of the characters are so true to life. The world feels entirely real, while still having a sense of beauty. She's an amazing writer
imperialdrive 3 days ago [-]
Something about it though, feels good to meet folks that have read it.
david927 3 days ago [-]
You can't entirely judge a George Sand novel partway through. For my money, it destroys any Brontë, Austen, or Dickens.
bpshaver 3 days ago [-]
Eliot*
david927 2 days ago [-]
Thank you
jeremyscanvic 3 days ago [-]
I'm reading singer song-writer Lily Allen's 2019 autobiography My Thoughts Exactly. I really liked her last album West End Girl (2025) and I wanted to know more about her and her creative process and inspirations. She tells about lots of different things having happened in her life, her relationship with her parents, how she grew up like. Really enjoyable read so far!
akkad33 19 hours ago [-]
Wow I didn't expect to see this here. It seems in the book she's very open but it seems to have an alienating effect on readers rather than making them sympathetic for her honesty
mysterydip 3 days ago [-]
I just finished Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and it had so many “aha” moments for me. Definitely recommended if you have even a passing interest in reading or making graphic novels or comics.
dam_jackalopes 3 days ago [-]
So, so good. Changed the way I read comics and I've been a lifelong fan of the medium.
equinumerous 3 days ago [-]
Data-Oriented Programming in Java by Chris Kiehl. So far it's one of the best books I've read about taming complexity in software, ensuring integrity of state, and writing correct software. It's applicable to languages other than Java, though Java is a good fit for the text given its object-orientation.
goostavos 3 days ago [-]
Whoa! What the -- that's me! This made my night. Glad you're enjoying it!
andersonpico 2 days ago [-]
nicest interaction ITT
gadders 2 days ago [-]
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
This is a bit of a departure - I normally read action thrillers where a retired navy SEAL foils a plot to bring down the US Government.
Also listening to the audiobook autobiography of Anthony Hopkins which I recommend.
__rito__ 2 days ago [-]
Really amazing book. So different from all other books, yet so great.
quuxplusone 3 days ago [-]
You Gotta Have Wa, by Robert Whiting (1989), about baseball in Japan in the 1980s.
Just started Homer's Iliad (Fagles translation) and Christopher Logue's War Music (2015).
Just finished re-reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams (1980). I think it holds up well. Last time I read it, I was much younger than Arthur Dent; now I'm much older. And now that we have computers with Genuine People Personalities, it's hard to remember what it was like in the Before Times.
Recently finished Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908). For better or worse (no spoilers here), it kept me guessing.
dcminter 3 days ago [-]
Chat GPT and Claude's infuriatingly obsequious ways make GPP seem distressingly prophetic.
The electric monk in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency makes me a bit twitchy these days too.
ogou 1 days ago [-]
The Wisdom of Insecurity, by Alan Watts. It's a counterintuitive exploration of letting go of things being definite and fixed. It's a Buddhist lens applied in pre-60s life.
The Ancillary Justice series. Which I think is the best sci-fi I’ve encountered in years and can’t believe it sat on my radar for so long before I jumped in.
frm88 2 days ago [-]
It's brilliant and it touches on so many topics worth thinking about; I'm still of two minds re. the ancilliaries, slaves or avatars?
If you like scifi that touches on ethical questions, Iain Banks Culture series is very good in that regard, particularly Player of Games and Use of Weapons. I buddy-reread the last one with an internet friend this year and via our discussions got so much more out of it.
SwellJoe 2 days ago [-]
Agatha Christie, for some reason. My mom and I used to watch Mrs. Marple and Poirot on public television so there's perhaps nostalgia involved, but, she was a great writer. A lot of her work is now in the public domain and there are Standard Ebook versions of them, making them an easy pick if you like mysteries or are willing to give mysteries a try:
For the near future, I've got some of Emily St. John Mandel's books loaded up (I liked the Station Eleven series a lot), as well as Peter Heller's The River.
KaiserPro 2 days ago [-]
I approve, she is on my list of authors to mine.
I have had a lot of fun with jeeves and wooster
I also really enjoyed raymond chandlers marlow series. Fast, easy to read, dense mystery.
Then there is rivers of london series, which is so wonderfuly visual of my london. Fun, not guessable and rich 3d characters.
criddell 2 days ago [-]
On a thread like this a long time ago, somebody recommended The Dog Stars to me and I read it and then a year later re-read it (it's one of three books I've ever read a second time).
For some reason I never read anything else by Heller until this year. Over the summer I read Burn, Celine, and The Orchard. All excellent. I think Heller is my favorite active writer and it surprises me because all of his books (that I've read) have a strong outdoorsman-type vibe and that's not me at all.
Of the four books, The Orchard really hooked me. I wish it was twice as long.
I just added Station Eleven to my to-read list yesterday. I read the first chapter online and it starts out great.
SwellJoe 2 days ago [-]
Yeah, The Dog Stars is a favorite. I'm afraid to see the film, as the reviews aren't great and the previews make it look like a quite different story from the book.
opesorry 3 days ago [-]
I always have two books going, one ebook and one audible. Currently on a fantasy kick.
The Years of Apocalypse by UraniumPhoenix:
Timeloop fantasy that starts out in a magic university. It's quite a fun read and I'm enjoying how different the MC approaches the timeloop from how I expect I would. She seems quite empathetic which adds an excellent emotional element to the story that I'm enjoying.
Worth the Candle: Through Adversity by Alexander Wales:
I'm a big fan of Alexander Wales. He has an intelligent way of writing plots and characters that I enjoy. This is a meta narrative LitRPG(?) fantasy book. The basic premise is that the MC is sent to a world that has elements of his previous DnD creations. I'm not much of a tabletop RPG person but excited to see where Wales takes this series.
bookofjoe 2 days ago [-]
Variation on your theme: I always have two books going, one fiction and one non-fiction.
opesorry 2 days ago [-]
I do love when things align for me to do the same, but I struggle to enjoy non-fiction so it's uncommon. Narrative non-fiction is particularly enjoyable when I can find it, especially tech, survival, and true crime.
Tech related narrative non-fiction is the pinnacle of reading for me. My top three are Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll, American King by Nick Bolton, and Countdown to Zero Day by Kim Zetter. OSU Cyber security canon is excellent for finding these but I've read almost everything they list.
If you have any non-fiction suggestions, I'm definitely interested to hear them.
bookofjoe 2 days ago [-]
Here are 3 non-fiction suggestions:
1. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Robert Pirsig. I read it in 1974 when I was in medical school.
2. The Power of Positive Thinking — Norman Vincent Peale. I read it when I was 14 years old in 1962 and it profoundly changed my life for the better. I wasn't "born again" nor did I become religious, rather it abruptly and completely changed for the better how I interacted with others.
3. Alive — Piers Paul Read. Published in 1974.
acheron 16 hours ago [-]
I just read Replay by Ken Grimwood. Couldn’t put it down and finished in a day. It’s a “character re-lives his life in a time loop” story, which subsequently has been done in many different ways, but this is an early example (was published in 1986 or 87, so e.g. it predates Groundhog Day by several years).
Anyway it was an emotional read. I’m surprised I had never encountered the book before, since “alternate choices affecting how your life turns out” is a concept I’ve always been into. But on the other hand this one would not have been nearly as powerful to me earlier in my life. Me being the same age (or close enough) to the main character at the start is what does it, of course.
So, recommended, especially if you’re in your early-mid 40s.
lkramer 2 days ago [-]
I had begun the 7th Expanse book, Persepolis Rising, but got distracted by a copy of Joseph Conrad's Victory I found lying around, so I'm half way through that.
I recently finished Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive.
The Expanse have been great, but I think I will be good and ready to say good bye when I'm done with the mainline novels.
I don't really read long form non-fiction, which is probably a character flaw, but for me reading is a form of escapism. I love Sci-Fi very much (both classical and modern) and I try to mix and match so I read about equal amounts sci-fi and non-sci-fi.
LaffertyDev 2 days ago [-]
> The Expanse have been great, but I think I will be good and ready to say good bye when I'm done with the mainline novels.
The novellas are fantastic and more bite sized. They published the anthology for the expanse ones that I read after book 9. Even if you're burned out on the main series, I feel like I'd still recommend the novellas.
elric 2 days ago [-]
Fiction: Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. I love it. Been reading the series out of order for some reason.
Non-fiction: Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Michael Sipser. It's fun. It looks at things like pushdown automata, Turing machines, decidability, ... Not reading it too rigorously, but more exploratively.
trumbitta2 8 hours ago [-]
Just finished Undo Redo by Scalini and Maponi, and I started Separazioni by Simone Amorino.
Both in Italian, both masterpieces of contemporary sci-fi.
Separazioni might need another pass of editing, but it's strikingly good nonetheless.
femto 3 days ago [-]
Deep Learning With Python, Third Edition by Francois Chollet and Matthew Watson
Recently read books by Anthony Doerr (Shell Collector, About Grace, Memory Wall, All the Light We Cannot See) and Simon Singh (Code Book, Fermat's Last Theorem, Trick or Treatment, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets).
arrowleaf 3 days ago [-]
I'm reading Sagas of the Icelanders as prep for a trip there, but I can feel it pulling me down into a rabbithole of older Scandinavian medieval writing. I've already got an order placed for a saga that's not in this book, along with the Poetic Edda and Havamal to learn more about Norse mythology.
SeaGully 2 days ago [-]
Starting The Trees as that is the first book in the Jeselnik Book Club after it goes out as a podcast. Loved James, so I'm sure I'll at least like it.
Otherwise started on a saga of going straight through The Expanse series. Haven't done a big series straight through since a >1 year re-read of Wheel of Time so I'm excited for that.
Agentlien 2 days ago [-]
I've been reading the books by Hannu Rajaniemi. Finished The Quantum Thief a while ago and now reading The Fractal Prince.
It's some of the best sci-fi I've read. Very interesting depiction of technology and I love how the different types of tech and societal structures are not explained, just showcased and talked about like it's obvious until you get it. It reminds me of Philip K. Dick but with a lot more scientifically grounded yet far out technology.
marshray 2 days ago [-]
I found it quite good, but super complex.
Apparently there are typographic markers which were completely lost in the audiobook version. It made very little sense to me until about halfway through.
ingvay7 3 days ago [-]
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - its about a russian soldier's life in a soviet labor camp and his fight for survival. Great read.
dv35z 2 days ago [-]
Great book! Makes you appreciate some life basics - like a scrap of bread, and a good coat!
egeoguz 2 days ago [-]
Just finished rereading Paul Graham's Hacker's and Painters. It's short essays, easy to pick and put down, I've learned or solidified some of my knowledge tremendously i think. i really suggest.
I was very happy to find this. I heard complaints that it's just a Tolkien clone and Jordan doesn't portray women well. But what I found was kind of a relic. It's an excellent fantasy series that probably couldn't be written again. Wish we had more like it.
sanswork 3 days ago [-]
I really enjoyed the books but there is a lot of issues around pacing. One of the books(7 maybe? it's been a while) was pretty much several hundred pages of them just walking. Had the same experience recently with book 3 of Otherland.
zem 3 days ago [-]
the pacing and consistency are atrocious, unfortunately. I loved the first six books, hated the seventh, and straight up abandoned the series halfway through book 8. tempted to do a full read through now that Sanderson has completed the series in a way that people seem happy with but it's a lot when I know I'm going to run into at least those two bad books in the middle and possibly more after that.
bkcooper 3 days ago [-]
I did this a while back, having read probably all of the Jordan ones from 5 on pretty much when they came out. On the one hand, relative to their size you can read through them pretty fast. But the Sanderson books are pretty meh and not really worth doing a reread of the whole series for. Books 2-4 remain the high point, I would say
RunSet 3 days ago [-]
> I heard complaints that it's just a Tolkien clone
What a flattering complaint. Reminds me of this:
"Terry Brooks has often been disparaged for imitating Tolkien, particularly by those reviewers who find his books inferior to Tolkien's own. I can say only that I wish there were more imitators -- we need them -- and that all imitations of so great an original must necessarily be inferior. "
Yes, this is exactly how I feel. 1) The parallels arent that strong and 2) the parallels are good.
It doens't feel like a Tolkien clone. There are definitely parallels you can draw but they start very broad and become even less defining as the books progress. A hero's journey, humble beginnings, a powerful magic user, clear good vs evil. And the world is very different than middle earth.
mcmcmc 3 days ago [-]
It’s a classic, but this is absolutely true
> Jordan doesn't portray women well.
tugs braid
randusername 2 days ago [-]
Can you elaborate?
There's a lot of awkward folded her arms beneath her breasts for sure but I never understood this criticism. Some female characters were trope-y, but so were many of the male characters.
I went in hearing about controversy online and guess I ended feeling like I'm miscalibrated from fantasy that is so much worse.
nonethewiser 2 days ago [-]
shrugs
delichon 3 days ago [-]
If you don't like to be sad, at least wait to forget most of it before watching the Prime Video series.
nonethewiser 2 days ago [-]
A great IP that they completely fucked up. Proof that the industry is really struggling. There is no doubt the story and universe are good. All on Amazon.
aditya_rs 3 days ago [-]
The series is also cancelled, so no point wasting time watching it either.
ferguess_k 3 days ago [-]
This is my 13th round to recommend "The Soul of a new Machine" as well as "Showstoppers".
Kon5ole 3 days ago [-]
I liked those as well (I assume you meant "Show-Stopper!" about windows NT) and also remember "Dreaming in code" as a good one in the same-ish genre.
jppope 3 days ago [-]
I read 3/4 of "The Soul of a new Machine" and thought it was good, but I sort of fizzled out. What makes you recommend it so highly (trying to understand if I should go back)
ferguess_k 2 days ago [-]
I'm very into the idea of "pinball" talked about in the book. I have always wanted to play pinball in my career but never got the chance -- that's why I read it over and over trying to live the experience.
If you are interested in DG history but not into this book, I can recommend a few other sources:
I couldn't remember which Shakespeare plays I had or hadn't read, so I've spent the summer going through them alphabetically. It's been a blast!
I knew many everyday expressions and phrases come from his work but I had no idea it was so many.
I'm currently about halfway through at 3.2k pages.
dcminter 3 days ago [-]
I vaguely remember the RSC doing a Christmas BBC Radio 4 skit years ago the gist of which was repeating "If you're <common phrase>, then you're quoting Shakespeare" for about 20 minutes straight.
aaronbrethorst 3 days ago [-]
I’ve been reading about bureaucracy, power, and civic engagement:
The Power Broker by Robert Caro.
Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka.
The Time Tax by Annie Lowrey.
gainda 2 days ago [-]
Did you come across the 99% invisible book club for The Power Broker? I tried keeping up but fell a bit behind by the end of the year and finished the following January. it's a great complement to the book. Caro is an incredible writer - I'm on the first LBJ book now. It was never a book I thought I could finish just from the intimidating size and seemingly dry nature but Caro's storytelling moves it along so well.
aaronbrethorst 2 days ago [-]
I do vaguely remember seeing the 99PI book club at some point, but I didn't follow it. I'll check it out, though. Thanks for the tip!
I'm really looking forward to working through the LBJ series. I think I'm going to get it on Kindle and Audible so I can work my way through it bit by bit whenever I have free time and attention.
asdfqwertzxcv 2 days ago [-]
The Power Broker is very good but his LBJ series is phenomenal. When I recommend it to people I say it's like The Odyssey of American History and Politics. It's the best non-fiction series I've ever read and I almost exclusively read NF.
akkartik 3 days ago [-]
Lots of scifi and fantasy.
The Works of Vermin. Exceptionally well written. Not an ounce of flab anywhere.
The Carryx series, 2 books so far. Best villains ever.
Tainted Cup and sequel. Sherlock Holmes meets Godzilla.
Goblin Emperor
The Prophet (Gibran)
Los Alamos (Kanon)
Hyperion (reread)
Finally, a shout out to the best book I read in 2025: Terra Ignota. Yes, the whole series.
aeve890 3 days ago [-]
>The Carryx series
Weird. There's a species called Carryx too in a series from James S.A. Corey called "The Captive's War".
akkartik 3 days ago [-]
That's the one I mean! Can never remember the names of the books/series, hence the gesture.
frm88 2 days ago [-]
Hiron Ennes is brilliant. Deep without fluff or lenghty exposition. If you liked The Works of Vermin - her other book, Leech is also brilliant. Another very good gothic fantasy novel is Tower of Mud and Straw by Yaroslav Barsukov.
ghostbrainalpha 3 days ago [-]
Starting Goblin Emperor based on your recommend.
clcaev 2 days ago [-]
Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons
Ostrom summarizes her empirical investigations of common pool resources (fisheries, forests, ground water, etc.) and how stakeholders can collectively govern them, a polycentric approach that is neither governmental nor proprietary. She abstracts 8 principles of governance, elements of successful community based resource governance.
Alvin Roth's Who Gets What — and Why: Matchmaking, Mismatch, and Market Design
Roth discusses market failures and how one builds market coordination organizations to perform matchmaking. He focuses on non-monetary markets such as paired kidney exchange, which he pioneered. Another example is medical residency matching.
shruubi 3 days ago [-]
In the last stretch of finishing off Malazan Book of the Fallen, currently about a third of the way through Dust of Dreams so hoping to have finished the series by the end of this year.
raleighm 2 days ago [-]
Well done! That's far into a long series. What do you think of it thus far?
glokta 3 days ago [-]
Dust of Dreams was the hardest book of the series for me.
4ggr0 2 days ago [-]
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo (Never read it until now, quite like it actually) EDIT: scrolled through the comments and saw a different person also reading this right now. I know that it's a popular book, still a bit fun that two HNers are reading a book from the 19th century at the same time. EDIT#2: okay, a bunch of people seem to be reading this right now, must be even more popular than i thought.
Neal Stevenson - Diamond Age
Rudy Rucker - Ware Tetralogy (old-school cyberpunk / high-scifi. i read Juicy Ghosts by Rucker last year and really dig his extravagant ideas. I had trouble understanding Juicy Ghosts at times, but the concepts that man is able to bundle together and flesh out, while creating an engaging page-turner is amazing. not much fluff.)
globular-toast 2 days ago [-]
I'm currently reading The Count of Monte Cristo too, mainly because it was recommended by many in a previous book recommendation thread on HN.
phtrivier 2 days ago [-]
Just out of curiousity : the recent movie adaptation had a huuuge success in France two years ago (deservedly so, in my opinion), did that cross the Atlantic ?
globular-toast 2 days ago [-]
No idea, but probably not because it didn't even make it across the Channel. Sadly, British/American audiences hate foreign language films generally. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, though, I'll watch it after I've finished reading.
djKianoosh 2 days ago [-]
there was a recent PBS tv series with Sam Claflin as Edmond Dantès and Jeremy Irons as the Abbé Faria but I don't recall a French movie. thanks for the tip!
I'm now reading Brothers Karamazov, because someone else on HN recommended it (well, that was the immediate catalyst, but I've been wanting to read a big Russian novel). There's a lot of jawing about the church which is a little boring, but I'm appreciating the way all the characters are bursting with life and feeling. And also that Dostoevsky never beats around the bush.
speakspokespok 2 days ago [-]
A canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller.
It gives very strong Fallout vibes. Having played the original games I think there is an influence.
Triphibian 2 days ago [-]
Re-read this recently and wholeheartedly agree. It is an ur-text for the Fallout wasteland for sure.
speakspokespok 2 days ago [-]
At the library and picked this book randomly from off the shelf. First stamp was 1986, an old hardcover copy with no dust cover. I'd never heard of the book.
But 30 pages in, when the monk finds the cave: "Mustering his modest command of pre-Deluge English, he whispered the words haltingly: FALLOUT SURVIVAL SHELTER"
faixon 2 days ago [-]
"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes is a particularly engaging read. Rhodes manages to record history as a character-driven story without sacrificing detailed elements of physical chemistry and - at times - philosophy. His treatment of Szilard and Bohr is outstanding.
I also recently finished "A Cage Went in Search of a Bird", which is an anthology of Kafka-esque short stories. I'd recommend it if only for reading "God's Doorbell" (which imagines swarm-behavior RSI building the Tower of Babel).
analog31 3 days ago [-]
Moby Dick. I'm further through then I've ever gotten before thanks to a long airplane ride.
TonyStr 2 days ago [-]
I've come to appreciate this book more after finishing it, as I'm able to process the themes without being subjected to the torture of actually reading it. Good luck!
cryptolobster 6 hours ago [-]
I'm about halfway through Slouching Towards Utopia by Brad DeLong
emptybits 2 days ago [-]
1. I love this question and not just on HN, but the answers are very high quality here. At a house party, at a baseball game, on a hike, whatever ... if anyone asks out loud to a group, "what are you reading?" I get ready to scribble down a new list!
2. Obvious (?) observation: Today's list consists of human-authored books. Will that trend hold? Can you imagine this question being asked in X years with predominantly AI-authored books as the answers? Novels or nonfiction. I get a thrill out of a good book, partly, because it lets me into the head of a lucid or genius or maniacal fellow human.
mosselman 2 days ago [-]
I am always afraid to share what I am actually reading right now because I am afraid that people spoil it for me. I am highly sensitive to spoilers, so even things like "I loved that it was so funny" or "The ending was great" or something just ruins the experience, at least somewhat.
So I'd usually share what I read before this.
mc3301 2 days ago [-]
agreed! Even the look on someone's face can spoil a book that I'm in the middle of reading. Of course, this depends on the book, but generally I don't talk about a book until I'm done with it.
sunjain 2 days ago [-]
Currently reading InCorruptible by Eric Ries. It is a fascinating read as to how most companies start with good intentions but end up so far away from their principles. It lays out in detail forces at play for last few decades that forces them in this direction. And how Costco, REI and Patagonia to name a few have resisted these forces. For my previous years reads : https://www.sunjain.com
isityettime 2 days ago [-]
I'm reading Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the latest edition of Eloquent Ruby, and Mastering Emacs.
I'm not sure any are that cognitively challenging, but all of them are certainly lovely.
marshray 2 days ago [-]
A Psalm for the Wild-Built is another cozy favorite from Chambers.
isityettime 2 days ago [-]
I'm going through a difficult time in my life, and I was surprised at how often The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet nonetheless made me smile. I just started on the sequel in the series, but I'll take your recommendation and start that Psalm concurrently. :)
phugoid 3 days ago [-]
Value(s): Building a Better World for All by Mark Carney, the current prime minister of Canada. He starts out with his perspective on the history of economics and money - it reads a bit like a textbook.
He has a knack for being critical and optimistic at the same time. Funny too!
jdfellow 3 days ago [-]
On Audible, revisiting a childhood favorite: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
On my Kindle I have two ham radio books I'm reading, one is about grounding antennas, the other a General test prep.
- Grounding and Bonding for the Radio Amateur
- Ham Radio General Class License Study Guide
ilvez 2 days ago [-]
I DNFed Lin Cixin "The Dark Forest" at 30% ... I really could not get past the shallow characters and boring writing style. Topic was really intriguing and I'm sad not able to grind through it to know what happens, but at the same time.. I was hoping that after same issues on book 1, I could get used to it, but it was just grind...
So I started to reread Brandon Sanderson "Wax and Wayne" series again and was immediately relieved how easy it is to read.
pkoird 2 days ago [-]
I really enjoyed the Dark Forest. I agree with you that the first part is SUCH A CHORE. But after the pace picks up, the payoff is amaxing!
ilvez 2 days ago [-]
That's what I got from other reviews as well. But since you poked, I'll pick it up again after I process through this trauma :D
mandolingual 2 days ago [-]
The Dark Forest continues a storied scifi tradition of conveying mind blowing ideas via wooden, chauvinistic characters.
andsoitis 3 days ago [-]
Why Greatness cannot be Planned.
The authors argue that rigid, goal-oriented planning and metric-driven objectives actively prevent true innovation and groundbreaking achievement.
tastyfreeze 3 days ago [-]
Dungeon Crawler Carl book 7. Started the series in January. Most books I've read in a year since I read the Expanse series.
Historical books that are great... Empire of the Summer Moon, Undaunted Courage, Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates
softwaredoug 3 days ago [-]
I’m reading The Well of Ascension, the second book of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy
I like how he has the slow, almost clinical way of revealing interesting worlds and systems. It’s not the kind of book that’ll make me cry, but I really like world building with fun enough characters
rileymichael 2 days ago [-]
the second book is a bit slow with all the politics, but it's worth it because book three is the best of the trilogy
i've been working my way through all of the cosmere (after starting with mistborn), currently on book 3 of stormlight archive. can't put em down
shhsshs 3 days ago [-]
> It’s not the kind of book that’ll make me cry
I thought so too, until I read the 2nd Mistborn trilogy!
hosel 3 days ago [-]
Wait until you hear a detailed explanation of the magic system for the 5th time. Still a good series.
leros 3 days ago [-]
I was just listening to a Sanderson interview. He's annoyed by it too. It's his publisher wanting the books to be easy to get into. He's dealing with it in Mistborn era 3 where's he's trying to figure out how to re-explain everything and it's annoying him because he just wants to show allomancers doing cool stuff.
nottorp 2 days ago [-]
He's blaming the publishers now? I only managed to go through like 2 or 3 Mistborns before I got absolutely bored about the "technical" explanations. I've never read a D&D manual but I think it would be as fun.
Now if anyone would invest in him continuing Elantris...
softwaredoug 3 days ago [-]
Well I often forget the rules, so its useful :)
sea6ear 3 days ago [-]
I guess I am reading Elric of Melnibone - although I can't say I'm really enjoying it, and looking forward to getting back to something like Earthsea that is more hopeful.
For programming I am reading HTML5 Games: Novice to Ninja, which I quite like so far. And JavaScript for Kids - both with the intent to entice my kids into game programming.
For work I am reading Learn dbatools in a Month of Lunches and outside of lingering questions about whether anything command line oriented matters in the age of AI, it has been really helpful in encapsulating solutions to things that are distinct problems in administering SQL Server.
raleighm 2 days ago [-]
On Elric and Earthsea: having read both, yeah I'm the same as you, I much prefer Earthsea. If you're open to another hopeful speculative fiction series of comparable quality as Earthsea (in my view), try Book of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe (whom Le Guin described as "our Melville"). It's great - quirky, intricate, inspiring.
lucb1e 3 days ago [-]
> I'm looking for something a little meaty to keep the brain working...
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks comes to mind. I had no idea how rampant purposeful discrimination was so recently for example, but the point of the book is the HeLa cells - and biology is also not my forté so loads of new information there as well. It was very interesting in expected and unexpected areas for me
- Daniel Suarez' Kill Decision has only gotten more relevant since its release in 2012. Not sure I'd call this meaty though, but his thrillers are always good (near-ish future tech) and the author iirc also said this particular one is meant as food for thought and not only entertainment
__rito__ 2 days ago [-]
I read multiple books together.
- My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok
Upbringing of a painter and the beginning of his journey in 1950s New York in a Hasidic Jewish family. Existentialism, art, passion.
- The Art of Doing Science and Engineerig, by Hamming
Surprisingly fresh and piercing, even today.
- Miracle of Love, Ram Dass
Stories about Neeb Karori Baba, as mentioned in Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs.
- The Name of The Rose, Umberto Ecori
Murder mystery in a famous library-monastery in medieval Europe. Amazing portrayal of that time.
I love these types of books and learned there's a term for them. A bildungsroman about an artist is called a künstlerroman. I went on a künstlerroman kick a while back. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Martin Eden. Roderick Hudson. I'm aware of My Name is Asher Lev and meant to get to that one too. Thanks for the reminder.
__rito__ 2 days ago [-]
Will highly recommend.
Extremely fluid writing, and you encounter a whole new world.
It is definitely good. You see the world from a very young person's eyes, but the nuances, complexities, etc. of adult life and wider worls still touches you unaltered. That's rare.
I will check out the ones that you mention.
Pick up the Penguin paperback (mine is from the "Modern Classics" series). It's cheap and great to read.
no_no_no_yes 2 days ago [-]
> - The Name of The Rose, Umberto Ecori
I think I've tried to read this twice, either this or Foucalt's Pendulum, either way I gave up early, Umberto Eco is difficult to read. Does it pick up and get easier?
__rito__ 2 days ago [-]
I think I get accustomed to new authors after reading some tens of pages.
I give every author that much.
By the way, the paperbacks have way too small font size, and now I am reading on Kindle.
(I also notice there is a bad typo in GP, but can't edit that now.
'Ecori', is of course, 'Eco'.)
forlorn 2 days ago [-]
The thing is you have to get used to the pace of the book resembling the pace of monastery life.
black_puppydog 3 days ago [-]
Iain M Banks' Culture series. It's hilarious (not really) how badly these books are mis-read by wannabe tech dictators.
argentinian 2 days ago [-]
First, thanks to all of you who share recommendations in this kind of topics. I found great books here.
I'm gonna recommend an author I never saw over here and that I found interesting.
Peter Kingsley. He's an academic who studied classical Greek philosophers and what he calls "the origins of western civilization" and he's also a mystic.
While reading him sometimes I think he may be mad, and at other times I think that his explanations make a lot of sense. His central idea (or what I got from him) is that at the origin of western civilization and its fundamentals there were mystics, not intellectuals. He includes among these mystics Parmenides and Empedocles. Then intellectuals gained popularity and took control of the discourse and diminished and ridiculed the real role of Parmenides and Empedocles and their teachings.
As a starting point, his shortest book "In the dark places of wisdom" is a very good introduction of his ideas and would allow a reader to know if he wants to read more or not. As a second book I think that "Reality" is a good choice.
Ozzie_osman 2 days ago [-]
Unfortunately unavailable on Kindle.
argentinian 2 days ago [-]
Yes. No idea why. I read most books on my ereader and believe it's the best way to read.
gorgoiler 3 days ago [-]
After my father died last year I’ve started going through his collection of popular-science paperbacks.
Done: QED, Richard Feynman. Lectures on explaining quantum electrodynamics but with no more math than geometry.
Currently: One Good Turn: A natural history of the screwdriver and the screw, Witold Rybczynski. The discourse goes into his references in depth. It has yielded an excellent list of museums to visit.
On deck: Impossibility: The limits science and the science of limits, John Barrow. A re-read for me. Barrow discusses what we can never know in a way that’s like P vs NP but for the physical world.*
mulr00ney 2 days ago [-]
Working through Craig Schaeffer's urban fantasy series, started with the Daniel Faust series and now at the point where it alternates with the Harmony Black releases. It's been cool so far; Faust is a con-man/actual magician and most of the books have a heist quality, whereas Black is an FBI witch, whose books so far have tended to be a bit more action-packed. It's interesting in terms of how one protagonist will do something and it affects characters in the other series -- I don't think you need to read both, but it's definitely adding a lot of extra texture.
I've also picked up his Revanche series which is apparently in the same greater universe though perhaps not literally the same world, involving a fantasy version of papal intrigue, I'm only two chapters into the first book. Apparently all the series do cross over at some point, so we'll see how well he sticks the landing.
dv35z 2 days ago [-]
I just read
(1) Roadside Picnic (the book which "Stalker" game is based from).
This was a page-turner! Fascinated by the science artifacts & effects (like gravitational glitches, frozen black sparks, etc)
(2) "Childhood's End" by Arthur C Clarke (who wrote 2001 Space Odyssey)
The sheer time scale of the story is impressive, and the technology is so interesting - especially for 1950s! There are some interesting time effects too (like an unborn child telepathically channeling information to a conversation in the past!)
branon 2 days ago [-]
I also finished Roadside Picnic recently and was enthralled, easily the best sci-fi I have read this year, I can see why it's spawned so many derivative works.
The Tarkovsky film wasn't bad either. I played a little bit of the game but increasingly I find immersion in video games difficult.
gb2d_hn 3 days ago [-]
Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life And Others. Just finished the short story behind Arrival, the way it frames free is something the film doesn't capture. Other stories in the book have been brilliant too.
BeetleB 3 days ago [-]
Great set of stories.
I hated Arrival. Years later when I read the original story, it was one of the most beautiful ones I've ever read. Particularly great if you've studied the calculus of variations.
upupupandaway 3 days ago [-]
Another great story from Ted Chiang is "Hell is the absence of God"
I've personally neglected national (Portuguese) authors for about a decade now, so I've started focusing on that; I'm currently reading "Livro do Desassossego" by Fernando Pessoa.
For the few months before that, I'd focused on some classics:
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- 1984 by George Orwell
- The Village by Ivan Bunin
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
- Siddharta by Hermann Hesse
I read quite a bit and love it; if only I could be paid to do it at my own pace and rhythm!
asphodele 3 days ago [-]
The Outsider (L'Étranger) will give you something to think about. Camus' idea with this novel was to see what would happen to a character who went through life only telling the truth.
ball_of_lint 3 days ago [-]
Big fan of Camus; I found The Fall and The Plague to both be stronger books than The Stranger
colechristensen 3 days ago [-]
I didn't realize it was published under two separate english translated titles
jonahx 3 days ago [-]
I've never heard it referred to as "The Outsider" before. TIL it has been published under that name, but "The Stranger" is the title it's typically known as in English:
Yeah the French word could also be translated as "the foreigner." It's an interesting demonstration of the challenge of translation; even a one-word title presents an ambiguity that has to be resolved.
bgleb 3 days ago [-]
Recently finished:
- Tau Zero by Poul Anderson (Hard Sci-Fi)
- Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (blew my mind)
Reading now:
- Hyperion by Dan Simmons (getting harder than two above, but enjoying it so far)
aspectmin 3 days ago [-]
Ooo - my favourite genre. Just added Tau Zero to my list. Children of Time was amazing as was Hyperion. Have you read the Quantum Magician series?
bgleb 3 days ago [-]
Unfortunately not, took a break in sci-fi for more than 10 years and only getting back. Noted Quantum Magician, quick glance suggests it should be fun
hingler36 3 days ago [-]
Hyperion is amazing, it's one of those books I wish I could read again for the first time. Enjoy!
PaulRobinson 2 days ago [-]
What, you're all reading the books? I thought the point was to just buy them excitedly, and then let them accumulate around you and when your partner complains about them quote that thing Umberto Eco said about needing a personal library or something... :)
Recent completions:
- The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick. I found it well written, but ultimately lacking in something - I kind of wanted the other boot to drop at the end.
- Poor Charlie's Almanack. Stripe Press published this collection of Charlie Munger's speeches and I've found I broadly agree with him on a ton of stuff and am slightly excited by some of his ideas that are new to me.
I'm about to have some time off recovering from a planned medical procedure and expect to have a mix of sci-fi, good quality non-fiction and at least one heavy "literary" book. I'm a big fan of Borges, so I might reread some of that work, or maybe pick up some adjacent/similar authors like Calvino too.
dhosek 2 days ago [-]
I have roughly 48m of bookshelves stuffed with books in my apartment¹ (not to mention 25 more books sitting on my desk for which I lack the shelf space to shelve them properly and another couple dozen waiting to go to the used book store). The bookcases covering one wall of my office are about 80% unread books which I’m making slow progress at.
A sampling of the unread books (picking the rightmost book on each of the 19 shelves of unread books): The Best American Short Stories 2020, The Riverside Chaucer, Flimsy Plastic Miracles by Ron Currie Jr, I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek, My Days of Anger by James T Farrell, Antología Poetica² by Federico García Lorca, Blurred Lines* by Vanessa Grigoriadis, Just Like You by Nick Hornby, Diaries by Franz Kafka, A Different Kind of Tension by Jonathan Lethem, A Writer’s Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham, The Magician’s Wife by Brian Moore, Father Elijah by Michael D. O’Brien, Challenging Problems in Algebra by Posamentier/Salkind, Cuentos by Alonso Reyes, All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva, Great American Desert by Terese Svoboda, A Silent Treatment by Jeanine Vanasco and The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House.
⸻
1. Thanks to most of these being IKEA shelves, with one antique glass-doored bookcase inherited from my grandfather which has four four-foot shelves, it’s not too much of a challenge to get the exact total of shelf space which is 487.68cm. There are a few places where the shelves.
2. Yes, I read books in Spanish.
dan-bailey 2 days ago [-]
Yeah, I have about 5000 of them in the to-read pile. I think I'm suffering from choice paralysis right now, which was why I posted this in the first place.
<I>Poor Charlie's Almanack</I> is sitting in that pile somewhere. I might have to pick it up soon. And speaking of literary, maybe I should get back to that. I try to read 1-2 titles per year in that vein. Camus, maybe?
mikewarot 2 days ago [-]
1632 by Eric Flint is an interesting exercise in alternative history. He extensively studied the real town of Mannington, West Virginia and used it as the basis of Grantville, a town that is transported from 2000 back in time to late 1631 in Thuringa, Germany during the 30 years war.
It was quite an engaging read, and lead to a series. You'll learn lots about the infrastructure of civilization along the way.
MattSteelblade 3 days ago [-]
Working my way through Elle Cordova's sci-fi book club[1]. Currently on Hyperion, but have read "The Man In The High Castle," "Sea of Tranquility," "Exhalation," "Neuromancer," "The Power," "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," "Parable of the Sower," and "I, Robot."
Warning: Hyperion ends on a cliffhanger, you'll want to get The Fall of Hyperion (the sequel).
The entire cantos is great, tho I prefer the first two to the Endymion/Rise of Endymion.
branon 2 days ago [-]
Recently I have begun reading more than one book at a time, which I have never done before.
I'm not stellar at this yet, trying to juggle three turns into progressing two fairly quickly with the third much slower...
Clive Barker, Books of Blood - Currently in volume three. I've always found horror to require, like fantasy, a concentrated effort on my part as a reader to sustain suspension of disbelief. But these are great fun even if that's difficult sometimes.
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We - With sci-fi for whatever reason I do not suffer from the suspension-of-disbelief problem, the worldbuilding is much easier to immerse myself in. (Before this I was reading Roadside Picnic which was extremely good)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago - The slow one, still very interesting, nonfiction is uncommon for me
epiccoleman 2 days ago [-]
Man I love Books of Blood. Hugely formative in my tastes in horror as one of the first things I had access when (as a teen) I started branching out from Stephen King. So many good stories in there.
3 days ago [-]
drudolph914 2 days ago [-]
1929 by Andrew Sorkin
It’s about the stock market crash of 1929, and done in way that leaves no stone unturned. the book could be thought of as an obsessive pursuit of financial journalism in order to truly understand every domino that fell and lead to the crash - and not just the high level story.
I’m only about a quarter of the way through, but it’s a great read!
ky-hy 3 days ago [-]
I recently finished "Warbreaker" by Brandon Sanderson, now plan to go back to reading "Designing data-intensive applications" since it's been a long time (for me) since I read anything educational. Warbreaker was amazing, I still think about it, a week after finishing, about the characters and how much fun I had while reading it. It's one of those books that you smile when you read it because of how pleasant it is and how enjoyable the characters are.
fosco 3 days ago [-]
I started the cosmere this year and have officially consumed every available book in the cosmere, really enjoyable brain junk food! He has written so much and I love the different systems and characters development. Highly recommend his works! I daydream in the various parts of cosmere weekly and am excited for more books to come out.
dv35z 2 days ago [-]
What is Cosmere? (of course could look it up, but thought it may be interesting to learn here)
ky-hy 2 days ago [-]
Cosmere is universe created by Brandon Sanderson for his books, its a small galaxy with many planets called shardworlds, usually series are independent from each other but the really cool part is that there is handful of characters (at least named) that can jump between those planets, and those characters are called worldhoppers and they can appear in series that normally wouldn't be connected to each other, and due to fantastic character writing of Brandon, you are always pleasantly suprised when a character from one series appears in another.
upupupandaway 3 days ago [-]
"The Memory Police", by Yoko Ogawa [1]. An island where things get disappeared by the Memory Police - physically from the world and from people's minds. A few people are immune to forgetting, so the Memory Police is on the case.
Sound similar to There Is No Antimemetics Division.
frm88 2 days ago [-]
It's not really similar,since qntm writes more in the vein of SCPs - paranormal occurences while The Memory Police is more sinister in an an ethical and political way, a bit like state mandated Alzheimer.
rznicolet 2 days ago [-]
I really enjoyed The Witch Roads, by Kate Elliott. The depth of the worldbuilding is a delight, and the vibes are exquisite -- it feels amazingly real, full of history and old traditions and cultures. It's a little slow for a modern novel (which I don't mind); it reminded me of an older book, in terms of quality (The Fortress in the Eye of Time by C. J. Cherryh) that I also loved. It's the first book in a duology, so I really need to get my hands on the second book.
As to the story: to protect herself and her nephew from a local lord with an ugly grudge, a courier gets sucked into helping an obnoxious prince take a dangerous route to bypass an avalanche and deal with an urgent, secret mission. The mission gets complicated when said prince ends up possessed by a haunt from ancient ruins; and of course, the courier has her own secret to keep...
BigTTYGothGF 2 days ago [-]
Kate Elliott's great, she had a couple of what I thought were recent duds ("Servant Mage", "Keeper's Six") but the "Crown of Stars" and "Crossroads" series are all-timers.
thrance 2 days ago [-]
Currently going through Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. It's... challenging for the non-native english speaker I am, but still very untertaining. I've been getting out of my comfort zone lately, as a lifelong Sci-Fi aficionado, with every other book on my "to read" pile being non-fiction or experimental like Pale Fire.
stefandesu 2 days ago [-]
I'm reading the second Harry Potter book in Norwegian. It's decent practice since translations are a bit easier to read and I already know what's going on.
I'm also reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, though I'm on a bit of a break after the third book. I'd like to continue soon.
If I'm in the mood for neither of those, I read the Mushoku Tensei light novels.
spudlyo 3 days ago [-]
So for my unofficial book club with a good friend, we're in the final act of A Passage to India by E.M. Forster, after having finished A Room with a View a few weeks before. I enjoy 19th and early 20th century literature for the prose quality quite a lot, and Forster does not disappoint on that score. It's also fascinating getting an inside view on Anglo-Indian relations during British rule. It's thematically similar To Kill a Mockingbird, in that both feature prominent "White Knight" type characters.
I'm also reading some less highbrow, yet highly entertaining novels that I'm obsessed with. I'm currently on book 16 in in Lindsey Davis' Falco series[0], which are murder mysteries set in Ancient Rome. I've been enjoying them non-stop ever since HN user "vintagedave" recommended[1] them around 4 months ago.
Let me know what you think and if you have recommendations or criticisms!
pastel8739 3 days ago [-]
Personally I find limited value in an AI-produced list of books that you haven’t even read. I would much prefer to read your thoughts on books that you have read.
Mary Roach is great, though.
rheffern 2 days ago [-]
I mean, it's my reading list, not my read list.
And yes, Roach is fantastic. The book is a bit dated these days, but still what a great read! Her prose and cadence are just my cup of tea.
danielheath 3 days ago [-]
Radiant Star (the new Ann Leckie book, in the “Ancillary Justice” series). Not as good as her earlier books in the series, but very worthwhile if you enjoyed them.
mandolingual 2 days ago [-]
I just finished the tome that is "The House of Government" - a look at the founding, arrangement, and domestic habits of/in the Soviet House of Government across from the Kremlin. It's a really fascinating look into Bolshevik psychology/culture at the highest level and shows how it really was practically an atheistic religion at that level. So much of the framing is centered around what books people are reading, how they are living (and indulging in the petty comforts of "bourgeois domesticity"), and so on. It has some sections that are a bit of a slog, going into boring details of domestic routine, but needless to say it picks up as it progresses into the late 1930s...
talon8635 2 days ago [-]
Thank you for an intriguing suggestion
jeanpah 3 days ago [-]
I'm reading the neuromancer triology. It makes me think that book ended up predicting (or maybe shaping) many things that really are happening right now.
dcminter 3 days ago [-]
I read that recently. Neuromancer I had read before and found excellent again (and in places pithier in the era of AI). It's very quotable too.
The other two were much weaker; of the two Count Zero was least interesting though so at least it wraps up on a fairly high note.
I read the Bridge trilogy a decade or so ago (?) and I must re-read that soon too - I suspect Idoru will hit harder these days.
simpaticoder 3 days ago [-]
I recently reread Neuromancer and I don't get why people think it's so prophetic. The real world is shaped by ubiquitous smartphones and surveillance capitalism and social media feeds. Gibson predicted none of that and not even close. Instead he predicted all kinds of things that never came to be, like neural interfaces consumer space stations. He didn't even predict income inequality - Case is in Chiba City for a very specific reason and for all we know it's quite unique. Even his predictions around the internet are way off because as far as I can tell the only medium that explains how it works in his book is telepathy - literally no one ever mentions or cares about physical connectivity, and there's no mechanism for Case to get online without repairing his nervous system. Which of course makes no sense if you could just look at a screen. The cultural aspects are way off although very atmospheric- the smoking the paper newspapers pay phones.... I think the only thing that it shaped was the cyberpunk aesthetic, which is as fundamentally retro-futuristic and silly as steampunk.
jeanpah 3 days ago [-]
In the second book, Count Zero, a billonaire named Virek is presented as an omnipresent being and literaly follows one of the protagonist at every step using a surveillance network, i think it's pretty close to what we have today
akkad33 19 hours ago [-]
I'm reading A scout mindset. It's been an eye opener and really sets out clearly everything I've been noticing in myself and in the world. It's about the lies we tell ourselves
schmookeeg 3 days ago [-]
I'm reading something a bit strange and wonderful: The mountain in the sea by Ray Naylor -- a fictional peek at octopus intelligence.
Question for some of y'all: Those who are listing 3 or more (sometimes way more!) books -- do you read them in parallel? I'm a dyed-in-the-wool serial book monogamist and can't fathom having like 8 or 10 storylines in my head at once.
No judgement, just curious and somewhat awed :)
efromvt 2 days ago [-]
I went into that blind and quite enjoyed it! The surrounding world building is quite sophisticated without being overwhelming. (and somewhat bleak).
tarr 3 days ago [-]
I’ll read 5-10 books at a time, but it takes me 5-10x longer to finish them (obviously).
It’s sort of like watching many TV shows at once, I suppose? Watch an episode of each per week.
rootbear 3 days ago [-]
I often have two books in progress, one fiction and one nonfiction. That’s a comfortable pace for me. I’m a slow reader.
jldugger 3 days ago [-]
About two thirds of the way through "Flaw of Averages". Thankfully the chapters are short but it's written for business students and is aggressively anti-jargon, which can be annoying at times.
It started off promising, with some hints about monte carlo methods implemented in spreadsheets, but kind of detours into statistics basics, layman summaries of the author's prior scholarly work, and various business consulting anecdotes. I did not, for example, expect to read a chapter on the FASB-II's flaws regarding options pricing. And a few are downright concerning a decade later. I would not, for example, brag about advising Wells Fargo executives on their employee incentive programs after the cross-selling scandal came to light.
The final chapters, which I have not yet gotten to, supposedly cover the solution to the flaw of averages. Given the book is 15 years old, I'm expecting it to be pretty dated implementation wise, but I might be able to apply it to Prometheus histograms or t-digests. And I've learned a few things, like Jensen's inequality, and found a few sheets demoing a sampling approach.
AlexKalWork 2 days ago [-]
Just finished "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy and "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem. Both were pretty satisfying reads. I will start reading "Piranesi" by Susanna Clarke, will also probably have some time for one more book this month. If you got any scifi + horror suggestions tell me.
AlexKalWork 1 days ago [-]
Actually blindsight was one of the top contenders for my next read! I will definitely give it a shot.
largePanda9 2 days ago [-]
I read all three of these in the last 12 months, great choices. Have you read Blindsight? I felt it was almost a sci fi/horror mix. Great read
ragazzina 2 days ago [-]
The first half of Piranesi is brilliant, the second half is banal and anticlimactic. Have you read Blindsight?
tarr11 16 hours ago [-]
I don't think that's very fair take on Piranesi. I enjoyed the second half even though it was not what i expected. If the second half was just a continuation of the first half, I would have felt robbed.
le-mark 3 days ago [-]
“Player Piano” by Vonnegut, his first novel which was sci-fi and explores the consequences of total and complete automation on society. Quite prescient for the current era.
I am currently listening to VC An American History by Tom Nicholas, Audible 2019. I am reading Predictable Winners, A Handbook for Developing, Forecasting, and Launching New Products and Services, Stanford Business Books, 2025. I have cracked open, but not gotten very far in reading, The Rise And Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2026. The Jill Lepore book is very interesting.
THansenite 2 days ago [-]
Currently reading:
This Inevitable Ruin (DCC Book 7) by Matt Dinniman
- Back to DCC after interrupting it for Red Rising, which is another fantastic series judging by the first book.
Deep Work by Cal Newport
- Going through this book to help my focus, especially in the super-connected world we find ourselves in.
Every Tool's a Hammer by Adam Savage
- Huge fan of Adam Savage and it is fun reading stories about him establishing himself and his views on making.
I'm also planning a reread of "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" by Neal Stephenson as his references to greater and greater resources being used for supplying computer power seems dangerously relevant to our current data center arms race our world is watching.
gsaines 3 days ago [-]
I (finally) wrote up the list of the best books I've read in the last 18 months! How timely that you asked! :)
Currently going through Bobiverse, Dungeon Crawler Carl. Recently finished the Dark Profit Saga (Orconomics). Highly recommend all of them.
rvshchwl 3 days ago [-]
The Story of my Experiments with Truth - Mahatma Gandhi.
I recently read another book (Autobiography of a Yogi) that included an excerpt from this book, and it piqued my curiosity into Gandhi’s struggles in India. So far I’ve found it different than other biographies I’ve read because the author is self-critical and reflective which helps in understanding him as a person and his actions.
all_factz 3 days ago [-]
I really loved The Story of my Experiments with Truth. It even inspired me to visit India. There were moments listening to it when I just sat down kind of in awe — Gandhi really was an exceptional person. And there are also excruciatingly boring parts where he is detailing the minutiae of his diet.
dv35z 2 days ago [-]
What did you think of Autobiography of a Yogi?
I read after hearing that it was the #1 book Steve Jobs recommended his executive team read (!!)
rvshchwl 2 days ago [-]
The book opened my mind on the inter-connected nature of various religions and the overall benefits of Meditation and Yoga. The stories are fascinating and interesting, and I read some amazing quotes from the book that I'll end up quoting more often.
The Meditation and Yoga techniques are still theoretical to me though and likely require some amount of practice to believe further in their benefits, or realize their value.
rkp8000 3 days ago [-]
I would also highly recommend Gandhi the Man, by Eknath Easwaran.
jan_m_savage 2 days ago [-]
I am on a Trollope binge. Just finished:
He knew he was right 800+ pages
Framley Parsonage 700+
Eustace Diamonds 800+
And currently reading:
The small house at Allington 800+
Now, why did I list the pages? Because I have ADHD and it's very hard for me to read even 100 pages. So that should say sth about the quality of writing Trollope has.
I have reviewed them on my blog (link on HN profile). But I will mention here:
Forget Dickens, and any other 18-to-19th century writer from Britain. Trollope is far more intelligent, his prose elegant like well-written code, his style inimitable yet persistent, his works useful but also entertaining and usually hilarious.
According to WKPD:
"It (The small house at Allington) enjoyed a revival in popularity in the early 1990s when the British prime minister, John Major, declared it his favourite book."
Also of interest:
Wilson, Jennifer Preston (2012). “On Honour and Consequences: The Duel in Trollope’s The Small House at Allington.” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 43: 169–186.
nozzlegear 3 days ago [-]
I'm reading A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine, it's the sequel to A Memory Called Empire. I'm enjoying it!
tobyjsullivan 3 days ago [-]
The Nature of Economies by Jane Jacobs
People complain about how it's written, but it's nevertheless an interesting exploration of the parallels between natural ecosystems and human economies. As someone with no particular interest or background in economics (and who hasn't read anything else by Jane Jacobs), I find it a fascinating and easy read.
vixen99 2 days ago [-]
The German Genius is an 850 page marathon (excluding notes) by Peter Watson who's not an academic but an ex NYT/Sunday Times journalist and it shows. It's a brilliantly readable unputdownable (in my view) account of how, in a reviewers words, a ton of Germans from the 17th to the early 20th century 'have done more than anything else to create the modern West'. It also offers a fascinating account of how the later appalling developments in the early 1900s onward came about so disastrously. If you only browse the book in a bookshop, read the three pages of comments from reviewers! Last word to Peter Watson 'The United States and Great Britain may speak English but more than they know, they think German'.
vincent-uden 2 days ago [-]
Currently at the end of "The Plauge" by Albert Camus after recently also reading "The myth of Sisyphus" and "The stranger".
I've found all three very enjoyable and unexpectedly applicable to real life for being philosophical texts.
john_strinlai 3 days ago [-]
the fionavar tapestry by guy gavriel kay.
nearing the end. i've found it a bit complicated to follow in some spots (there are several 'main' protagonists and it switches between them without much warning or introduction) but overall it's scratched the fantasy itch.
(i suppose it's actually 3 books, but i have the omnibus version)
acheron 3 days ago [-]
I’ve read most of GGK’s books but never got to that one.
john_strinlai 3 days ago [-]
i'm enjoying it enough that i would read more, do you have a recommendation of what i should pick up from him next? this was the first book of his ive read.
acheron 16 hours ago [-]
Someone else mentioned Tigana which is standalone and good. A lot of his other books though take place in a shared world, the first one for that is The Lions of Al-Rassan. (Mostly they don’t have to be read in order but if you do read them in publication order you will catch small references.)
Either of those two would work as a next read.
shawn_w 3 days ago [-]
Tigana is my favorite GGK book.
ChrisMarshallNY 3 days ago [-]
Glen Cook's Garrett P.I. series[0]. It's a perennial fave (I've read it many times, in the past).
If your url gets linked incorrectly, put it in <angle brackets> and it should work.
ChrisMarshallNY 2 days ago [-]
Thanks so much!
I've read that very passage in the Ts&Cs, numerous times, and it didn't sink in.
It will, now...
badnew 2 days ago [-]
D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Battle for the Normandy Beaches by Stephen Ambrose
As I was reading the account of the assault on Omaha and Utah beaches, a lot of the stories reminded me of the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan. Eventually the similarities got so great that I looked it up and, sure enough, the author of the script of SPR based those scenes on this book.
Every single vignette of horror which you see in that film really happened. If anything I think the film under-exaggerated the events unfortunately. I don't think I can watch that film the same way again.
DamnInteresting 3 days ago [-]
Fiction I recently enjoyed: The Ana and Din series by Robert Jackson Bennett. Sherlock Holmes vibes, with Kaiju. Also The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North.
Currently reading and enjoying: Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel.
Next to Read: Hollywood, Ending by John Green.
frm88 2 days ago [-]
I just finished The Tainted Cup and moved on to the next. I've read every Bennet there is, his writing is compelling. One of my auto-buy authors, same as Claire North. I paticularly enjoyed her Gameshouse series.
travisgriggs 3 days ago [-]
Just finished Trade of Blood (most recent #3 of the Din and Ana books). Phenomenal. Been a while since I’ve enjoyed a series this much. Good/fun writing. Great underlying messages.
sigmar 3 days ago [-]
almost done with exit party and ctrl-f'd to see if someone else was also reading. I like it a lot so far.
latortuga 3 days ago [-]
Just got Exit Party from my public library, looking forward to it!
RamblingCTO 1 days ago [-]
I'm also reading the first dungeon crawler carl series. You might really like the bobiverse, just got another book as well!
Before that I read "a short stay in hell", super good! Or discordia by max barry or road kill by dennis e. taylor. All very entertaining.
brachkow 2 days ago [-]
I'm reading "Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style". This is a book on how Japan became leading power in western menswear.
Apart from being an interesting book on fashion history, it also draws a lot of interesting connections & facts.
For example, that renowned Japanese magazine Popeye has this weird, almost construction catalog structure because it was inspired by... "The Whole Earth Catalog."
Or how in post-war Japan western formal wear was a punk-like form of protest of teens against elderly.
largePanda9 3 days ago [-]
Currently on the final book of James Clavell’s Asia Saga, it’s been a long road and I’m frankly kind of over it but 90% through the final book and I’m glad I read them. First read Shogun maybe ~10 years ago but read the other four back to back. Gai-Jin wasn’t very good but the others have been pretty solid overall. A bit long winded and sometimes I wish he’d’ve had a more aggressive editor, but happy with em enough to finish them all.
tantalor 3 days ago [-]
The Cuckoo's Egg, by Cliff Stoll
n1ivih 3 days ago [-]
Such a good one, enjoy!
antoni4040 2 days ago [-]
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. The first volume, Swann's Way, to be exact.
It's not for the faint of heart, it's relatively difficult, but it's very satisfying so far. You know the feeling when it's maybe an autumn evening and some blue light comes throught the window, hits the curtains a certain way and the shadows remind you of something from your childhood that you thought you had forgotten forever? Well, it's like this, on steroids.
jeffreyrogers 2 days ago [-]
I recently finished George Vaillant's book Adaptation to Life and immediately picked up the follow up The Wisdom of the Ego. Vaillant is a psychiatrist and was a director of the Grant Study, which followed about 250 Harvard undergrads from college until they died.
Both books are largely about how the psychological defense mechanisms a person uses play a large role in determining how successfully they adapt to and navigate life.
I’m also reading this! Not quite the narrative of “All Quiet on the Western Front”, but an interesting recount from a regular guy in the trenches.
api 3 days ago [-]
Currently reading Eversion by Alastair Reynolds.
Highlights from the past year or two:
Revelator by Daryl Gregory - Appalachian weird fiction with a tinge of cosmic horror.
The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias - Tragic story about the cartel underworld plus magic realism.
The Expanse (all of them) by James S A Corey (pen name for two writers IRL) - Everyone probably knows this one. Books were better than the show in many ways the the prose quality was pleasantly good. Fun read.
Tomato Red by Daniel Woodrell - One of the best openings I have ever read and I’ll leave it at that.
I like to read a wide variety of styles and genres, but the writing has to be good. I’ll drop a book if it’s got flat characters or clunky prose or cringey tropey stuff.
knuckleheads 2 days ago [-]
Mother of Learning is pretty good, similar vein, does some interesting things. The Wandering Inn is also pretty good, I'd say more challenging than Dungeon Crawler Carl while still being entertaining.
depworker 2 days ago [-]
A few years ago I thought through the concept of time and developed the fragile but persistent belief that time is a human invention and not a fundamental part of the natural world. It was a very unsettling experience, until
Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time restored my sense of mental sanity.
I’m currently rereading it because it made me an instant fanboy of Rovelli and this is one of his most tender books. The prose gently rocks you while delivering a complete shift in worldview.
delichon 3 days ago [-]
You've Been Pooping All Wrong by Trisha Pasricha MD. Get a bidet, eat more fiber and kiwis.
Austin worked for British Intelligence during World War II, running the Martians section and helping assess possible invasion sites for D-Day. After the war, as a philosopher of language, he helped bring ideas such as performative utterances and speech acts into the discussion.
A fascinating overlap between intelligence work and philosophy of language.
And because the Brewers are in the playoffs, "Catcher in the Wry" by Bob Uecker. Despite being a Cleveland fan, I have to admit the book is amazingly fun. Uecker was Uecker long before he became everybody's favorite baseball storyteller, and he was the Cleveland announcer in Major League.
It was a mix of fantasy & humor. It is a bit long but it is extremely funny & entertaining. It is the first fantasy book I have read other than the Harry Potter series (not sure if it is considered fantasy) but I loved it.
The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby
I'm halfway through and is quite interesting and enjoyable. behind the scenes documentary view into his life, academic period, pre-DeepMind, forming DeepMind, raising capital, working on various projects like the Atari games, the AlphaGo period (currently immersed in). Definitely recommend
Just finished The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry (who died last month). Such beautiful writing. It's a short book but it took me a while to get through it because I would keep re-reading paragraphs to savor them. The chapter about Jack's marriage to Ruth was so poignant - he says that the marriage failed in the courtship. Jack's desire blinded him to Ruth's ambition to turn him into something that he wasn't and couldn't be. (an age-old story)
Just started On The Equality of All Things by Carlo Rovelli and Holy the firm by Annie Dillard
ekjhgkejhgk 3 days ago [-]
I'm about 100 pages into "Dune Messiah" (the 2 movies out are both for the first book, the 3rd movie is going to be this book), 50 pages into "Analysis I" by Terence Tao, 100 pages into "Thinking in bets"
2snakes 3 days ago [-]
There was a ntsc or pal version of children of dune at one point but it was region locked so I never saw it
TheAceOfHearts 2 days ago [-]
Well, since nobody has mentioned it yet, I recently read The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander and quite enjoyed it. It's an architecture book but the concepts are universal.
The most impactful book I've read recently has been The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, which deals with a man in a reincarnation loop.
Since I was going through a bit of a reincarnation phase I also quite enjoyed Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore, although it's a bit jumpy and all over place.
prevailrob 2 days ago [-]
I'm about half way through Harry August. Very enjoyable so far
cleandreams 3 days ago [-]
"What Happened to Liberal Democracy" by Daron Acemoglu (Nobel laureate).
As someone who fled the desolation of the rust belt this book spoke to me and I found it credible and compelling. My book club spent 4 hours discussing this book.
nephihaha 3 days ago [-]
In print:
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen. (Much more disjointed than the film, but a quick read.)
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
On audiobook (I know, not technically reading):
Garth Marenghi's horror trilogy (Matthew Holness is one of the best narrators I've heard.)
On Kindle:
Cut Throat: the Vicious World of Rod Maclean by Wayne Thallon (I don't believe the half of it, but I know many of the locations discussed in it. I seem to find true crime my light reading these days)
An Angel at my Table by Janet Frame
The Summer Son by Craig Lancaster
Recently finished:
Sky Above, Great Wind by Kazuaki Tanahashi
Jew(ish) by Matt Greene
The House that Evolves by Pauline Hunter
The Inheritors by William Golding (made much less of an impact than the last time I read it.)
shawn_w 3 days ago [-]
Like half the people here I'm in the middle of Dungeon Crawler Carl.
Finished Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia yesterday, and also have been reading Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee mysteries - currently on The Haunted Monastery.
pfortuny 2 days ago [-]
Right now, "The Lord", by Romano Guardini, a large collection of homilies covering the whole life of Christ. Obviously, this is a Catholic text.
Also, "Heaven on Earh", by Emma Wells, about nine or ten Gothic Cathedrals (mostly the history of their building and preservation). A bit too plain for my taste but includes interesting facts and anecdotes.
Finished recently:
-Flowers for Algernon, which I liked a lot.
-Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, so beautiful and surprising.
-The Great Gatsby, which I had not read yet and which I have loved reading.
mbielski 2 days ago [-]
Currently reading the Amazon listing for my first book. I've wanted to write since I was a teenager, and it's finally happened.
Beyond that, I'm steadily working my way through Finders Keepers by Stephen King, and then I have a couple of John Scalzi books queued up.
ericol 2 days ago [-]
Somebody somewhere here gave a list that had "consider Phlebas" in it.
That particular book bored me to death, but from the same author / series I recently read "Player of Games" and "Use of Weapons" and I can't recommend (both) enough.
Dungeon Crawler, I started the series recently but got bored mid 3rd book. It is quite more denser than the first 2, and it feels like never ending.
dan-bailey 2 days ago [-]
I can see where Dungeon Crawler could go that way -- I just did the newest Bobiverse book on Audible, and it's just so goddamned repetitive. I'm not sure I can slog through another one. I feel like Dungeon Crawler is doing a really good job of setting up and laying the groundwork for more _meaningful_ conflict in future books. But I'm only on Book 3, so who knows? Ask me again 2 books from now.
ericol 2 days ago [-]
It was book 3 precisely that held me down. It was too long, and kind of lost the pace of the previous 2 books.
It was too repetitive.
CyberFalcon_42 2 days ago [-]
If you've seen the movie master and commander and liked it, or are interested in a long series with 20 well written books, I'd recommend Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian. It's book one of the Aubrey–Maturin series. It's historical naval fiction, written in the 1970s so the style is a touch more formal than current books but you can sense the "classiness" of the writing.
jeffreyrogers 2 days ago [-]
If you enjoyed those books I can highly recommend John Biggins' Otto Prohaska series, which I've seen described as "a techno-thriller set on a WWI submarine". Biggins books are really fun and well researched.
CyberFalcon_42 2 days ago [-]
Thank you! I will check them out. I've been liking the Dungeon Crawler Carl series that is discussed in this thread. It's light and entertaining. Also Children of Time series is pretty good.
calmworm 2 days ago [-]
Lonesome Dove has been mentioned many times in this thread. Was it recently revealed/brought up on a tech blog or is this some sort of AI-related “what should I read” convergence? Not at all a criticism, but curiosity.
I just finally finished “The Ferryman” (Justin Cronin), and “Vera, or Faith” (Shteyngart). I have “Reverse Centaur” (Doctorow) open and “Rainbow’s End” (Vernor Vinge) on deck.
Triphibian 2 days ago [-]
I had this same question and am very curious about what triggers a certain cultural work's resurgence.
Only semi-related I forced my son to explain to me why so many young people knew the song "Big Iron" by Marty Robbins.
bookofjoe 2 days ago [-]
Wow. I'd have thought NO ONE under 30 — maybe 40! – knew who Marty Robbins was.
I've been reading more than usual this year, have found it profoundly rewarding, and recommend it as an antidote to social media and news fixation to anyone who will listen to me.
A few of my favorite reads so far this year:
- The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones
- Angel Down, Daniel Kraus
- Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
- Between Two Fires, Christopher Buehlman
- The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow
- The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy
- Nettle & Bone, T. Kingfisher
- The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett
- The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead
marshray 2 days ago [-]
Piranesi has my vote for "ideal book", at least of that genre. Not a word is wasted. It fills out beautiful scenes by slowly lowering abstractions into them. It unfolds a dreamy, cerebral story. You meet likable characters transcending the paradigm.
There’s even a gun, kicked around in a parking lot if that checks any boxes for you.
Did I mention the baby albatrosses?
rta5 2 days ago [-]
I just started The Gold Standard by Saifedean Ammous. I'm still in the history part of the book, since it starts off with economic history and moves into a fiction about what the 20th century could have looked like if the fiat money experiment had failed and the gold standard was instead refined.
I don't usually do fiction outside of classics (Tolkien, Dostoevsky, Huxley, etc), so I'm hopeful this will be interesting.
randcraw 2 days ago [-]
I'm reading Paul Theroux's "True North", on his recent tour of Canada, the country of his birth. Now 84, he claims it will be his last travel book.
Just finished Jill Lepore's "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State" -- a history of the popular fascination (esp. among idealistic tech types) for ending human-based governance and replacing it with computer automation (esp. via AI). I appreciated her coverage of the rise more than her case for the fall.
dcminter 3 days ago [-]
Well in theory I'm reading "Blind Corner" by Dornford Yates, but it's so terrible I may not finish it. I adore Dorothy Sayers and have a sort of forlorn hope that another of the golden age crime writers will have something approaching her flair. In practice this is a third rate John Buchan-ish boys-own bit of tatt. So far. I suppose it might improve.
Instead I'm sneaking off to reread a Pratchett novel (he had very few duds until the Alzheimers really got its teeth into him).
After that/those I'm dithering between SS/GB by Deighton and some other re-read.
artifix 2 days ago [-]
About to tackle Princes of the Yen by Richard Werner.
My wife just sent me a video of his: what I didn't know about central banking! TBH I'm shocked. Apparently we'd all be so much better if we had more local banks doing local lending to local businesses.
Explains a lot, actually, so I even mentioned him in an article I just wrote about my freelancing career. Now I know why the market has been increasingly impossible ...
delld16 2 days ago [-]
Out of interest, what kind of copy do you have of Princes of the Yen?
I looked a little while ago and could only find an extremely expensive second hand copy and a not very good quality pdf.
artifix 2 days ago [-]
I have an epub which says 2003 but then says also says 2015, so now I'm confused ;)
globular-toast 2 days ago [-]
Fiction: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (English translation by Chapman & Hall).
Non-fiction: Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh.
Previous fiction: Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. Loved Ender's Game when I was younger, but for some reason never picked this up. It's brilliant, even better than Ender's.
Previous non-fiction: Endurance by Alfred Lansing. Well, I couldn't put it down. What a book.
SubGenius 3 days ago [-]
The Rouse by China Miéville, great read so far.
frm88 2 days ago [-]
Can you elaborate a little, please? I've read all Mieville and before I venture into this monster, I'd like to read your thoughts. How does it compare to his other works?
KineticLensman 2 days ago [-]
I'm 30% of the way through and really enjoying it.
It's definitely Miéville, but the weird doesn't cut in immediately.
The first 100 or so pages is about a young single British woman (Maur) in the 1970s/1980s. She brings up a son who becomes increasingly remote, joins the army, and then something happens to him, which is when the weird elements begin to appear (involving the disturbingly unpleasant lingering spirits of the dead). The second plot strand concerns a Brit soldier (Allardyce) whose unit participates in various weird events (also somewhat disturbing) set against British-empire post-colonial / cold war shenanigans in the 50s and 60s, although the two plot strands eventually connect.
One reviewer I saw described the first bit (which is 'mundane', in the non-fantasy sense) as a masterclass in how to present a character's interiority, and I'm inclined to agree. As with any Miéville, it helps to have access to a good dictionary. I'm a Brit who grew up at approximately the same time as Maur, which helped me understand some of the allusions (e.g. to 'the election', which is Thatcher's). But I had to read into the darker sides of British colonial disengagement to fully understand Allardyce's experiences. E.g. the so-called Malayan Emergency, a particularly brutal little war of independence in the 1950s.
In a way, it reminded me of Kraken, where Miéville throws in lots of references to real-world weirdness to better sneak his own inventions into the story world.
frm88 2 days ago [-]
I'm sold. Thank you so much.
agnishom 3 days ago [-]
I am reading "The Last Contract of Isako" by Fonda Lee. Finished reading her Green Bone Saga earlier. She does phenomenal world building.
Also, "Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto"
fidelramos 2 days ago [-]
I'm reading Harry Browne's "How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World" [0]. This book is a good guide and inspiration, even if I don't fully agree with every point.
Currently reading "Beyond Tube-and-Wing: The X-48 Blended Wing-Body and NASA's Quest to Reshape Future Transport Aircraft".
Its a pretty good history of the X-48 program.
Edit: also reading the "The Anduril Thesis" in parallel.
thuridas 2 days ago [-]
10x Org.
I am fed up of this "you should be fast with AI" and this book explains how your can really improve the global performance.
Not super complex. It is written so even management should understand it. But it makes you think about your organización.
Like the Ferrari paradox: give everybody in the city a Ferrari and the traffic won't improve or even be worse. The same with AI
intelkishan 2 days ago [-]
A corner of a foreign Field: the Indian History of a British sport. It goes into the details of how Cricket became popular in the Indian sub-continent.
WillAdams 3 days ago [-]
Re-reading C.J. Cherryh's Chanur books and various other Alliance-Union novels from her Humble Bundle.
I'd be re-reading Tolkien's _Old English Exodus_, but proofreading the typos got to be too much.
sfRattan 3 days ago [-]
Humble Bundle frequently has nice bundles of genre fiction or comics by specific authors. I've picked up large sets of Ebooks from them over the last few years by numerous authors: Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Jordan, comics by Moebius, and recently Timothy Zahn and various scifi/fantasy authors with careers spanning decades.
It's a great resource!
lbeckman314 3 days ago [-]
Lord of the Rings — second read after ~15 years, excited to revisit!
lkm0 2 days ago [-]
Actually not very flashy but I'm reading 50 great short stories (selected) by Milton Crane.
Very good way to discover new authors, and the proximity of different styles (I hope) develops my conscious awareness of them.
Ulysses - again .. hopefully I'll make it this time
Gupie 2 days ago [-]
INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO MORE, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.
gxonatano 20 hours ago [-]
If you've read Aristotle, you get it. But even if you haven't, you can still glean that Stephen's walking along the shore thinking about the color and form of everything he sees, and how Ancient Greek phenomenology would understand it. If not, skip the chapter and the next one is a lot more approachable.
neofytos 2 days ago [-]
C.S.Lewis, Prince Caspian. I'll skip the commentary to avoid spoiling the magic for anyone who hasn't read it yet.
trinsic2 3 days ago [-]
I just finished "The Emergency". Heard about it on Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz [0]. Is a fictional story about what it might be like if a modern government empire collapses. Im interested in writers that are thinking about the future.
I'm reading tons of Claude, all I do everyday is read all day
tarr 3 days ago [-]
The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, by Roland Allen.
From the title, it sounds very tedious, but I think it’s super cool. It chronicles the history of notebooking/journaling and the impact it’s had throughout time. Notebooks haven’t been been around and accessible for very long (relatively), and it’s interesting to hear about how somebody like Leonardo da Vinci used them to grow ideas. Makes you wonder how we possibly could’ve progressed without them.
The book is called “The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993”.
Wojtkie 2 days ago [-]
I just finished the Planet Money book. Pretty nice wide Econ 101 overview of how the economy works from a US point of view.
I'm going to read The Nerd Reich by Gil Duran next because that seems rather pertinent to the modern time. I haven't really looked at reviews and am going in blind.
Just finished: The Castle by Jon Ronson, very funny and enlightening look at the unraveling of some men.
Just started : Catch the Devil by Pamela Colloff, true crime about a con artist in Florida who traded overheard (probably fabricated) jailhouse confessions for a seemingly endless chain of get out of jail free cards.
mon_ 3 days ago [-]
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang.
It's an autobiographical history which recounts the lives of the author, her mother, and her grandmother throughout an extremely transformational century in Chinese history.
I went into this knowing little to no Chinese history, and it has opened my eyes to this fascinating country. I hope to visit China for the first time in 2027. Before I go, I'm doing a deep dive into Chinese history. Open to recommendations on what to read next!
As a follow up you can read Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls, an autobiographical history in graphic novel format recounting the lives of the author, her mother, and her grandmother throughout an extremely transformational century in Chinese history, across continents (Mainland China, Hong Kong, and the United States).
yanhangyhy 2 days ago [-]
<Red Star Over China> -> for the Communism side of china, why china choose this path.
<River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze> -> one of my fav all the time. a forigner teach in this small chinese city, and he write what he observes.
for more ancient chinese history:
<1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline> -> one of the most popular china's history book for these years. highly recommnded.
i read a lot but i doubt many of them has a non-chinese version. the above ones are the ones i can think of now.
also <The Search for Modern China> is highly recommmend, but i foget if i have read it or not.
oh also another book on how chinese characters are made, 《China: Empire of Living Symbols》。 writen by a Sweden author Cecilia Lindqvist. i love it very much
jairuhme 2 days ago [-]
Just finished 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin and am now reading Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King. The King novel is interesting because the whole thing is Dolores giving a statement to the police and its all in first person point of view.
After this, I have The Gales of November by John Bacon and then The Power Broker by Robert Caro.
bwnkl 2 days ago [-]
Darwin's "The voyage of the Beagle" which is basically his edited travel diary. It's a slow read because he just describes his observations on animals and landscape (he was really into geology) and sometimes the interactions with the people there (lots of tensions between the settlers and the "Indians"), but overall an interesting read.
sphars 3 days ago [-]
I just finished book 8 of DCC, and while I wasn't blown away with the series like others, it was entertaining enough to keep me reading.
I just started reading The Blacktongue Thief (hardback) and The Name of the Wind (ebook). I've heard very good things about the latter, and although I'm aware that the series may never complete, I'm trying to not let that dissuade me.
johnthedebs 3 days ago [-]
I felt the same way about DCC having listened to the series as audiobooks.
On the other hand, and not to over-hype them, but The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear are probably my favorite non-fiction books. Way better writing and stories than DCC. Not everyone is a fan, but I think I've listened to them 6-7 times each at this point. I often notice new details on each pass, and I appreciate some parts more on subsequent listens than I did in the first one/few. Not having a third book sucks, but definitely still worth it.
ramesh31 3 days ago [-]
Structural Functions of Harmony by Arnold Schoenberg. I can't even begin to understand it, it's just beautiful to encounter such genius and rigorous thought.
litrpg - I've read lots of these, but can't recommend that many. Even better ones can't hold my interest until the end of the series. Some that weren't that bad: solo leveling (up to book ~6), the wandering inn (~11).
I listened to dungeon crawler carl (~8 books) and he who fights with monsters (~8).
scifi - the murderbot diaries, old man's war.
chadd 3 days ago [-]
I do a lot more reading now while i wait for AI bots, it's much better than scrolling social media, i get a few minutes at a time all day long and it's been a mental game changer.
* Fun - Vince Fynn's "Mitch Rapp" Series - a bit dated, but if you like Tom Clancy it's got a similar vibe.
* Beautiful/Thought Provoking - Things In Nature Merely Grow, by Yiyun Li
xelxebar 3 days ago [-]
80年代SF傑作選.
Recently, I remembered a short SF story that I read back in high school and tracked it down, "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers".
I find new wave SF to be really playful and enjoyable to read, not to mention that the experimentation with funky themes and formatting adds a lot of novelty. The above Japanese title is a nice collection of late era stories in this genre.
askvictor 3 days ago [-]
Non fiction: The Dawn of Everything.
Fiction: just finished The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott; about to read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (for the 2nd or 3rd time)
Oanid 3 days ago [-]
Capital in the Twenty-First Century from a physical book,
Science in a Demon Haunted World on my Xteink X4, and Why Nations Fail on my Kobo.
zem 3 days ago [-]
I'm on book 3 of Romlyn Domingue's "Keeper of Tales" trilogy. One unusual touch I liked is that each book is written in a different person - book 1 is a second person autobiography written as the protagonist talking to her past self, book 2 is third person with a different protagonist, and then book 3 is a continuation of book 2 but with the voice switched to first person.
redzedi 2 days ago [-]
1. "Shadow of the torturer" + "Claw of the Conciliator" -- The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
2. "Chronicle of a Death foretold" , Gabriel Garcia Marzquez
3. "Piranesi" , Susanna Clarke
4. "Ananda Math" , Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay
irenaeus 2 days ago [-]
The Book of the New Sun is probably my favorite "sci fi" series. It's so incredibly different in terms of tone, content, philosophy, and style. How's "Chronicle"?
andersonpico 2 days ago [-]
Crónica de una muerte anunciada is such a great book
gainda 2 days ago [-]
what are your thoughts on the Book of the New Sun? I read Shadow and while I really enjoyed the vibe, I was often confused
hardwaregeek 2 days ago [-]
Almost finished with A Perfect Spy. Maybe the most emotionally compelling Le Carre I’ve read. Long and I do find him a bit of a slog (The Honorable Schoolboy especially), but there’s something so fun about his brand of tactical, psychological espionage.
random_cat_8745 2 days ago [-]
Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin. I'm enjoying it so far, there is overlap with Clean Code, it is a great reminder that there is no silver bullet for software architecture.
I'm also reading Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne by David Gaider, the original writer of Dragon Age.
robertkoss 3 days ago [-]
Just finished:
- Selected Stories - Anton Chekhov
- Death in Venice - Thomas Mann
- The Burnout Society - Byung-Chul Han
Currently I am reading an Austrian economics classic - Economics in one lesson by Henry Hazlitt
lanfeust6 2 days ago [-]
Chekhov is great
Ozzie_osman 2 days ago [-]
The Nature of Tyranny, by El Kawakibi (a Syrian scholar). The book is 100 years old, and originally in Arabic, but there are some very good translations.
Great read on tyranny and it's adverse effects. Very relevant to what's happening in the world day.
snapplebobapple 2 days ago [-]
Greg Egan's Orthogonal series, it's fricking wild. Alternate physics leading to a really weird alien species that solves a society ending problem in a weird way that is only possible because of the weird physics.
Quizzical4230 2 days ago [-]
I have been reading 'The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks' by Rebecca Skloot.
It's a fascinating read on how loose the ethics were when experimenting with African Americans back then.
This book also makes me wonder about the current practices, which we do "normally", that the future scientists will consider downright crazy.
vwake 3 days ago [-]
I am reading The dream of enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb.
My goal is to read the history of ideas from Renaissance period till 2000s. Started with The Florentines by Paul Strathern. Then read The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick. Now at the enlightenment era. It has been eye opening to read about the life and times of some of the great minds like Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Locke and more.
rstat1 2 days ago [-]
I just finished (as in literally like 10 minutes before posting this comment) L.E Modesitt’s Solar Express. It’s a hard sci-fi book about humanity’s first encounter with alien artifacts and the race to be the first to whatever discoveries might be contained within. I REALLY enjoyed it.
It started slow (booting) but I'm enjoying the books (currently on #3), the universe-building and the length (10 books) of it.
bobson_dugnutt5 2 days ago [-]
Also reading DCC as a light read, and then reading At Swim-two-birds by Flann O'Brien as something a bit meatier. ASTB worth the read if you're looking for absurd meta fiction. Some parts I've found to be a bit of a slog, but it's short overall so worth the read
haritha-j 2 days ago [-]
Walden, by Henry David Therou. Written by a man who got tired of modern life and decided to live in a hut in the woods. Written in the 1850s.
Full of lovely lines such as “I hear they’re building a telegraph line from Maine to Texas. Have they stopped to ask, does Texas have anything to say to Maine?”
GarnetFloride 3 days ago [-]
Structuring Life to Support Creativity By Sandra Tayler
Only a short way into this but it is a really interesting toolbox for finding ways to figure out what's important to you and making space for creativity.
Master Alvin by Orson Scott Card
Kinda impressed that he finished the series after 30 years. GRR Martin loses another excuse.
dv35z 2 days ago [-]
Curious what you have learned so far about creativity, practical "do it now" type ideas.
I read Artists Way a few years back, and did some of the recommended practices (daily pages, and artist dates) - it was effective in subtle and powerful ways.
GarnetFloride 2 days ago [-]
I’m only at chapter 4 but so far it’s asking What do you want to do? What are you actually doing?
What can you change to start making those things line up better?
greatquux 3 days ago [-]
"The Dictionary of the Khazars" by Milorad Pavić - maybe the first "hypertext" novel; certainly could be one if it was electronic. You can read the entries in any order really and you wind up putting together everything that happens like a giant jigsaw puzzle. That'll keep your brain strong!
jrop 3 days ago [-]
An Introduction to General Systems Thinking by Gerald Weinberg. I've found his writing style to really land with my brain.
GaryBluto 3 days ago [-]
I've mostly been reading short SF stories recently, most of them from Dangerous Visions.
Here's a few of the ones I've read and enjoyed:
“The Jigsaw Man” by Larry Niven
“The Night That All Time Broke Out” by Brian W. Aldiss
“A Toy for Juliette” by Robert Bloch (although I was surprisingly not a fan of Harlan's continuation)
“The Man Who Went to the Moon — Twice” by Howard Rodman
“Flies” by Robert Silverberg
klodolph 3 days ago [-]
Currently reading: Tracks (re-read) by Erdrich. Just finished: The Bad Beginning by Daniel Handler. Before that, Lolita by Nabokov.
I have a long-ish commute at the moment with some opportunities to read on the train, so I’ve been reading more. Been knocking out some of the books on my shelf.
nikope 2 days ago [-]
Making Work visible by Domenica Degrandis.
I have switch more into it team management role (have been 17 years individual contributor) and Im trying to find good books, any advice welcome
ramathornn 3 days ago [-]
I just finished Red Notice by Bill Browder - highly recommend it. It's super interesting to get a peak into what business in other parts of the world looked like in the early 80s - 2000s. I don't want to spoil but it's got some heavy/moving stuff in it. Reads like a novel!
nicois 3 days ago [-]
I just finished my second read of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It's quite engaging, and also quite helpful to juxtapose against current political events, both to identify the similarities (media control) and divergences.
Rereading the Lies of Locke Lamure. If only the sequel were half as good as it...
GJim 2 days ago [-]
> I just finished my second read of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Heil Schicklgruber!
(For those unaware, in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer notes that the Grandfather of the mustachioed-one had the surname 'Schicklgruber'. Shirer suggests that history may have turned out somewhat differnetly if he hadn't changed it, as lets face it, it sounds rather silly).
jaapz 2 days ago [-]
Reading the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as well. For me it is kind of a struggle to read, but at the same time very interesting because he goes into great depths about basically everything.
It's a shame the author seems to have quite a pronounced (and historically irrelevant) distaste for homosexuality.
storywatch 3 days ago [-]
I tend to prefer to avoid LitRPGs, they rot the brain and everything becomes a minmax number hacking endeavor.
Try Charles Stross's Accelerando and the Laundry Files series if you need good sci-fi. Foundryside and Empress of Forever are also decent. If you want fantasy, The Name of The Wind and Discworld are classics.
voidUpdate 2 days ago [-]
I started reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, but I found it much drier than I expected. It's been a lot of space politics so far, and less colonising mars. I was hoping for more The Martian. I might just read The Martian again instead
ByThyGrace 2 days ago [-]
The sequels are possibly what you were expecting to read in the first book, which IIRC its ending paves the way for it. Politics don't go away though, but it doesn't stagnate either. Much dynamism in and among the factions.
voidUpdate 2 days ago [-]
I was sold it as "Red Mars is where they colonise mars" but from the part I've read so far, it seems pretty colonised already, and the racism has already set in
nottorp 2 days ago [-]
I heard the Martian is extremely dry because it's all technical descriptions :)
Incidentally Mars is the only Kim Stanley Robinson book I liked.
voidUpdate 2 days ago [-]
I mean, it's not all technical descriptions. There's humor, problem solving, blowing up historic space hardware with a short circuit. Exactly what I'd expect from trying to survive on mars
no-dr-onboard 3 days ago [-]
The Intellectual Life by AG Sertillanges. Note that it does presuppose a Christian worldview, so ymmv depending on your belief.
neverkn0wsb357 3 days ago [-]
Three books.
These two feel especially relevant:
Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered - E.F. Schumacher
Tools for Conviviality - Ivan Illich
and
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - John Koenig
Saddie 2 days ago [-]
I've never read Obscure sorrows but the name seemed oddly familiar... There should be a word for feeling of _I know i have seen/heard of this somewhere_ and trying to figure out where from. Anyway it was recently discussed on hn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48611411
frm88 2 days ago [-]
Koenig used to have a tumblr, which is where he first published his sorrows, very intriguing. I follow him, but he has long gone silent.
I have grown playing MMORPG's and this one brings the nostalgia vibes without investing the time into grinding for gear.
ErroneousBosh 2 days ago [-]
Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks
(re-reading) Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett
(re-reading) Invitation to Forth by Harry Katzan Jr
(reading to my son) Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl, Der Kleine Peter in der Katzenstadt, An Caisteal fòn Mhuir.
Got quite a lot going on at the moment, really, in terms of books.
biophysboy 2 days ago [-]
I’m reading William Vollmann’s Imperial (a book about the eponymous county in CA) , Richard White’s “The Republic for Which it Stands” (a history of reconstruction and the gilded age), and Paul Starr’s “Social Transformation of American Medicine”.
SquirrelOnFire 2 days ago [-]
Currently reading
Katabasis by RF Kuang - magicians from Oxford go to hell on purpose
And, meatier
The language of the night, essays by Ursula Le Guin
hodgesrm 2 days ago [-]
> The language of the night, essays by Ursula Le Guin
That sounds really cool! I love Ursula Le Guin but had never heard of this book.
gagarwal123 2 days ago [-]
At book 2 of Hyperion Cantos and enjoying it.. Gets weird at times but keeps you hooked for sure
paweladamczuk 2 days ago [-]
"Singing to Plants" by Stephan V. Beyer.
The description of the actual world of shamanism leaves me feeling massively disillusioned. McKenna et al. did us a disservice by shaping the western popcultural idea of what indigenous shamanism is.
raleighm 2 days ago [-]
Would you be willing to say more? I'm intrigued.
paweladamczuk 1 days ago [-]
The image of a shaman I had had in my head was heavily romanticised. The one in the tribe who transcends what is ordinary, the one who explores the world of spirits so that others don't have to, the courageous one, the sacrificial one, the ultimate poet, the ultimate cleric.
Not sure if this is specific to mestizo culture, but the shaman that the book describes looks to me much more like a superstitious, opportunistic charlatan than a clerical psychonaut.
Gordon Wasson did not reveal to the west the idea about ethneogens that Maria Sabina represented. He came to her with a preconceived goal of looking for god, which was not what she was using the mushrooms for.
Anyway, my point is that shamanism looks different through the lens of rigorous ethnography than it when conveyed to us by the influencial popcultural figures. I won't be able to explain it well in a comment, but I highly recommend the book, even if you only read fragments.
NDlurker 3 days ago [-]
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. Pretty good world building. Haven't got too far into it yet.
benleejamin 2 days ago [-]
I really loved Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet! Very succinct. Currently working through The Tale of Genji (slowly) and Play It as It Lays (because I will read anything by Joan Didion).
lunchladydoris 2 days ago [-]
Leviathan, or The Whale by Philip Hoare - As a big fan of whales and Moby Dick, this was amazing.
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold - This has been on my to-read list for years. Pretty great so far.
Game_Ender 3 days ago [-]
Peter F. Hamilton started on the Exodus series and now onto the Reality Dysfunction. He has a talent for taking 5-10 different story threads and weaving them together over a 1000 pages. Also because are so many characters you can actually kill a decent number off.
jiehong 2 days ago [-]
Just finished Diaspora by Greg Egan: sort of SF epic.
bix6 3 days ago [-]
Carl was hilarious, can’t wait for the final books
Nettle and Bone I really enjoyed
Some desperate glory also enjoyed
East of Eden very meaty if you want an epic
samizdis 2 days ago [-]
Not sure whether this will "keep the brain working", but it definitely tied some knots in mine: The Space Trilogy [1], by C.S. Lewis, blends sci-fi with spirituality and classic mythology. The books should probably be read in sequence, as they follow the adventures of the same main character, but Lewis's almost fractal writing style in wildly trippy sections in the first two (which bear hallmarks from the New Testament's Revelations), exhausted me. The last book in the trilogy is worth reading in isolation; it deals with problematic uses of science (eugenics etc), government capture, media manipulation/propaganda, and also human psychology/power relationships etc. It also has its mystic/mythological stuff (Merlin of Arthurian legend is a character in the book), but what gave me cold chills was the creeping dystopian takeover of societal norms that certainly finds echoes in our modern world.
Floating Mountains by Joe Rohde - One of Disney's most prominent imagineers reflects on his life, art, creativity and how collaboration is the secret to accomplishing massive projects.
Avicebron 3 days ago [-]
Gardens of the Moon - Steven Erikson
focusedone 3 days ago [-]
"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac. My first time though this one and it's...well...a trip.
arch_deluxe 3 days ago [-]
A bleak and appalling nuclear triptych:
- Hiroshima
- The Doomsday Machine
- Command and Control
Highly recommended if you’re feeling too happy and full of faith in humanity.
Arubis 3 days ago [-]
I could almost see these being darkly encouraging. Yes, everything is awful, but everything was _already_ awful, and most of us are still mostly okay?
kostarelo 2 days ago [-]
"Everything flows" by Vassily Grossman. It's the first time getting into the Soviet era. Not really a history book per se but still a great FPV of the peopler that lived during that era.
mcv 3 days ago [-]
I've taken a hiatus in my journey through Iain M. Banks' Culture novels to reread 1984.
JoeAltmaier 3 days ago [-]
Terry Pratchet's entire corpus
azaras 3 days ago [-]
For keep the brain working and sci-fi I recommend you "EVO - Padres" by Ignacio Fernandez Moreno, spanish only but easy to read with B2 level or upper. It's a science fiction novel exploring politics based in evolution in a far away planet.
iwannareadir 3 days ago [-]
Can you provide a link to this book? It sounds right up my alley but when I search on multiple search engines and book dBs I’m not seeing it anywhere or even references to it. Ai not finding it either
It's from 1924 and US centric, old new ideas in there.
stewart_p 3 days ago [-]
I'm reading the AI technology blog, because I'm looking for a Job, so sad.
scruple 3 days ago [-]
I'm generally reading 3-4 books at a time. Right now that's:
* That All Shall Be Saved by David Bentley Hart
* Almost Transparent Blue by Ryū Murakami
* The Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cormwell
* The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (rereading after his recent passing)
jadijadi 3 days ago [-]
Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon
(by Kim Zetter).
An indepth history of Stuxnet. A bit long but recommended. You can not find any other book which goes this much in describing a mallware (no code).
Ozymandias-9 2 days ago [-]
Men at Arms from the Discworld series. Second book of the series for me.
dzonga 2 days ago [-]
Consultative Selling - by Mack Hanan.
pretty much you've to sell dollars to high up decision makers. and promise ROI. pretty radical.
just have to put what I have been reading in practice.
bookofjoe 2 days ago [-]
"Exit Party," Emily St. John Mandel's ["Station Eleven," among others] new novel. It's her best yet which is saying A LOT.
abstash 3 days ago [-]
The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh.
A book which depicts tale of a family across the East and West Bengal amidst Partition of India. This book is very renowned and well written. Being a programmer, its better to read on different topics(which is rarity these days)
jtip 3 days ago [-]
"Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great"
by Eric Ries
The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (How to Think About Artificial Intelligence-Before It's Too Late)
By Cory Doctorow
npilk 2 days ago [-]
Just finished Mansfield Park. Sort of a strange way to end the book, though I enjoyed it overall and was pretty well sucked in from the “play” onward.
I loved this, and his Last and First Men. It made me crave more "future histories."
axegon_ 2 days ago [-]
Minerva's Matchbook, kinda painful to read, seeing how catastrophically familiar some things feel 20+ years later if you swap "Italy" with just about any other country.
Oscalemor 3 days ago [-]
I've got a history of picking up the 2 top books of the airports best sellers. Have been my strategy for a while, right now it's FLESH. Feels like I'm being part of the mainstream, reading something everyone else reading.
warthog 2 days ago [-]
More Money than God
Tells individual stories of hedge funds and their founders such as Simmon, Tudor-Jones, Soros and more
Great lessons in how each thought about markets, how they lost and made money
spenjovewkwhalo 2 days ago [-]
Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance
Fascinating (to me) book, basically setting up the question, is human endurance limiting factor physical or psychological …
rodolphoarruda 2 days ago [-]
Thinking In Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows
The American by Martin Booth
gyre007 3 days ago [-]
I finished Quantum Radio last week and Im quite far in Rainbows End. I think the former is ok, not great; the latter is a better book (with AR future vibes), but still lacking something that makes u never drop it before u finish it.
Joel_Mckay 2 days ago [-]
"Principles and Techniques for Designing Precision Machines"(Layton Carter Hale, Thesis, 1999)
Mostly seeking design tips for a vacuum tolerant micro-positioning stage project. =3
paulorlando 3 days ago [-]
One of the books I'm reading now is Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay, by George Ewart Evans. Set in 1957 Suffolk county, England. I often read in a theme and this theme is about cultural and technological transitions.
0xB0D 3 days ago [-]
Gnomon
Just finished "there is no antimemetics division" an absolutely astounding read
laweijfmvo 3 days ago [-]
An Immense World. It’s not as jaw-dropping as I’d expected (yes, I know rattlesnakes can “see” heat), but it’s also not an easy/fun read either. So I’ll probably land at around 3/5 rating.
yanhangyhy 2 days ago [-]
I’ve recently been reading a book about the Ritz Hotel in Paris during World War II. It hinted that Simone de Beauvoir and Ernest Hemingway might have slept together. Is this true?
dyauspitr 3 days ago [-]
The pillars of the earth. It took me a while to get to it but what a book.
ex-aws-dude 3 days ago [-]
Reading Gödel, Escher, Bach but I've been stuck on the MU puzzle for days
euthymiclabs 3 days ago [-]
The Score, by C. Thi Nguyen.
It explores why we love metrics in games, but hate them at work.
Razengan 3 days ago [-]
Nothing currently, but most recently, the various audiobooks of The Wind in the Willows to fall asleep, and Diana Wynne Jones' (of Howl's Moving Castle fame) Chrestomanci series while awake.
jtgi 3 days ago [-]
Assorted Crisis Events by Deniz Camp (Graphic Novel)
- what if time was buggy?
Playing Off the Rail: A Pool Hustler's Journey by David McCumber (1996)
- hustling in the golden era of pool in the usa
gitowiec 2 days ago [-]
Graham Oppy - Atheism: The Basics
I just want it do it right, for my child.
hhhAndrew 2 days ago [-]
Gene Wolfe, Peace
I will admit, I needed the spoiler afterwards to untangle it.
raleighm 2 days ago [-]
I've read all his series but haven't gotten to Peace one yet, and his diehard fans all seem to agree it's one of his best works. How was it, other than the tangle. (Which is my experience with all of his books tbh.)
hhhAndrew 2 days ago [-]
I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would enjoy a sleepy midwestern memoir. Which it wasn't, quite. Always that Wolfe thing where you know something else is going on ...
scrapcode 2 days ago [-]
I've never been much fiction reader but I recently picked up The Gunslinger by Stephen King and it has been tough to put down.
kstrauser 2 days ago [-]
There may be better writers, but I don’t think there’s a better storyteller. King tells amazing stories, and The Gunslinger is near the top of my list of favorites.
vhiremath4 2 days ago [-]
Reading Psycho-cybernetics to understand teleological goal-oriented mindsets. Reading The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt to remember what America used to stand for.
Zizizizz 2 days ago [-]
Just finished the Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb. I loved it!
rsyring 3 days ago [-]
- Hacker News, mostly comments, and the occasional full article
- Google News and the occasional full article
- Email
- Slack
- ChatGPT/ Codex responses
- Road signs
- Various things in various mobile apps I use
- Websites
- Movie/Show subtitles
Off the top of my head, that accounts for most of the things I read on a weekly basis.
No time for books.
almost_usual 3 days ago [-]
Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane.
sho_hn 3 days ago [-]
I read Lane's The Vital Question this year and enjoyed it quite a bit. If you've read both, would you compare them for me?
pchristensen 3 days ago [-]
I havent read PSS but I loved The Vital Question and Transformer. It was so much better than a book on the Krebs cycle had any business being. I probably liked VQ better though.
miesman 2 days ago [-]
Atomic Accidents By James Maheffey. Witty author who worked in the field. Extremely entertaining highly recommended.
Arad883 2 days ago [-]
Picking away at TCP/IP Illustrated. Internet engineering, packet by packet. Slow going, but I'm into it.
enjrolas 2 days ago [-]
just finished The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman. It's a really well-written story looking at the collision of the American Medical System and Hmong culture, specifically one Hmong family who has a young child with epilepsy. I like it a _lot_, because there are no villains in the story, but it is a tragedy, and the writer really gets into why these two groups aren't on the same wavelength.
yboris 2 days ago [-]
The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality by Andy Clark
So far read about 20%, seems like a lovely theory tying together a lot about how the mind works.
theflyinghorse 3 days ago [-]
Finally got to Dostoevsky's Brother Karamazov. This will take a while.
jppope 3 days ago [-]
This is my K2. Grapes of Wrath is my Everest. I've started it ~7 times and never made it past 120 pages. Good Luck!
nephihaha 3 days ago [-]
There are much harder works out there. Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest, Finnegans Wake to name but three. Heck, even Walter Scott's novels. That's before we get onto ergodic literarure.
I read the Grapes of Wrath many years ago. I think Steinbeck is more effective in his shorter works.
hwc 3 days ago [-]
For me, I took a copy of it with me on a solo backpacking trip. It was the only entertainment I had for a week.
snovymgodym 3 days ago [-]
It's good.
Try to get a modern translation if you're not reading in original language.
aerodexis 3 days ago [-]
I'm hyped for you. This one is a massive banger.
chistev 3 days ago [-]
Read Crime and Punishment?
ngokevin 3 days ago [-]
Avatar: The Last Airbender books. Yangchen's series. Nothing you'd use to try to show off your knowledge over coffee, but fun well-written read with great world building.
ElCapitanMarkla 3 days ago [-]
I just finished the full cast Harry Potter audiobooks and they were fantastic.
Currently reading and recommending - Endurance by Alfred Lansing. Sir Earnest Shackleton’s attempt to cross the Antarctic.
dcminter 3 days ago [-]
Ooh, do try "Farthest North" too, about Nansen's North Polar expedition. Quite fascinating and (I found) quite amusing to a modern reader for various reasons.
misiti3780 3 days ago [-]
President Lincoln by William Lee Miller about the magnanimity of Lincoln
God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre by Richard Grant about hiking through cartel-run Mexico alone
stevenwoo 3 days ago [-]
On the Origin of Sex - real life examples that seem like science fiction. How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch, I read last year but goes into most recent discoveries in physics.
godzillafarts 3 days ago [-]
I just wrapped up the Murderbot Diaries series and am starting in on Dungeon Crawler Carl.
I normally read a lot of nonfiction and history and am trying to make a point to read more fiction this year.
askvictor 3 days ago [-]
Haha I've been trying to do the reverse :)
futurecat 2 days ago [-]
These days, a lot of manga. Favorites: Dorohedoro, Dai Dark, Tokyo Kaido, Ikigami, The Drifting Classroom, The Ghost in the Shell.
ta8903 2 days ago [-]
I love Q Hayashida! I should catch up to Dai Dark.
futurecat 2 days ago [-]
Me too. Her style and writing are incredible.
collide6 2 days ago [-]
The Dresden Files (Big ol' series)
mulr00ney 2 days ago [-]
Hell yeah. I picked these up again a few years ago after enjoying them as a teenager. Reading in my thirties, the early ones are definitely rockier than I remember and I did cringe a bit but it's gone on so long that Butcher has clearly become a better writer over time.
Some people think the later books have lost the juice but I think as you approach 20 books the vibe is gonna shift a lot, it's definitely a lot more high-powered fantasy than the first ones which isn't everyone's taste.
ItsMattyG 3 days ago [-]
if you're into litrpg, have you tried the wandering inn? it's not so meaty but it's above almost all other litrpgs in that department and the storytelling is great
sanswork 3 days ago [-]
Non-Fiction(on breaks): Indistractable
Fiction(before bed): Quicksilver Neal Stephenson
Audio(during chores): Dungeon Crawler Carl(Up to book 6)
Next up:
Non-Fiction: Ten things I wish I knew about raising boys, Outdoor kids in an indoor world, Intentional(Chris Bailey)
Fiction: The rest of the Baroque Cycle, then moving onto The Laundry Files by Charles Stross, then the rest of Discworld
Audio: The rest of DCC then I'm going to switch to podcasts for a while nothing else planned after this right now.
jeffnv 3 days ago [-]
"Lost Worlds" - by Patrick Wyman, fascinating prehistory about meso and neolithic 'civilizations', their lives, their rises and downfalls. Really amazing stuff
largePanda9 3 days ago [-]
I like his podcast a lot, brief vignettes into… whatever. Really fun production and not a deep dive into topics generally, but that’s a feature and not a bug in the context in which I listen to him
fk_fk 3 days ago [-]
"A man in the Maze" by Robert Silverberg. Don't know why but I felt the urge to re-read it, last time I read it 30 years ago and remembered the plot very well.
hackernud3s 3 days ago [-]
Iain Banks - Excession - 5 stars and the most optimistic series on AI
Dungeon Crawler Card - Not for me but I might give it another chance
Bukowski - Post Office - Worth reading, Gen-Z might get triggered
dejournal 23 hours ago [-]
I've been finding it difficult to get back into reading books (Hacker News and X are difficult for me to deprioritise)....
...but this year I set myself the goal of reading 10 books. One of the things that has really helped, is giving myself permission to quit a book if I am not enjoying it after the first 50 pages, or if it's too much of a struggle.
Also having 2 books on the go at the same time has been helpful too.
I am currnetly reading:
+ The Eloquence of the Sardine - Bill Francis
+ What about you doing with your life - J. Krishnmurti (recommended by Naval)
I am enjoying the first, learning lots of interesting facts about fish and the ocean but the second is quite slow and difficult and I might give up soon.
michaelmior 3 days ago [-]
I recently discovered Charles Soule who started in comic books and ventured into novels. I read The Oracle Year recently and now I'm reading The Endless Vessel.
antonyragleap 2 days ago [-]
Currently reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications — on the replication chapter. Dense but worth it. What are you reading?
mattmar96 3 days ago [-]
Boom Town by Sam Anderson. Its an intertwined history of Oklahoma City and its basketball team, the Thunder. I'm about halfway through, and I'm loving it so far.
cheschire 3 days ago [-]
I'm on book 3 of the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown.
arwhatever 3 days ago [-]
Gouged: The End of a Fair Price—and What That Means for Your Wallet by Lindsay Owens became available today, and I have purchased ebook and will begin reading today.
syngrog66 3 days ago [-]
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer. my 5th+ read
Weaveworld, by Clive Barker. my 2nd read
Surface Detail, by Ian M. Banks
devtest reads of my WIP book on computer performance
kurttheviking 3 days ago [-]
I read a lot so I'll toss out some fiction titles you might like if you're a DCC fan:
* Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer -- post-apoc dystopian, somewhat cozy, told from a robot's perspective (who is joined by a companion cyborg dog)
* Blacktongue Thief by Chris Buehlman -- witty and snarky fantasy, solid character development and world building; and, if you like it, book 2 in the series (book 3 if you count a prequel) comes out soon
* Mortedant's Peril -- Fantasy mystery in a world where magic allows the "detectives" to touch the dead and sense their final thoughts/words; in that world, someone learns a dark secret from a victim...
* Trade of Blood -- Another fantasy mystery that is exceptionally well told; it's Book 3 in a series so I'd start with Tainted Cup if you haven't read that already
* The Infinite State -- new SciFi by Richard Swan (usually a fantasy author); a universe where ultra wealthy can establish colony planets, someone attempts to start a democracy.
sphars 3 days ago [-]
> The Blacktongue Thief
I just started this last week after wrapping up DCC series and seeing it recommended in a reddit thread. I'm surprised that I'm enjoying it, it's not my usual genre
2snakes 3 days ago [-]
Proofs and refutations by laktos
Basic mathematics by lang
Mathematics for nonmathematician
Hail mary andy weil
Just picked up player piano linked here
RGS1811 3 days ago [-]
I just finished Wilfred Sellars “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”
I am perpetually rereading the works of Richard Rorty.
arialdomartini 3 days ago [-]
The first volume of Software Foundations, and the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust.
Both very very slowly.
I guess it will take me years to have reason of both.
waldothedog 3 days ago [-]
Energy and Civilization by Vaclav Smil. Bounced off a few Robert Macfarlane titles —just not for me — and also Anne of Green Gables w my kid
Uptrenda 2 days ago [-]
"So you got gutted like a pig. A survival guide for unemployed software engineers." An O'reily classic.
rceDia 2 days ago [-]
Catching up on some classics,
Resurrection, Tolstoy
Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck
Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passo
FartinMowler 2 days ago [-]
Resurrection is near the front of my reading queue. Tolstoy donated the proceeds of that book to help the Doukhobors emigrate from Russia to Canada in 1899. My dad was a Doukhobor. Thanks Leo!
TrustPatches 3 days ago [-]
Fiction: Between Two Fires
Non-fiction: 21st Century Monetary Policy
eltercero 2 days ago [-]
"Between Two Fires" is so good, I think about it a lot. From the same author (although, in a very different vein) I really enjoyed The Blacktongue Thief.
goostavos 2 days ago [-]
Meaty: Quarantine by Greg Egan. Easily my favorite book so far this year. It starts as a detective story, but then spirals into something much bigger. Forced beliefs, quantum super positions, and the existential dread of repeatedly facing your own non-existence. It's second only to Permutation City in my Egan tier list.
That book led me to Quantum Computing for Everyone. It's good so far, but more work than expected to follow along being that I'm dumb.
Since the question is what are you reading (not what have you read): Ant-Kind by Charlie Kaufman. It's too soon to say if it's good or not, but it has made me laugh out loud several times. I'm about 80 pages in, and it's only just now started to open up into Kaufman's recursive, meta story telling that makes his film stuff so cool.
snapplebobapple 2 days ago [-]
Have you read his orthogonal series yet? I like it a lot but I haven't gotten to Permutation city yet. (that is literally on my x4pro waiting for me to get through century rain to get to it though).
snapcaster 2 days ago [-]
Invisible Women and the Culture series by Iain Banks (Use of Weapons currently). Both really good
ilt 2 days ago [-]
The Forest People by Colin Turnbull and If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Ancalagon 3 days ago [-]
Finally getting around to reading the LOTR trilogy. I've read the Hobbit and the Silmarillion, just never got around to the main story.
vigneshravichan 2 days ago [-]
Designing Data Intensive Applications by Martin Klepman. It’s my second time and I felt I understand better this time.
kaypro 3 days ago [-]
Just finished “Every Man Dies Alone” by Hans Fallada and now half way through “The Lady and the Monk” by Pico Iyer. Both recommended.
weldu 3 days ago [-]
I’m reading the gospel! It’s super interesting and accurate account to my understanding.
I’m specifically talking about the New Testament.
I’m currently reading Hebrews 6.
dv35z 2 days ago [-]
Curious if you have read the bible completely, starting from the beginning.
I recently started it - currently 30% through. I am tryin to hold back judgement until I have completed the book, but I can definitely say its quite shocking, nearly every page.
Book 2 of Hyperion Cantos. Really enjoying it, but am unsure if I want to do books 3 & 4. Anyone read them and recommend either way?
bontaq 3 days ago [-]
I'd say it's some of best science (?) fiction written, so I'm biased, but yes books 3 & 4 are worth it. It gets very bizarre and the ending has stuck with me for a long time.
dcminter 3 days ago [-]
I liked 1 & 2 a lot (I happened to read 2 before realising that 1 existed and that worked well for me).
3 & 4 I thought were quite poor.
nottorp 2 days ago [-]
3 & 4 are ... different and more conventional than 1 & 2. They can be disappointing but they do try to bring some closure to all the events.
drakonka 2 days ago [-]
I'm reading Awakenings by Oliver Sacks in English and Medmänniskor by Stefan Einhorn in Swedish.
marshray 2 days ago [-]
Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley
I didn't really get this book the first time through.
SplitVengeance 3 days ago [-]
Just started Dark Tower Series Book 4: Wizard and Glass. I crushed the first 3 books, then took a break to read dungeon crawler carl.
The Undetectables by Courtney Smyth. A ghost and a bunch of magical teenagers solve paranormal mysteries
tobadzistsini 3 days ago [-]
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, the manga adaptations of The Shadow over Innsmouth and The Shadow out of Time, Progress and Poverty.
ta8903 2 days ago [-]
At home, Atlas Shrugged. It's an interesting story even if you don't care about the allegories, I'm really enjoying it so far. But it will probably take me half a year to finish it at this rate, since I can only read it on weekends.
At work I'm currently trying to read SF light novels from the turn of the millennium. I finished Murasaki no Qualia some time ago, and it's just as amazing as I remember the manga being when I read it as a teen. Right now I'm reading Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu. Sadly very few of these are translated. The Last and First Idol story collection is also a good read if you're interested in this genre.
undopamine 3 days ago [-]
Just started Quantum Break: Zero State
Highly recommend the game for anyone who liked Dark or Primer (or any other fiction that features stable time loops).
sgordon70 2 days ago [-]
Bill Bryson - a short history of nearly everything. And he means EVERYTHING.
dmillar 3 days ago [-]
London Falling, fascinating story about a piece of London's underbelly. Same guy that wrote Say Nothing, which is also great.
rearview 3 days ago [-]
Just recently started watching Reacher S1 and it was absolutely amazing so started reading the book and wow - like its absolutely amazing
katspaugh 2 days ago [-]
Slowly reading “Seeing that Frees” by Rob Burbea.
Highly recommended if you want to challenge your view of the world.
sieste 3 days ago [-]
Ready Player One, together with my 9yo boy.
mpreda 2 days ago [-]
Looked over the lists, and there is one that was not mentioned yet:
1. "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny
ojbyrne 3 days ago [-]
Currently, “Football” by Chuck Klosterman. Basically about the cultural impact of (American) Football. Pretty good.
buckhx 3 days ago [-]
Infinite Jest. Enjoying it so far, but the length keeps on killing me. I'm like 5% of the way in after a couple of weeks...
desbo 3 days ago [-]
Took me a year. Loved it! Planning to go back when I have the energy.
The Pale King was also really good and a little easier going.
rowdyranga 2 days ago [-]
Currently reading: The Magus by John Fowles
Just finished reading: Middlemarch by George Eliot
SV_BubbleTime 3 days ago [-]
Dostoevsky, the Brothers Karamazov!
Oh hell, what truly great novel. It’s a long collection of people’s inner monologues, and it’s confusing as hell at first that every Russian has at least three names. But so good.
Before this: The Subtle Art Of Folding Space… biggest pile of shit I’ve read in years. Fuck. So stupid. If you made me pick between reading it again and a Kristin Hannah… I’d just go get my wine glass and basic bitch sweatpants now. It was supposed to be “modern sci fi” it was actually a food snob that seems like they’re in a cult and trying subtly to tell you how everyone else is so fucking stupid except the smart people that choose to be mentally superior to everyone else. Bad bad bad.
opminion 2 days ago [-]
Daedalus; or, Science and the Future by Haldane. To be followed by Icarus by Russell.
asimovfan 2 days ago [-]
Just reread all of Nero Wolfe by Rex Stout. 40+ books. Didn't even breathe.
dgellow 3 days ago [-]
„Practical Engineering for Inventors“. It’s not really made to be read from beginning to end but I do like to le
adangit 3 days ago [-]
Tau Zero, by Poul Anderson. Love it so far——does anyone know how scientifically accurate it might be?
david927 3 days ago [-]
Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.
lbrito 3 days ago [-]
Dear God, why would anyone - more than once - downvote this?
Its simply one of the best novels ever written. I hope it was downvoted by a clanker, not a real person.
sudokatsu 2 days ago [-]
Finally getting around to reading House of Leaves by Danielewski.
BrenBarn 2 days ago [-]
"Middlemarch", "Utopia for Realists", and various graphic novels.
ultrasounder 3 days ago [-]
Notes from the underground, myth of Sisyphus and Thus spoke Zarathustra. All three in parallel
PaulHoule 3 days ago [-]
In my bag right now I have: The Fox and the Jewel by Karen A. Smeyers and The Spiral Dance by Starhawk.
nottorp 3 days ago [-]
Arkady Martine right now. Pretty good.
sim04ful 3 days ago [-]
Samuel Butler's adaptation of Homer.
vsundar 3 days ago [-]
I've been meaning to get into classics more and, lately, I have. Otherwise my usual reads are historical fiction and fantasy.
I just finished 'All Quiet on the Western Front' - reading with https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicBookClub/. Really great book, though a bit heavy content - ww1 from a german soldier's pov, gets you to feel the mindnumbing senselessness and horror - highly recommend it if your tastes run that way.
Also reading Iliad, the Fagles translation, through https://catherineproject.org/ about a third of way through right now and we'll also be reading the Emily Wilson translation later this year. It's been fun discussing it with people. This translation has been a easy read, far easier than I expected. And the discussions make it thought-provoking. For meaty, this might work.
Also reading 'When Things Fall Apart' by Pema Chodron. This is slow going, thoughtful. I read a few pages every few days, never more than a chapter at a time. I suppose it's all variants of being fully in the present moment to some extent. And I think I might re-read it after I finish. It did get me thinking again about loving-kindness and tonglen. In this vein, 'Taming the Tiger Within' was also great - short and sweet, simple language but still thought-provoking.
Earlier this year I read 'The Road' which I loved, and highly recommend. Dystopian with language to match. On the fantasy side the 'Ana & Din' novels by Robert Jackson Bennett, think sherlock holmes but in a fantasy setting and magic for science. I liked the earlier ones in the series better or maybe I just read too many of them in a short period. Either works for a good read though I think Ana & Din might be easier.
Other slightly off the beaten path fiction recommendations would be 'Eagle in the Snow' - set in Roman times about an officer holding the line against attacking german forces, starts a bit rocky and I was lost a bit and found it hard to understand initially but totally loved it as it progressed. I came to it from a fivebooks recommendation. Also, CJ Sansom's shardlake series, another fivebooks recommendation I think. This is about a hunchback lawyer investigating something each time. I love how it gets us into the time period and the personalities involved.
Now that I'm done with the book for classicbookclub, I might start 'A Tale of Two Cities'
1-more 3 days ago [-]
The Overstory is rad fiction. Just started listening to Ordinary Men which is about a Polish police battalion responsible for a great many murders during the Holocaust. The members of that battalion were, I guess, welcomed back into society afterwards? Idk, I just started. I'll tell you one thing, though: it's weird to absorb facts about the Shoah as digestible statistics fun facts (for lack of a better term) but those little snippets are very necessary to get my arms around the scale of things such as it. It's the same as happened when I listened to Late Victorian Holocausts. So now I have stats like
- Most Jewish victims of the Holocaust died by gunshot in the occupied USSR
- In March 1942, 80% of Holocaust victims were still alive and by February 1943 80% were dead.
- Per capita incomes were equal in the first and last years of the British Raj
- Indian grain exports increased in the 1880s and 90s and there were 3(?) different famines at that time
rattling around in my head in the same part that holds on to "Pakistan has never had a PM finish a 5 year term," "The Lions, Falcons, and Bills (non-exhaustive) have never won a Super Bowl," "There are no surviving contemperaneous attestations of Hamilcar and Hannibal Barca" and "the first drummer of the Beatles was called Pete Best and made an album called Best of the Beatles"
antisthenes 3 days ago [-]
> - Most Jewish victims of the Holocaust died by gunshot in the occupied USSR
> - In March 1942, 80% of Holocaust victims were still alive and by February 1943 80% were dead.
Makes sense. A couple of things happened: 1942 Wannsee Conference in January 1942 - which I assume took some time during 1942 to get into motion.
Germany started losing, they realized they did not have the logistics to feed additional millions of people in the occupied territories.
1-more 22 hours ago [-]
Right, I'm just shocked by the speed of it all and how many regular people had to be mobilized to kill so many in 11 months.
vladde 2 days ago [-]
reading the second edition of "Clean Code", it's been a while since i read the first edition.
will be giving my trainee this book too, and hoping we can discuss parts of the book we agree and don't agree with.
amadeoeoeo 3 days ago [-]
"Correction" from Bernhard. Wow. This is in its own league of weirdness and yet it flows...
Tomte 3 days ago [-]
Back issues of The London Review of Books.
tocs3 3 days ago [-]
I do not know if this is related to this comments but if you are reading The London Review of Books so that you do not have to read the whole book, maybe it is. I do not watch movies much anymore. Sometime though I want to know what a movie is all about. So, I just read the wikipedia plot review on it. It saves me the time by not having to sit through much tedium but I get a scenes of what it is about.
I have been reading The Bible. It has been a long time project and I have a long ways to go. I am much more agnostic that a true believer but it has been interesting. Hearing popular views about it and Christianity vs. reading The Book is sort of like the difference between reading a novel and watching the based on movie.
zero_shift 3 days ago [-]
I am an atheist but I have read a little bit of the bible, mostly early OT. I recommend reading a scholarly / literal translation, because there is a lot of nuance in the Hebrew
tocs3 3 days ago [-]
Do you have any recommendations for translations? I have been reading from some I just have laying around.
I have been wanting to read Donald Knuth's "3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated".
The King James Version! I'd only recommend modern translations as a second point of reference when trying to interpret a difficult verse, or for looking at how modern critical editions of the NT differ from the traditional Byzantine NT. When a verse is difficult to read in the KJV, that's usually because the original text is difficult/ambiguous. Modern editions tend to pave over those difficult/ambiguous passages with a "clear" but opinionated reading, while the KJV provides a more literal rendering of what's in the source text.
My favorite example: see how all mainstream modern editions (NRSV, NIV, ESV, NASB, CSB, and even the NKJV) say "every man" (or something along those lines), rather than "any that pisseth against the wall" (literal rendering of the Hebrew):
https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/1%20Samuel%2025%3A22
zero_shift 2 days ago [-]
I do not advise this. It is effectively translating twice: Hebrew through EM English to contemporary English
throwaway093020 2 days ago [-]
I personally like the term "biblical English" as a description of the KJV's dialect. It's not really representative of early modern English, as it often uses non-standard grammar to preserve the word order and cadence of the source texts.
zero_shift 2 days ago [-]
I would be less confident about that, there are false friends in EME and most modern readers would benefit from not having the added complication.
(I don't have a theology degree, but I do have an English degree. I have read parts of KJV, and it has literary significance, but it is not attempting to be a bare literal translation)
throwaway093020 2 days ago [-]
It's usually pretty obvious when a word means something different than what you think it means, because the verse won't make any sense. And stopping for a moment to resolve that confusion is always a good learning experience. You either learn something about English, about Hebrew/Greek, or about the text's cultural context or how it's been historically understood.
nephihaha 2 days ago [-]
For the purposes of this post, I'm concentrating mainly on English language style, and not the quality of the translation from the original languages. The KJV, though outdated, has good turns of phrase. Many modern translations are lacking when it comes to the beauty of the English. A decent translation stands up as literature in its own right.
* New Living Translation (NLT): My main one nowadays. This one is not for everyone, but I find it very readable and was recommended it online. My one criticism is that the style is a bit too American. It works on a thought for thought basis.
* New English Bible (NEB): I have something of a soft spot for this one. It has the opposite problem to the NLT in that its style is sometimes too British. Nonetheless I always liked its text lay out and style. Sadly it got superseded by the Revised English Bible which is not so good. I mostly come across it second hand.
* New King James Version (NKJV): this one at least retains some of the literary qualities of the KJV while making the text more accessible to a modern audience. It does have some problems (mostly those that afflict other modern Bible versions).
The International Standard Version is online only, but its range of sources has piqued my interest as a study Bible, but its readability seems to vary. I hope it comes out in print.
I have Lorimer's New Testament in Scots. I find it a bit uneven. I know folk who love it.
As for BAD Bible versions, I'd out the following on the naughty stool. The Scholars' Version is gospels only, but is horrendous to read (its version of the Beatitudes says "congratulations to the..." as if they'd won Reader's Digest Prize Draw.) The New World Translation is the Jehovah's Witness version and had clunky prose, making it extremely unpleasurable to read. The Good News Bible is not as annoying as the other two but its English is oversimplified and directed at children and learners. The Message goes for colloquial English and doesn't always work. The Conservative Bible, like NIV and NSRVue allows its political biases in.
haensi 2 days ago [-]
I have read 3:16 and it’s really good. Also, it made me want to meet Donald Knuth so I went to his church for Bible study and to his home after service. Great memory.
phtrivier 2 days ago [-]
Going through "Here comes the sun" by Bill McKibben - slightly disappointed / surprised, as the book is very much a pamphlet / manifesto in favor of a single idea (that I could paraphrase as "solar is good, solar is _now_ cheap, it's so cheap that it's very cheap, and so good that's it's very good, and we should build more cause it's cheap and good, and if you disagree you're a fossil fuel shill astroturfer and all the land and materials problems are not really problems, and oh, did I mentionned it's cheap and good ?")
To which I'll say, _fair enough_, but I was hoping for a slightly more nuanced view of the topic.
Also started "Sutskever's list" by Richard Heimann, which goes into the history of the current AI paradigm "one paper at a time". It's written for a curious audience : people who can vaguely understand the concepts, but not go into details. That means that I kinda "get" some chapters because I already read about the topics, and I'm completely stumped by some. But the "insider baseball" history is illuminating sometimes.
mexicocitinluez 2 days ago [-]
Book 4 of Tad William's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series.
computerdork 2 days ago [-]
Re-read Crime and Punishment - read this as a teenager in high school, and (not suprisingly) think at the time had missed the main point behind it (and warning, if you haven't read it, spoilers ahead!).
When I was young, thought that Raskolnikov was an example of an intelligent, moral person who was struggling with higher concepts which led him to murder. And moreover back then, thought he was a overall a good protagnist who was just in an impossible situation.
Now, realized the novel is more about psychology and how people who are overall good and others who are overall bad make choices, and then they have to mentally deal with these decisions. Yeah, think Dostoevsky is saying Raskolnikov was actually very misguided in the reasoning behind his murders. Eventhough his intentions were in many respects actually good, they were egotistically and overly idealistic. Eventually, Raskonikov realized he had deluded himself and that he was hyperinflating his own merits and value as a person over other people. And also, at a more basically level, he struggled with his conscience on whether to avoid being caught, commit suicide or turn himself in. He himself didn't believe he was an immoral person, and when he realized he had deluded himself, he struggled in the end on what course of action to take.
One downside of the book is by today's standards, it is very long-winded and often take several pages to go through something that would take a single page by many writers today. But think this also makes it more realistic, because most people in actual life don't get to the point that quickly. Really fascinating.
joeguilmette 2 days ago [-]
I recently read this as well. Some passages were just fantastic and really captured the imagination and made you think and feel.
It’s a shame that, as you said, but modern standards the
book has a lot of rough edges.
If it were half as long it would be 10x better.
If you got through C&P unscathed, I’d *highly* recommend The Gambler. It is absolutely a modern, tight, fast paced thriller. It is a deep, disturbing look into addiction and compulsive behavior.
I found it as thought provoking and insightful as C&P but, crucially, I also enjoyed reading the whole thing.
thatsnogood123 2 days ago [-]
i also re-read this as an adult after having read it in school and not really gotten it. I don't have any more talent for literary interpretation than back then, but it's funny how much more interesting everything is as an adult. The murder scene grabbed as well as any modern thriller.
computerdork 2 days ago [-]
Agreed, the murder scene is very realistic in its "make it up as you go along" feel to it. Really also liked the scene where Raskolnikov, after days of carrying the tremendous burden of guilt and shame of these murders, finally confesses what he did to Sonya. You could feel this enormous weight being lifted off his shoulders. Both great scenes.
stewart_p 3 days ago [-]
I'm reading AI technology blog, because I'm looking for a job, so sad.
tonymet 3 days ago [-]
Reading a number of books on the Manhattan Project / Cold War / Soviet Nuclear Program
* Dead Hand
* Atomic Accidents
* Hiroshima
* Command and Control
leandot 3 days ago [-]
The Immortal Great Souls from Phil Tucker. Very enjoyable fantasy with unique world and characters.
imperialdrive 3 days ago [-]
Half way through Dungeon Crawler Carl book 8, really got hooked on the whole universe haha.
Insanity 2 days ago [-]
Just finished: “Animal Liberation Now”. The original animal liberation book was a major contributing factor to me becoming vegetarian, and this new book has convinced me to become vegan instead
Starting today: “In the shadow of man”.
purpleflame1257 2 days ago [-]
Finishing up Wolf Hall right now. I quite enjoy it.
leandot 3 days ago [-]
The Immortal Great Souls by Phil Tucker. Very enjoyable fantasy with great world and characters.
FumblingBear 3 days ago [-]
I also vouch for this series! Some of my favorite character work and worldbuilding in recent years, and I'm super excited to see where the series goes!
AlexErrant 3 days ago [-]
If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies
I'm not a doomer, but I'm trying to understand the perspective. Up to chapter 10, I'm still not convinced. There's too much hand-waving around what will happen.
It's like: 1. AI smarter than us 2. ??? 3. We're dead. What happens in 2.?
I just got past the "extinction scenario" and I'm wildly unconvinced. I agree that AI can theoretically create a bioweapon. I'm unconvinced that an AI can hide its ability to RSI, find money to run its weights on a random GPU farm, train itself to be smarter _outside_ a lab with no human input, then somehow manipulate people to give it supplies to build a bioweapon which it uses to kill us all. I to believe that Yudkowsky was good at fanfiction; this senario did not demonstrate that. My number 1 question: why do they think an RSI capable model would be first developed OUTSIDE a frontier lab? The labs have more compute, more data, more human brains working on the problem. Also thousands of variations of that same model that escaped. The escaping model somehow acquires the millions of dollars it takes to run training to somehow RSI itself into infinity then decides to kill us all, all before the frontier labs manage to achieve RSI?
Come on.
Anyway. Finishing the book for completeness, but massively underwhelmed.
lanfeust6 2 days ago [-]
Similar sentiment, have not read the book but I imagine I've absorbed some of it through rat/ea circles and here. I can appreciate an argument that rapidly-improving AI, with mere probabilistic output, could lead to bad outcomes owing to neglect and complacency, or aiding at wreaking havoc. What I don't buy is the argument that sentient super-intelligence could "accidentally" manifest itself through recursive self-improvement, which is along few dimensions. I'm not sure it would be even possible to intentionally create one, but it would be redundant; you don't need RSI to generate the value people want from AI. We could pass strict laws against that, but it wouldn't satisfy the doomers who are already arguing that human minds are "just an algorithm", as though AI sentience is a foregone conclusion
ssttoo 3 days ago [-]
Binging on Barbara Ehrenreich: Nickeled and Dimed, Dancing in the Streets, Natural Causes
pykello 3 days ago [-]
- "Foundations of Analysis" by Belding & Mitchell
- "On Writing Well" by Zinsser
snicky 3 days ago [-]
Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China's New Social Order
Not sure if this one qualifies as more meaty :)
ermir 2 days ago [-]
I am currently reading The Cauldron by Simon Sebag Montefiore
AbbeFaria 3 days ago [-]
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
aerodexis 3 days ago [-]
Don't bother with this.
I'm reading Information and Meaning in Evolutionary Processes by Harms and it goes off on how weak Dawkins is.
drivers99 3 days ago [-]
I recently ran across an edition of the Selfish Gene which adds two chapters from The Extended Phenotype that are supposed to fix/clarify some things. I haven't read any of the 3 books mentioned in this thread, but it makes me curious if there's any connection between the criticism and the updates.
chistev 3 days ago [-]
Oh, I plan to re-read this in the near future!
"Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence"
In my original comment, I Iisted some other books by Dawkins if you're interested -
Abaddon´s Gate, James S.A. Cory.
From the Expanse thrilogy.
Very very good scy-fi
gieksosz 2 days ago [-]
“Careless People” by Sarah Wyn-Williams. About Meta.
onel 2 days ago [-]
Breakneck, China's quest to engineer the future. Dan Wang
fiatpandas 2 days ago [-]
- Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
- From Third World to First
Last finished: Human Use of Human Beings
utopiah 2 days ago [-]
DCC book 4
The economy of anonymity by Amaya
Artificial Intimacy by Sherry Turkle, just out
gdotdesign 2 days ago [-]
I've started reading the Expanse series once again.
gibspaulding 2 days ago [-]
I try to read fiction and non fiction in parallel, so my current pairing is How Asia Works by Joe Studwell and Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Enjoying both so far!
Other books I’ve enjoyed recently:
The Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft - I read Endurance by Alfred Lansing last year so it was fun having a real Antarctic adventure in my mind while reading it.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy - I actually started this a couple of years ago and quit part way through deciding I couldn’t put myself through it anymore. I kept thinking about it though, until I finally picked it back up and finished it this summer. Horrifying, but quite a masterpiece.
If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky - I was about a year late to the party on this, but it still holds up. I would recommend it.
The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Malaby - Excellent! Fascinating seeing a glimpse inside of the companies currently eating the world.
dominicq 2 days ago [-]
The Road hurt me spiritually
dmbche 3 days ago [-]
Maupassant, Appartion et autres comptes d'angoisse (very good)
Becky Chambers, the long way to a small angry planet (very good)
Asimov, Second foundation (just finished, not as good as Foundation but good still)
Maybe Knut Hansun, The last joy (Nazi sympathizer, might just put the book down - and book not blowing my mind)
Edit0: writing this and seeing Hansun was a Nazi collaborator - putting the book down
MrOrelliOReilly 2 days ago [-]
The Last Witnesses by Svetlana Alexievich. A sad book!
jlengrand 3 days ago [-]
Le Comte de MonteChristo, an African history of Africa and Hold me tight
gAI 3 days ago [-]
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
Always.
suzukivenom 2 days ago [-]
Naufragios by Alvar Nunez Caveza de Vaca.
pastel8739 3 days ago [-]
I just read Killers of the Flower Moon, which was great.
kevinor 3 days ago [-]
Material world and chip wars. Both brilliant. Material world highlights our human ingenuity with an optimism for the future as it outlines our exploitation of the worlds resources over history up to the present time.
Chips wars, for me as a dev without a strong hardware background is a fascinating read into the history of Silicon Valley, from the 50s right up to nvidia and Taiwan semiconductor.
ekjhgkejhgk 3 days ago [-]
I recently read this and followed it up with "Only the paranoid survive", a story of Intel by Andy Grove.
pyjarrett 3 days ago [-]
Discourses by Epictetus
joshrw 2 days ago [-]
200 Years Together by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
sirpilade 2 days ago [-]
Aeneid, it’s been a while since my school years
algo314 2 days ago [-]
Hegel, Lacan - embraced the dark side :D
asa123 2 days ago [-]
beware (s)he who open hegel for pleasure
donohoe 2 days ago [-]
Hyperion, by Dan Simmons
I had just finished the first "Dungeon Crawler Carl" and found it harmless and not worth the money. Frankly I'm a little surprised its a best seller. Do the later books get any better?
Hyperion is a first-time read and as I near the end I know I'll seek out the next one.
marshray 2 days ago [-]
The first two books contain the primary story. I'm told it was originally supposed to be a single book.
The end of the first book made me wish for a paper copy I could throw against the wall :-D
gertburger 2 days ago [-]
wrt DCC, the audiobooks by Soundbooth Theater are really good! A very different experience from traditional audiobooks.
ArisC 2 days ago [-]
Only tangentially related shameless plug but... For the readers here, could you give www.bertieapp.com a try? Would love feedback!
greset 2 days ago [-]
Just finished Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. One of the best books I've read, ever.
It's long and tedious, and if you like getting lost in minute descriptions of mundane objects and daily routines of people who lived in past eras, then you'll love it and feel sad when it's over.
I also find books like this to be a great antidote to the pace of current life, where you're pressured to "read n books in 1 year" or you're not deemed a proper reader.
Next up is going to be Lonesome Dove, suggested by someone in this very thread!
bityard 3 days ago [-]
Airframe by Michael Crichton. It's riveting.
robrain 2 days ago [-]
- Fluent Python
- Middlemarch
Something from every food group there.
johnobrien1010 3 days ago [-]
Actually, Nevermind: Essays by Taylor Tomlinson
sokols 2 days ago [-]
A Fabulous Debt by Robin Wigglesworth
joemazerino 3 days ago [-]
Does anyone consider audiobooks reading?
My friends have begun saying they are reading books when they listen to them.
It enrages me.
asp_hornet 3 days ago [-]
For me personally, I believe there is a distinction and i try to read book books.
For other people, it’s all good, we all walk a different path. If they think that then that’s ok. It’s all minor in the big scheme of things.
Just my opinion though.
randcraw 2 days ago [-]
IMHO, audiobooks <--> podcasts. The act of reading is unique, unlike any other medium.
irenaeus 2 days ago [-]
A Secular Age by Charles Taylor.
ValtteriL 2 days ago [-]
Professional CMake: A Practical Guide
pringk02 3 days ago [-]
I just got done with a second read of 2666 by Bolaño.
There was an article on HN a month or two ago about how some books drive people to the kind of madness that would make them do a degree in literature. This is probably the one for me. Excited to read it again in 5 years and see it differently again.
dnc 2 days ago [-]
I felt the same way. It started slow and I nearly quit, but something beneath the surface kept me reading. After 50 pages or so, I was hooked. It's an amazing book. The only other book that pulled me in that deeply in a couple of last years was Blood Meridian.
alasano 2 days ago [-]
here's a page that allows you to browse and search all the books mentioned in this thread.
I was coding already before LLMs but nowadays any little idea for something useful can be done on 15 minutes.
From your profile, you're a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist so I'm not sure how much you tinker with code but if you've got a ChatGPT subscription you can just ask ChatGPT to build you useful little utilities and websites like this now.
It will publish it for you either privately or publicly under your own subdomain e.g. something.bookofjoe.chatgpt.site
Could be fun for you to try for anything you can think of.
bookofjoe 2 days ago [-]
I am and always will be in a NOCODE zone. When I remark in passing here that I don't use an ad blocker the responses are a combination of admonishment/disbelief/dismay. Full disclosure: I have a $200/year subscription to Perplexity Pro and interact with it 5-10 times/day. It's WONDERFUL!
veritascap 3 days ago [-]
The way of excellence and The Troubles
3 days ago [-]
Kerrick 2 days ago [-]
I just finished Domain-Driven Transformation by Lilienthal & Schwentner. It's the book I've been seeking for years.
I'm currently reading More Fearless Change by Manns & Rising. I've always enjoyed being a change agent, and I would've been more effective if I'd read this book a decade ago.
Next up, I plan to read Facilitating Software Architecture by Harmel-Law.
Oh, and every day or two I read aloud a chapter of Magic and Meaning Expanded by Burger & Neale to my wife. We're both magicians and big fans of Eugene Burger's work.
talon8635 2 days ago [-]
Why Nothing Works (2025)
asxndu 3 days ago [-]
Wall Street Stories by Edwin Lefèvre
josters 3 days ago [-]
A copy of Resurrection by Tolstoy I found on the street. Really enjoying the way he is able to portray characters in such profound ways.
Also still working through Civilization and Capitalism by Fernand Braudel.
What I finished recently and was really surprised by: Der Geisterbanner by Karl Friedrich Kahlert from 1792.
bcrosby95 3 days ago [-]
City of Stairs
asimpletune 2 days ago [-]
Ovid's Metamorphoses
checkyoursudo 3 days ago [-]
The Nerd Reich
andy_ppp 3 days ago [-]
The output of LLMs, largely :-/
veidelis 2 days ago [-]
Politics by Aristotle
xd1936 2 days ago [-]
I just finished book 7 of Dungeon Crawler Carl, as well as Enshittification, myself! Funny.
I'm now working my way through "I Am Not A Robot: My Year Using AI To Do (Almost) Everything" by Joanna Stern.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff. Can't recommend it enough
TRiG_Ireland 2 days ago [-]
Currently taking a brief break from the History of Middle-earth series (The Lays of Beleriand is astonishingly beautiful) to read a fascinating book called Fascist Yoga, about how the wellness movement has some surprising links with white supremacism.
NorthSouthNorth 2 days ago [-]
Dungeon Crawler Carl too, but in German. The translations are so slow, but it's worth it I rate. I tried to use LLM's to translate it (due to my impatience) but it's just so shit I can barely make it a chapter. Might just read them in English.
saonnet 2 days ago [-]
The Brothers Karamazov
nanopasta 2 days ago [-]
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. One of the longest English novels, but it has got me hooked. I love how descriptive the prose is. I can almost see the events happen in front of my eyes. There's a bbc adaptation as well, but I was enraged by it so I can't recommend it.
herpdyderp 3 days ago [-]
I haven't read books in years. I read an incredible amount of code, does that count?
dvh 3 days ago [-]
15,000 miles in a ketch
judicious 3 days ago [-]
Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century by W. David Marx. A fascinating and approachable read.
firefax 3 days ago [-]
Eichmann in Jerusalem
atlasunshrugged 3 days ago [-]
I'm reading Purge (not to be confused with the film franchise), by a Finnish-Estonian writer about two women with dark pasts during the waning days of the Soviet Occupation of Estonia
"A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the 21st Century" - really enjoying the modern take on Darwinian natural selection (the first part of the book). In short nature diversifies in good times, to stock resilience for weathering the bad times. Just a few chapters in, waiting for that hope to kick in any minute...
"The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst" - This story is about the first round-the-world solo yacht race, and the one contestant who died at sea. His story is really strange - an anti-hero tragedy with a touch of mental illness. The author does a great job bringing the reader on this descent into madness.
"Protocols" - Andrew Huberman's recent book. Like his podcast, it's full of solid advice backed by published science - but also with some repetitive filler and product name drops. The sections on exercise and diet were not very informative to me, mainly because I've already incorporated most of that into my life already. The sections on light exposure and its relationship to sleep, melatonin and cortisol is the most fascinating new-to-me info. I've started morning/evening walking without my sunglasses to get those sweet sweet photons.
gitghxst 2 days ago [-]
the cold start problem by andrew chen
28304283409234 3 days ago [-]
"Escape from Capitalism", by Clara Mattei
loganfrederick 3 days ago [-]
Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky
hackernud3s 3 days ago [-]
Well, I guess that was inevitable, wasn't it?
phrotoma 2 days ago [-]
I just finished "Behave" and am excited to get my hands on Determined next!
jtagrgh 3 days ago [-]
Helliconia Summer
kidnoodle 3 days ago [-]
Is a river alive by Robert McFarlane
A beautifully written travelogue/nature book/eco activist screed that tours the world visiting rivers and the people engaged in living with and protecting them. Fascinating, hopeful, heartbreaking and lyrical. Really enjoying it (evidently)!
mertbio 3 days ago [-]
Right now I’m reading Biological War. Before this one I finished reading:
- The Left Hand of Darkness
- The Nerd Reich
- What Happened to Liberal Democracy?
elinfame 3 days ago [-]
Vingt Ans Après
rewgs 2 days ago [-]
Snow Crash. A few decades late, but man am I loving it.
mgbmtl 3 days ago [-]
You may enjoy :
- End Times Fascism, And the Fight for the Living World (Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor)
- The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity (Tim Wu)
dorianmariecom 2 days ago [-]
zero to one by peter thiel
whyage 3 days ago [-]
Currently listening to I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. A fascinating exploration of consciousness written 20 years ago but very relevant in the age of AI.
I too am on DCC; I wonder why I like it, but I do.
Strangely, one of the things it reminds me of,
is the Malazan-Book-of-the-fallen series, in spite of how different they are.
I was/have been on the 'book that wouldnt burn' series;
I still have to read the final third book.
Ironically, I have not yet finished that series because I dread it;
the author is a little too good at writing truly loathable antagonists,
and at the same time reading him, you have learned
he cares little for plot armor ('if he dies, he dies', sigh.)
Other than that, Piranesi by Susanne Clarke;
I have also gotten her earlier book, but not gotten far into it yet.
DCC is strangely hypocritical -
a massive commercial success where we the readers revel-wallow in the graphic
suffering of the fictive protagonists/victims,
and author & co are making truckloads of profits,
precisely on the kinds of sheenanigans the books on the surface critisize :-).
It is also a bit ironic, that the books/Carl critisize fascism,
while at the same time, Carl is on a kind of one-man fascist/tyrant purging
the existing elite, with summary and graphic executions. Sigh :-)
louwrentius 3 days ago [-]
Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris - a re-read about the history of Silicon Valley, highly recommended.
mrmattyboy 2 days ago [-]
Similar to this, I'm reading "The Innovators" by Walter Isaacson - it covers a lot of Silicon Valley, but also stretching back to Ada Lovelace.
Having read Steve Jobs by him, I was quite excited to read more by him.
edbaskerville 2 days ago [-]
Way too many John Le Carré novels (and his memoir). Not escapist enough, frankly—it adds up to a very dismal appraisal of geopolitics, with plenty of foreshadowing of what the world has become: the kleptocracy in the ruins of the Soviet state; having fought communism, the need to now fight capitalism; and this one I saved from The Little Drummer Girl: "What are we to become, I wonder? A Jewish homeland, or an ugly little Spartan state?"
zekenie 2 days ago [-]
Claude tokens
chistev 3 days ago [-]
Thanks for this question!
I'm not reading anything at the moment since I'm taking a break and watching season one of Deadwood and also re-watching season one of Boston Legal.
But when I'm done, I plan to re-read "The Cold War A Very Short Introduction" by Robert J. McMahon. I read it about five years ago and it's time to read it again.
Having said that, I can't pass on this opportunity to share the books I've read (some are re-reads) thus far this year that I recommend. I'll just list them while saying that they all come highly recommended by me.
In the famous words of Frank Zappa - So many books, so little time.
1. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris
2. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
3. Lying by Sam Harris
4. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
5. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
6. Cosmos by Carl Sagan.
7. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins
8. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
9. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
10. Mortality by Christopher Hitchens
11. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J. K. Rowling
12. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling
13. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
14. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
15. Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan
16. Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide to Atheism by Richard Dawkins
ghostbrainalpha 3 days ago [-]
I love all these books especially Sam Harris, but from one atheist to another, are you ok? This is a really heavy dose to be doing in one year. And if your fun reads are Cormac... it looks exactly like my reading list when I'm depressed.
chistev 2 days ago [-]
If I'm depressed, I'm unaware of it.
ptman 2 days ago [-]
I've been reading graphical novels, lots of non-fiction and adaptations. Many that I've read as regular novels and many that I would never have read otherwise.
* Iain M. Banks is a bad writer. His books are predictable. You know the goodies (1990s neoliberals with space helmets) are gonna win. There's no moral uncertainty and not even really any jeopardy.
* I'm seeing an alarming amount of Dungeon Crawler Carl. Look, if you don't want to read, just don't read! There's no point reading rubbish. Just play a computer game or pick your nose or something. There's a thousand years of literature out there. Some of it is really good.
* Neil Gaiman. American Gods was so unbearable I couldn't finish it. How can any decent person like this vain, pompous writer?
I am judging typical hn-er tastes, sorry, but it's as if I thought PHP was the best programming language or something. No. It is not.
Genre is fine! There's great SF and fantasy. But bad writing is bad writing. Genre is not an excuse.
joeguilmette 2 days ago [-]
I lately I’ve been reading three books at once:
- Fiction: Pure entertainment, with no shame, although I do enjoy working in a mix of slop and more high-brow works. I generally go through one of these every 5-10 days.
- Non-fiction: Big, meaty, interesting book. These take me forever to finish but I really enjoy them. I get through like 100 pages in a good month.
- Children’s: I have been reading to my son, which is entirely for me as he’s only ~5mo old. But I have a stack of lovely children’s classics that I have greatly enjoyed going through.
Here’s what I’m currently reading and some recommendations on previous stuff I’ve read.
Fiction
Right now I’m finishing up The Kremlin’s Candidate. Not great, the series has been going a bit downhill. Some recent hits:
- The Dog Stars (Heller): Awful movie, incredible book. Highly recommended.
- True Grit (Portis): For everyone recommending Lonesome Dove, definitely get a copy of True Grit. A fantastically fun masterpiece. A real achievement.
- The Force (Winslow): The first 80 pages are deep cringe
but it picks up into a really compelling and fast crime novel. Pulp for sure but fun.
- All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy): Incredible book. I could read it 100 times.
Nonfiction
- The Politics of Heroin (McCoy): Dense but very very good. First hand reporting of the CIA’s role in the global drug trade and how it has, to a surprising degree, shaped the modern world.
Children’s
- The Last Unicorn (Beagle): Surprisingly nice. Some rough edges but I’m enjoying it. If my son was able to understand more than just that he’s spending time with me and that I’m making comforting noises I think he’s enjoy it.
- The Wind in the Willows (Grahame): Stop everything you’re doing and go read this. Aloud, your kids if you have them but as a treat to yourself if you don’t. What a joy this is.
————
Some things I haven’t read that are on the shelf thaf I really want to dig in to:
- Challenger: History of the tragic NASA accident.
- First Casualty: Inside the CIA’s paramilitary ops and the early days of the Afghanistan war.
- The Great Game: Historic book on the power struggles of the British and Russian empire
in Afghanistan.
- Lonesome Dove: I love westerns, I have this whole series on the shelf, and am kind of just waiting and keeping it in my back pocket for a rainy day.
- Power of the Dog series: I just know I’m going to love this. Cartel/DEA saga spanning decades.
- McCloskey’s CIA series: It’s slop, and the tradecraft is dated to the point that what is happening in the field now is completely unrecognizable from the dead drops and SDRs and such of the cold war, but… it’s fun!
jeffreyrogers 2 days ago [-]
If The Great Game you mentioned is the one by Peter Hopkirk, it's fantastic.
shoo 3 days ago [-]
I've been mainly reading sci-fi & fantasy series. On the fiction side I can strongly recommend Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga, Seth Dickinson's The Traitor Baru Cormorant & sequels, and Robert Jackon Bennett's The Tainted Cup & sequels (fantasy murder mystery series).
On the non fiction side, I'm slowly chipping away at Joe Studwell's book How Asia Works, about East Asian development. In the first section of the book, the author argues that the foundation for successful development was boosting agricultural output -- instead of spending precious foreign currency on food imports, surplus agricultural output can be exported & intensive farming provides a way to soak up and use labour before other industries develop.
Studwell also argues for the importance of land reform in boosting agricultural output -- appropriating land from wealthy landlords & redistributing it to landless peasants & tenants. This happened in both socialist & capitalist societies. There was a huge demand for land reform from landless peasants. I was completely ignorant of this chunk of history & found it fascinating. Agricultural output increases on a per hectare basis when farmers have the incentive to work hard - unlike if they're day labourers or share croppers paying much of their output as rent. Landlords don't have an incentive to increase output as its easier for them to earn money from renting out their land & lending money. Studwell gives examples of small farmer-owned farms being much more productive than colonial plantation style farming. Developmental success stories (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) were those where governments supported their huge newly created markets of tiny landowner-farmers with subsidised fertiliser inputs, better varieties of crops etc & where peasants & tenants got a seat at the table to influence the land redistribution process. There are also stories of failures where wealthy elites got control of the land reform process & rendered it largely ineffective (the Philippines).
arkonvault 45 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
1saadcodes 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
shyue 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
eggsandbeer 3 days ago [-]
Gogol - Dead Souls
cyberjunkie 2 days ago [-]
Why read when we can have the hundreds of pages summarized to 5 pages using AI? /s
My 17 year old son bought it for me for my birthday. I've been enjoying it a lot. I do in fact like thinking in systems and learning more about it, and reading it in a more generalized fashion than I tend to in the computer science world has provided a refreshing perspective. It's all very approachable, nothing very complex, but gives names and discreet patterns to things I intuitively understood but previously wouldn't articulate easily. Definitely one of my favourite gifts in a long time.
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
I read bits of this to my wife at night occasionally. One of the first trips we went on together was camping on a little island, and I had Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami) with me which I suggested I read to her in the evening. She really liked it and I've done it since. I wish I did it more often. Anyway, Stories of Your Life and Others is a wonderful collection. I've read it a few times, not always completely, and I enjoy it. Story of your life is the standout. It's what the movie Arrival is based on, which I consider one of the best scifi movies of all time. It's a beautiful story.
Silo series by Hugh Howey
I've been watching the show and decided the books deserve a shot. If the show is as good as it is, the books must be great, right?
I liked the observations like:
'long-term behavior provides clues to the underlying system structure. And structure is the key to understanding not just what is happening, but why'*
'Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.'
'Large organizations of all kinds, from corporations to governments, lose their resilience simply because the feedback mechanisms by which they sense and respond to their environment have to travel through too many layers of delay and distortion.'
* 'Structure generates behavior' as stated in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Yp8A7BPE8
A light rewrite of the slogan "the purpose of a system is what it does".
I hate that slogan. It's supposed to be profound, but it's actually really, really dumb.
The whole point of the word purpose - its purpose if you will - is to be able to talk about the difference between what a system does and what it ought to do. To say the purpose of a thing is what it does, is to render the word completely redundant.
If the stated goals of a system don't match what it does, then either you have a dysfunctional system that needs to be fixed, or those stated goals are lies.
In these days of AI, it's all the more important to think clearly about purpose. Just because a system does a thing, there's not necessarily anyone who wants that thing. And there's definitively not any "spirit of the corporation" or "spirit of the nation" or "spirit of the language model" which wants it. Only persons want things.
I think the jarring alternative definition of "purpose" is an intentional mental hack: to break people out of orienting themselves around design intent, when processes often go out of alignment with that. It's easy for humans to fool themselves. Taking a dispassionate, empirical view when considering what a process is doing, or analyzing what its range of behaviors is, can illuminate many problems.
Yes, that's part of the point. If the stated purpose of a system is to "improve vehicle fuel efficiency" but the observed behaviour is to give car companies a way to avoid doing much of anything about fuel efficiency, or if the stated purpose is to "encourage EV adoption" but the observed behaviour is "funnel money to certain rich people" then you are better off assuming that the behaviour you observe is the intent, and the publicly stated purpose is marketing spin.
On the other hand, things change over time. Google started out organizing the world's information, and gradually turned into surveillance advertising. They got rid of "don't be evil" so there are no explicit lies. They aren't a dysfunctional search company, they are a functional surveillance-advertising company, that thing they do - update your expectations so you believe that's their purpose and don't believe that they are "trying to be good but misguided".
Additionally, a statement is generated by a system and reflects itself a separate purpose in its generation. A system can exist without statement of purpose, so why was it made? The statement has an intent and an audience. It is therefore necessarily more constrained than the system itself, and for the systems we are referring to, it is markedly less complex than the system itself. It cannot hope to capture the full function, which is what can serve (or not) a purpose.
Also, as the video I linked in the previous comment says: 'our first instinct is to blame people in the system and that is a low leverage response...actions people take are possible, feasible, and rational because of the universe in which they exist.'
I am not sure if you've read the book. But even though you've not used terms like feedback loops, etc. I think what you are saying is not much different from what the book says.
If interested, a chapter wise summary of Thinking In Systems https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL6RiAl2WHXEU04zFYyWr...
I think you might like this song then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqBBNjkAlXM
as it takes normal every day systems that we think we can depend on (banks, the army, phones) and sarcastically highlights some of the worst things those systems do vs what we're told they do. The chorus is that slogan.
Systems thinking changes the way people think about solutions, often for the better (but not always). There's a tendency to think: "uh... it's the system, nothing's gonna change unless we change the _system_ per se". And that's correct. But individual actions also change systemic outputs. So. Case in point: climate change and all that...
[fun fact, I took a class with Sterman at MIT. He's fantastic, very engaging!]
[1] https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/directory/john-d-sterman
totally deserved and worth it IMO
I also read to my youngest perhaps 5 days per week, and used to read to his two older brothers for many years. I’m realizing I spend a lot of time reading to people. They definitely fall asleep quite often.
I was inspired, and I did a variation of it with a partner at one point. It was really nice. Feels kinda like a synthetic version of an engaging conversation with someone you care about, but perhaps with words you can't muster yourselves at that time of the day. If you've chosen the book together, it's guaranteed to be the right thing between you. It's nice to feel like you're hearing or learning something interesting from the person you care about, even when one of you perhaps don't have the conversation or the story in you. (I have a high appetite for connecting over ideas, but sometimes people I care about can run out of capacity before me, so it feels like a hack for my relationships.)
I imagine swapping reader-listener roles is another variation.
They have a special place in my heart. Vinge didn't write much, but what he did write I think is very special indeed.
I've also taken to buying hardbacks of my favourite books from ebay.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/77711.A_Fire_Upon_the...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/226004.A_Deepness_in_the...
The Cradle series by Will Wight, starting with Unsouled. Kind of hard to describe, but it’s an sci-fi/Asian fantasy martial arts cultivation epic. If you liked Dungeon Crawler Carl, it may be of interest.
I recently described finishing Fire Upon the Deep as saying goodbye to a very dear friend. A great book.
Now reading: "null: $cat /dev/null_", by Dienw Neb[0]. I don't know what it's about yet. I heard about it in an ad in the back of "2600 Magazine" and it caught my attention. Initial impressions are that 1) Neb is really good at dialog, and 2) their recreations of IRC chats is so perfect that I know they had to've spend many hours online in the middle of the night. Basically, the author knows how to write things I want to read. I do so hope they stick the landing and that the story turns out as wonderful as the writing.
[0]https://nebulaofbooks.com/books/null-cat-dev-null_/
People who haven’t read it: Lonesome Dove won a Pulitzer for a reason. It’s very good.
One of the best books and simply the best imho in its genre.
Roald Dahl: "True Grit is the best novel to come my way for a very long time. What book has given me greater pleasure in the last five years? Or in the last twenty? What a writer."
Donna Tartt: "I cannot think of another novel—any novel—which is so delightful to so many disparate age groups and literary tastes [as True Grit]."
The more recent film is more faithful to the novel than the 60s/70s one.
"Butcher's Crossing" is another one that springs to mind.
The next one was Lonesome Dove, this was my first time reading a western and I didn't think I'd enjoy it as much as I did. The book is also absolutely hilarious and has one of my favorite characters in a book(shoutout to Gus).
I'm currently reading The Count of Monte Cresto and, boy, it's turning out to be quite the epic tale of revenge(no spoilers please!).
At the beginning of the summer I read All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. I'm not into westerns, but I really liked that one. A modern classic.
Just finished The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry. Such a gorgeously written book.
I was lead to Rebecca after I found and read a discarded copy of Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History”. I wanted more and Googled “books like Rebecca”. Sadly, I thought Tartt’s “The Goldfinch”, which lots of people raved about, was not very good.
I first read _Rebecca_ as a teen, years ago. Still recall the thrill of the book. Few writers wrote so engagingly as Du Maurier. Hitchcock's movie was fine, but the book is the real deal.
Once you get done, try The Three Musketeers. It's both romantic (like Monte Christo) and also really funny, not dark at all. Dumas was an amazing writer, backed by August Maquet, who wrote the first drafts on both novels.
If you're unconvinced, try comparing a few random passages to see which one you prefer, or just check the beginning of Chapter 1. You could also show a few translations of a passage to an LLM and ask it which one best conveys the nuance of the original French.
- The Friends of Eddie Coyle
- A River Runs Through It
- Stoner
- The Tartar Steppe
- Siddhartha
And a very cliche recommendation but will still make it, the first 3 Game of Thrones books. I also like the Dark Tower series.
This sentence from the first page is what piqued my interest in the book: "Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers." I thought, "Why write about him then? There must be something here.". I was not disappointing. :)
I also loved The Glass Bead Game, and Steppenwolf
If you liked Lonesome Dove and attempted to read the prequel and sequels I strongly recommend against it.
[0] https://archive.org/details/eastofeden0000john_p8l1/mode/2up
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75781
I'm going to need a nice, short book after this one.
when you’re done, read Umberto Eco on it: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/10/28/the-cult-of-t...
Now I want to read it again.
I'm on Book Two of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series.
Non-Fiction:
More than I can count, as far as "I've read at least some, put a bookmark in it, and intend to finish it eventually." But in terms of the books I'm really actively engaging with right now, the top one is:
Neuroscience: Exploring The Brain[1] by Mark F. Bear, Barry W. Connors, and Michael A. Paradiso
And sort of in parallel with that, is
Analog Computing: Development, Programming, Applications, and Future Directions[2] by Bernd Ulmann
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0781760038/
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Analog-Computing-Development-Programm...
There was a particular "Prepotente" moment that made laugh so loud i was honestly embarrassed of the sound I made in the caffe, I'm really not easily embarrassed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ54CpkUoaM
Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience by Michael S. A. Graziano (https://link.amazon/B0fbKBxEU)
The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science by Erik Hoel (https://link.amazon/B05TPjEY6)
Greatly enjoyed both. Made me think about the thinking-machines future and our ever-increasing understanding of the human brain.
The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science by Erik Hoel (https://link.amazon/B05TPjEY6)
Awesome. I had Rethinking Consciousness on my list as well, but haven't gotten to it yet. I'll check out The World Behind the World as well. That sounds right up my alley. :-)
I think of it as an analog computer primer.
In fact, I sent one to Dr. Bernd Ulmann. He enjoyed it. :-)
[1] https://www.tindie.com/products/jcalhoun/anna-analog-compute...
(I know you probably didn't mean movie.)
In regards to analog computers, it's that, plus an awareness of the constraints of the Von Neumann Bottleneck[1] and a vague notion that analog computing might (keyword, might) offer some potential to avoid that, and/or avoid the insane power consumption of modern digital computers (relative to a given workload).
And that in turn ties back to the Neuroscience book, as I'm reading that mainly because of my interest in neuromorphic computing[2]. And neuromorphic computing and analog computing, while separate topics, seem like they may have some interesting touch-points.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture#Von_N...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromorphic_computing
A few books that i am currently looking at which you might also find useful;
1) Principles of Neurobiology by Liqun Luo - Uses an integrated approach to neuroscience.
2) Handbook Of Unconventional Computing in 2-vols (Vol1-Theory, Vol2- Implementations) - A comprehensive resource.
Just ordered a copy, thanks for the pointer. In the meantime, I have a copy of Neurobiology by Professor Gordon M Shepherd, to work through.
2) Handbook Of Unconventional Computing in 2-vols (Vol1-Theory, Vol2- Implementations) - A comprehensive resource.
Yeah, I have those in an Amazon list waiting to be purchased "sometime soon". :-) Unfortunately, copies are currently going for around $448.00 USD. :-(
You can get pdfs of the Handbook of Unconventional Computing if you ask Google and/or Anna ;-)
One more book that i hope to get my hands-on is Peter Kogge's *The Zen of Exotic Computing" - https://epubs.siam.org/doi/10.1137/1.9781611977295 This seems like a nice overview (plus more) of most of the stuff from the above Handbook. Also checkout the wikipedia link for original papers/books/etc. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconventional_computing
Agreed. In fact, I may have them downloaded already somewhere in my massive pile of <strike>pirate</strike> cough grey-market cough e-books. :-) But honestly, sometimes I still prefer reading off of paper. It's easier on the eyes in my experience.
> Neurobiology: A Functional Approach by Georg Striedter for better understanding. I also find reading pop-sci books on Neuroscience/Brain a good supplement since these give a nice top-level overview (and thus stimulate motivation) before diving into the details in a textbook. Two i have found useful are The Accidental Mind by David Linden and Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter.
Cool, I will look into those. I have a whole pile of similar pop-sci stuff to churn through already, but the more the merrier!
> One more book that i hope to get my hands-on is Peter Kogge's The Zen of Exotic Computing
Ooooohhh.. Now that sounds interesting. Thanks for the tip!
Recently I managed to find the list again, and it's been endless pleasure:
- American Gods -- Neil Gaiman
- Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley
- The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett
- Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks
- Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson
- Cloud Atlas -- David Mitchell
- The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson
- The Dispossessed -- Ursula K Le Guin
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick
- Dune -- Frank Herbert
- Foundation -- Isaac Asimov
- Giles Goat-Boy -- John Barth
- Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon
- The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams
- I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov
- The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
- The Left Hand of Darkness -- Ursula K Le Guin
- The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick
- Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland
- Neuromancer -- William Gibson
- Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell
- Orlando -- Virgina Woolf
- The Shockwave Rider -- John Brunner
- Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson
- Stand on Zanzibar -- John Brunner
- Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein
- Trouble with lichen - John Wyndham
- UBIK -- Philip Dick
- Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
- Woman on the Edge of Time -- Marge Piercy
(I am creatively interpreting "The Colour of Magic" as "all Discworld", "Dune" as "the six Dune books", etc.)
I started The Culture series a while ago. I read both "The Player of Games" (amazing book), and "Use of Weapons". Also amazing, with a Memento-like storytelling that was also incredible. I did enjoy both books a lot for different reasons, I can't vouch for any over the other really.
I then moved to "Consider Phlebas" and honestly, got bored to death. So my recommendation is to go for these two as well.
I recently (This month, bought a recent "deluxe edition" of sorts [1]) re read Neuromancer, and then jumped to "Count Zero" but at some point got bored mid way with Gibson's endless descriptions of non things.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GGGZSNXQ
I was actually surprised when I finished UoW regarding how different it was from PoG, while maintaining the quality (If not better, but PoG IS THAT GOOD anyway).
For the record, the series was recommended to be by Claude of all things, and it told me that Phlebas was not up to quality but I gave it a shot just for the sake of completeness of the series. Nop, not worth it.
But for me Consider Phlebas is the best. Currently on 4th book in series, but cant get through it. Nineteen Eighty-Four doesnt feel geek novel, just political. Also great.
I keep reading outputs from LLMs all day and don't have energy to focus on Eng written books in the evening.
There are various online guides as to the best place to jump in if you start at the very beginning and wonder what all the fuss is about.
I don't tend to be great at finishing (or starting) books, and this is a big one. I've also never had any interest in Medieval or Renaissance history, for me it's been a black hole between the fall of Rome and the modern age.
But recently I saw some Youtube videos of Ada, and her enthusiasm is totally infectious [2]. She's fun and paints these vivid pictures of Florence and renaissance Europe that are incredible, absurd, and relatable, which makes sense since given she's also an accomplished sci-fi writer. She also reminds me of one of my favourite high school teachers. So I ordered the book right away.
The book is in the same tone as her videos, so it won't be for everyone, but I've really been enjoying it and now I'm fascinated by Renaissance Italy, Machiavelli, merchant republics, etc.
1. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo246135...
2. (My favourite example) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68p3jVQQdFk
On Youtube, you'll probably come across a lot of her podcast appearances like Dwarkesh Patel's (which is how I first came across her), but she also just started her own podcast 3 weeks ago that might not pop up in the results yet [1]. The latest episode [2] where she's talking about the church bells of Florence, which still ring today, was so cool to listen to. The way their schedule carried (and carries) the rhythm of life, the blood of tradition, and when something wasn't right in the city, the call-to-action (defence or riot, for example). So neat, it made me want to live there for a few years (something she did during her studies, in a tower that the medieval Florentines had ripped the upper levels off so noblemen couldn't garrison it and burn the city around them).
1. https://www.youtube.com/@Beforecast
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruDc0GynjSI
About to start her Biological War.
* Seeing Like a State - great overview of how states (and corporations) lose visibility into reality due to the abstraction levels they operate at
* Normal Accidents - all about how things like nuclear reactors, ships and large systems naturally have accidents
* Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty - great easy read about how high reliability organizations manage complexity and dangerous, high tempo situations.
For example, business intelligence systems provide ways to impose consistent measures on an organisation, which makes the org more legible to executive decision makers, but that consistency also tends to erode local team autonomy and undermine specialist knowledge. This type of tension shows up everywhere once you start noticing it.
Very facinating book.
"7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy" - Recommended by @pc in an interview. I'm ~50 pages in and not really blown away. Its a nice accumulation of Alpha creating strategy... but I think its really missing some nuance. I do LOVE that they take an economist approach and actually provide the math/algorithms behind the concepts. Theres some good stuff in here but so far it feels like 30 pages stretched out to make a book.
"Monetizing Innovation" - dropped this book, do not recommend. I was expecting a really nice accumulation of how pricing should work with companies who are innovating... and it came no where near that hopeful concept. The case studies were weak, the hypothesis were weak, the writing was weak.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY96hTb8WgI
- "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang - "Ficciones" by Borges - "I have no Mouth and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison.
I'm also slowly plowing through "The Big Book of Science Fiction" edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer.
I love short speculative fiction. And the above are among my favorites.
I should get Exhalation.
I read these exact three in the past six weeks. For a follow-up, I recommend "Earthlings" and "The Memory Police".
Some other bits I’ve read recently that I’ve loved: - Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie” is a beautiful short story by the Three Body Problem’s translator - Cryptonomicon feels like a great balance between heady reading (it goes into WWII-era crypto thinking) and pulpy humor. I loved reading it. - “Stoner” by John Williams (not the Stoner you think, and also not the John Williams you think) is kinda in a different direction, but it’s a really well paced and beautifully written book about a farmer’s son who falls in love with literature. It’s one of those books that’s hard to sell in a sentence, but is effortless to read and makes you think a lot in a non-engineering-brained way.
It's the same thing with Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which has a ton of video games and shows based off of it. People in Japan weren't reading Guanzhong in Chinese, they were reading Yoshikawa's adaptation. Oddly, the Japanese Sangokushi hasn't been localized until now, and it's currently being released on Kindle. So if we wait just a little more we should be able to read it in print.
About halfway through- it’s really good so far. He makes a compelling case for how our culture has changed in many ways, often for the worse, with the introduction of television.
I'm also trying to transition into software development and have been watching John Ousterhout's talks and just yesterday started reading "A Philosophy of Software Design" - enjoying it so far.
I liked The Windup Bird Chronicle slightly more, and it’s an easier read than 1Q84 to get into him. He also does short stories that are phenomenal.
Also make sure to read Sputnik Sweetheart and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki.
Hard Boiled Wonderland is such an underrated Murakami novel. I recommend it to Murakami lovers.
Also, does that friend have a list of favourites?
This year I also read "The Brothers Karamazov" after having read "Crime and Punishment", "The Idiot" and "Demons" in previous years. It was not an easy read but it stays with you for a long time (or maybe even forever).
Also did some re-reading this year:
"A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles
"Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius
The thing I love most about Dostoievski is how real everything feels.
A lot of fiction nowadays is based on: how the character portrays himself/how he thinks about himself/who he really is.
And a lot of resolution is about finding out who he really is, or about other characters finding that out and accepting that (usually immediately). Followed by emotional chatharsis and resolution.
In Dostoievski it feels like a lot of the character are chasing that idea and simply finding out it's not true. They will give long speeches about who they really are, expectijg emotional chatharsis, only for none to come. And they react by feeling resentful towards their confidants, or towards themselves. Or shameful. And then they also react to their reaction.
There is no gold character core waiting to be resolved, and a reveleation is usually just a very awkward monologue.
100% agree with your points. That's what brings me back to his books always. Since my first book of his (Crime and Punishment) I keep mentioning this to friends also. Spoiled many other books for me...
- The Women by Kristin Hannah
- Jurassic Park by Micheal Crichton
- Platform Decay by Martha Wells
- The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
- Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the End of the World by Eric Jay Dolin
- All the Sinners Bleed by S A Cosby
- Project Hail Mary and Artemis by Andy Weir
- Cibola Burn and Nemesis Games by James S A Corey (the Expanse series)
It is a deep and profound book. Proper SciFi.
Much emphasis on philosophy, ideas. It is so far from the public opinion about the movie: a monster attack and survival movie.
This may be my favorite "Children of Time" book yet (and I really liked the first and second book).
I'd say the biggest reason I enjoy science fiction is being exposed to new ideas. In book one of this series, I enjoyed imagining how a hunter spider species would evolve when imbued with a "brainiac-empathy" gene. In book two, I loved the idea of a central (Id) mind with a 8 distributed actuators (ego).
This one introduces the notion of a punchy, aggressive, status driven mantis shrimp.
I really enjoyed thinking about what it would mean to be an evolved mantis shrimp. Human beings have technically carried around deadly weapons since we developed tools. But a mantis shrimp is an organism that has two deadly weapon everywhere it goes. Imagine how much different human society/evolution/whatever would have been if we were constantly holdings blunderbuss' at each others heads at all times? Where being in range literally meant that either party (whoever fires first) can immediately and almost certainly kill the other. I suppose we have had potentially deadly weapons since we realized we could brain with rocks, but this is a risky (and messy) way to do things compared to the instant death that a mantis shrimp represents. What would that do to trust, to boundaries, to aggression and bluffing?
It is just such a fun humorous world, where 4 (5 with lowercase humans) species are learning to coexist despite their very different ways of looking at the world.
https://stephencagle.dev/posts-output/2026-07-20-children-of...
It's quite good - not as good as Killers of the Flower Moon. I won't spoil anything you won't learn from the first few pages. The Wager was a British naval ship in the early 1700s that was lost to inclement weather. All were presumed dead. Some time later a boat arrives in England with a small number of survivors. Then a while later, another boat arrives with some more survivors. They each accuse the other of terrible acts.
The book tells the story of what happened after the ship went down.
It's a good read.
I had to listen to the books twice because there are a lot of details that you won't get the first time through unless you're extremely intentional and detail oriented, but I found it was worth it to listen again. I'll probably listen to Infinite Jest again sometime soon, even though it's 64 hours long. IJ is actually really great sci-fi with some important questions for our time.
> "Over the course of this book, we have looked at some eighty years of this history. We have seen how the idea of nuclear secrecy was initially born out of a very specific fear—that the world’s worst nation could achieve nation-destroying power—that, over the course of many transformations, morphed into something more generalized. More than totalitarian regimes were the target of this secrecy: allied nations, private industry, democratic institutions, and “the public” more broadly became understood as targets as well, for reasons both justifiable and not. The secrecy problem moved wherever the problem of the bomb went, which was far indeed. The desirability of control over nuclear knowledge became totalizing because the threat of loss of control was tied to the almost unimaginable power of the bomb itself. These two forces—the desire for control, the fear of its loss—became locked in a vicious cycle, each driving the other."
Also of note is Wellerstein's more recent 'The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age – The Anti-Nuclear President, the Bomb Decision, and Cold War History', which I read earlier this year and thought it was excellent.
A clipping from its closing pages:
> “What is the measure of a civilized man?” The proper answer, Lilienthal suggested, was to consider the sense that a “civilized man” was one who believed they had a responsibility to others. The invention of nuclear weapons had clearly magnified the problem: “One sees that the mark of a civilized man must be some quality that will help the world from destroying itself. He is most civilized who has those qualities and talents of leadership, by example and precept and character and ideas, that will help civilization to survive.”
To extend the reading list, I was completely floored by 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', Richard Rhodes, but that was 20 years ago. I need to re-read it, and add 'Dark Sun' and 'American Prometheus' to round out that part of my picture of the military-industrial complex.
I read it this summer. I learned a lot but got lost remembering who is who..
Could you recommend titles about discovery of radio-activity and after ? I'm fascinated by this subject.
If those titles were also a gentle introduction to the physics involved, I'd be delighted.
I'm less than an amateur here, my recommendation would've been the first ~300 pages of Rhodes. Maybe re-reading that part for events and ideas rather than names would help, but hopefully someone more skilled can answer.
Sadly found I could have been reading a better abridgement, which I'll get for the 2nd reading now.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
> As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit ... If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious ... By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself ... A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.
But his "6 rules" are brilliant too. I'll look into his other essays.
https://qntm.org/ra
I'm guessing that many people here are familiar with this work already since HN was where I found out about qntm in the first place. If you haven't read Ra, though, I greatly enjoyed it and would strongly recommend it.
Have been on some good stuff recently: Whitt by Iain M. Banks was nice, lighter than a lot of his other stuff, and genuinely funny at times.
Best book this year was The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Couldn't put it down.
For reading before bed, I recently finished "The Mountain In the Sea" by Ray Nayler. I found it very good, with primary themes centered around the nature of consciousness, robots, AI, and corporatism. Highly recommended.
> "Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is."
"working through it" does indeed seem like the right phrasing from what little I've been exposed to. Good luck!
1. Except most of the books I read out loud to my kids when they were younger.
What if it's dated? Anything wrong with that?
You don't like the mythology of a culture being blended into a great story with futuristic tech?
I just loved that.
I see Stephenson as an unapologetic celebration of nerdy, intelligent stuff. It it definitely not the only way.
I have read Quicksilver. The way the novel portrays that time, and my Science heroes, is just fantastic. I don't care at all that it's dated.
My first book from him was Cryptonomicon. I care about History, Math, Computers, and that book blended all that in a coherent setup with proper environmental creation.
I also like the writing style. It's so clean and friendly.
I'm 50% of the way through and it's good but I don't entirely see the hype. Brontë is more atmospheric, Austen funnier and more incisive, Dickens more immersive. But I've still got a way to go.
Also, Eliot's language is incredible. On one hand, it's a lot more difficult to read than Austen, but on the other, it's so descriptive while still often being laced with a sense of beauty. Really wonderful prose.
The character arcs of Lydgate and Causabon are some of the best depictions of the collision of personal ambition with social obligation I've ever read. As someone with their own ambitions, I'm a bit haunted by that part of the story.
It's also occasionally funny. The uncle is pretty funny and a good demonstration of someone who's mind is curious and too unshaped to ever utter a coherent thought.
It's less focused than a Bronte novel but I love its wider lens.
This is a bit of a departure - I normally read action thrillers where a retired navy SEAL foils a plot to bring down the US Government.
Also listening to the audiobook autobiography of Anthony Hopkins which I recommend.
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (1818/1831), https://frankendiff.com; and Tales of the Dead, by Mrs. Utterson (1813), https://archive.org/details/talesofdead00utte
Just started Homer's Iliad (Fagles translation) and Christopher Logue's War Music (2015).
Just finished re-reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams (1980). I think it holds up well. Last time I read it, I was much younger than Arthur Dent; now I'm much older. And now that we have computers with Genuine People Personalities, it's hard to remember what it was like in the Before Times.
Recently finished Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908). For better or worse (no spoilers here), it kept me guessing.
The electric monk in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency makes me a bit twitchy these days too.
https://archive.org/details/wisdomofinsecuri00watt
If you like scifi that touches on ethical questions, Iain Banks Culture series is very good in that regard, particularly Player of Games and Use of Weapons. I buddy-reread the last one with an internet friend this year and via our discussions got so much more out of it.
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/agatha-christie
For the near future, I've got some of Emily St. John Mandel's books loaded up (I liked the Station Eleven series a lot), as well as Peter Heller's The River.
I have had a lot of fun with jeeves and wooster
I also really enjoyed raymond chandlers marlow series. Fast, easy to read, dense mystery.
Then there is rivers of london series, which is so wonderfuly visual of my london. Fun, not guessable and rich 3d characters.
For some reason I never read anything else by Heller until this year. Over the summer I read Burn, Celine, and The Orchard. All excellent. I think Heller is my favorite active writer and it surprises me because all of his books (that I've read) have a strong outdoorsman-type vibe and that's not me at all.
Of the four books, The Orchard really hooked me. I wish it was twice as long.
I just added Station Eleven to my to-read list yesterday. I read the first chapter online and it starts out great.
The Years of Apocalypse by UraniumPhoenix:
Timeloop fantasy that starts out in a magic university. It's quite a fun read and I'm enjoying how different the MC approaches the timeloop from how I expect I would. She seems quite empathetic which adds an excellent emotional element to the story that I'm enjoying.
Worth the Candle: Through Adversity by Alexander Wales:
I'm a big fan of Alexander Wales. He has an intelligent way of writing plots and characters that I enjoy. This is a meta narrative LitRPG(?) fantasy book. The basic premise is that the MC is sent to a world that has elements of his previous DnD creations. I'm not much of a tabletop RPG person but excited to see where Wales takes this series.
Tech related narrative non-fiction is the pinnacle of reading for me. My top three are Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll, American King by Nick Bolton, and Countdown to Zero Day by Kim Zetter. OSU Cyber security canon is excellent for finding these but I've read almost everything they list.
If you have any non-fiction suggestions, I'm definitely interested to hear them.
1. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Robert Pirsig. I read it in 1974 when I was in medical school.
2. The Power of Positive Thinking — Norman Vincent Peale. I read it when I was 14 years old in 1962 and it profoundly changed my life for the better. I wasn't "born again" nor did I become religious, rather it abruptly and completely changed for the better how I interacted with others.
3. Alive — Piers Paul Read. Published in 1974.
Anyway it was an emotional read. I’m surprised I had never encountered the book before, since “alternate choices affecting how your life turns out” is a concept I’ve always been into. But on the other hand this one would not have been nearly as powerful to me earlier in my life. Me being the same age (or close enough) to the main character at the start is what does it, of course.
So, recommended, especially if you’re in your early-mid 40s.
I recently finished Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive.
The Expanse have been great, but I think I will be good and ready to say good bye when I'm done with the mainline novels.
I don't really read long form non-fiction, which is probably a character flaw, but for me reading is a form of escapism. I love Sci-Fi very much (both classical and modern) and I try to mix and match so I read about equal amounts sci-fi and non-sci-fi.
The novellas are fantastic and more bite sized. They published the anthology for the expanse ones that I read after book 9. Even if you're burned out on the main series, I feel like I'd still recommend the novellas.
Non-fiction: Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Michael Sipser. It's fun. It looks at things like pushdown automata, Turing machines, decidability, ... Not reading it too rigorously, but more exploratively.
Both in Italian, both masterpieces of contemporary sci-fi. Separazioni might need another pass of editing, but it's strikingly good nonetheless.
Recently read books by Anthony Doerr (Shell Collector, About Grace, Memory Wall, All the Light We Cannot See) and Simon Singh (Code Book, Fermat's Last Theorem, Trick or Treatment, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets).
Otherwise started on a saga of going straight through The Expanse series. Haven't done a big series straight through since a >1 year re-read of Wheel of Time so I'm excited for that.
It's some of the best sci-fi I've read. Very interesting depiction of technology and I love how the different types of tech and societal structures are not explained, just showcased and talked about like it's obvious until you get it. It reminds me of Philip K. Dick but with a lot more scientifically grounded yet far out technology.
Apparently there are typographic markers which were completely lost in the audiobook version. It made very little sense to me until about halfway through.
I was very happy to find this. I heard complaints that it's just a Tolkien clone and Jordan doesn't portray women well. But what I found was kind of a relic. It's an excellent fantasy series that probably couldn't be written again. Wish we had more like it.
What a flattering complaint. Reminds me of this:
"Terry Brooks has often been disparaged for imitating Tolkien, particularly by those reviewers who find his books inferior to Tolkien's own. I can say only that I wish there were more imitators -- we need them -- and that all imitations of so great an original must necessarily be inferior. "
https://web.archive.org/web/20110823100353/https://www.theni...
It doens't feel like a Tolkien clone. There are definitely parallels you can draw but they start very broad and become even less defining as the books progress. A hero's journey, humble beginnings, a powerful magic user, clear good vs evil. And the world is very different than middle earth.
> Jordan doesn't portray women well.
tugs braid
There's a lot of awkward folded her arms beneath her breasts for sure but I never understood this criticism. Some female characters were trope-y, but so were many of the male characters.
I went in hearing about controversy online and guess I ended feeling like I'm miscalibrated from fantasy that is so much worse.
If you are interested in DG history but not into this book, I can recommend a few other sources:
https://mark.people.clemson.edu/fhp.html
https://www.teamfoster.com/billteamfostercom
I knew many everyday expressions and phrases come from his work but I had no idea it was so many.
I'm currently about halfway through at 3.2k pages.
The Power Broker by Robert Caro.
Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka.
The Time Tax by Annie Lowrey.
For anyone else curious: https://99percentinvisible.org/pb/
I'm really looking forward to working through the LBJ series. I think I'm going to get it on Kindle and Audible so I can work my way through it bit by bit whenever I have free time and attention.
The Works of Vermin. Exceptionally well written. Not an ounce of flab anywhere.
The Carryx series, 2 books so far. Best villains ever.
Tainted Cup and sequel. Sherlock Holmes meets Godzilla.
Goblin Emperor
The Prophet (Gibran)
Los Alamos (Kanon)
Hyperion (reread)
Finally, a shout out to the best book I read in 2025: Terra Ignota. Yes, the whole series.
Weird. There's a species called Carryx too in a series from James S.A. Corey called "The Captive's War".
Ostrom summarizes her empirical investigations of common pool resources (fisheries, forests, ground water, etc.) and how stakeholders can collectively govern them, a polycentric approach that is neither governmental nor proprietary. She abstracts 8 principles of governance, elements of successful community based resource governance.
Alvin Roth's Who Gets What — and Why: Matchmaking, Mismatch, and Market Design
Roth discusses market failures and how one builds market coordination organizations to perform matchmaking. He focuses on non-monetary markets such as paired kidney exchange, which he pioneered. Another example is medical residency matching.
Neal Stevenson - Diamond Age
Rudy Rucker - Ware Tetralogy (old-school cyberpunk / high-scifi. i read Juicy Ghosts by Rucker last year and really dig his extravagant ideas. I had trouble understanding Juicy Ghosts at times, but the concepts that man is able to bundle together and flesh out, while creating an engaging page-turner is amazing. not much fluff.)
I'm now reading Brothers Karamazov, because someone else on HN recommended it (well, that was the immediate catalyst, but I've been wanting to read a big Russian novel). There's a lot of jawing about the church which is a little boring, but I'm appreciating the way all the characters are bursting with life and feeling. And also that Dostoevsky never beats around the bush.
It gives very strong Fallout vibes. Having played the original games I think there is an influence.
But 30 pages in, when the monk finds the cave: "Mustering his modest command of pre-Deluge English, he whispered the words haltingly: FALLOUT SURVIVAL SHELTER"
I also recently finished "A Cage Went in Search of a Bird", which is an anthology of Kafka-esque short stories. I'd recommend it if only for reading "God's Doorbell" (which imagines swarm-behavior RSI building the Tower of Babel).
2. Obvious (?) observation: Today's list consists of human-authored books. Will that trend hold? Can you imagine this question being asked in X years with predominantly AI-authored books as the answers? Novels or nonfiction. I get a thrill out of a good book, partly, because it lets me into the head of a lucid or genius or maniacal fellow human.
So I'd usually share what I read before this.
I'm not sure any are that cognitively challenging, but all of them are certainly lovely.
He has a knack for being critical and optimistic at the same time. Funny too!
On my Kindle I have two ham radio books I'm reading, one is about grounding antennas, the other a General test prep.
- Grounding and Bonding for the Radio Amateur - Ham Radio General Class License Study Guide
So I started to reread Brandon Sanderson "Wax and Wayne" series again and was immediately relieved how easy it is to read.
The authors argue that rigid, goal-oriented planning and metric-driven objectives actively prevent true innovation and groundbreaking achievement.
Historical books that are great... Empire of the Summer Moon, Undaunted Courage, Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates
I like how he has the slow, almost clinical way of revealing interesting worlds and systems. It’s not the kind of book that’ll make me cry, but I really like world building with fun enough characters
i've been working my way through all of the cosmere (after starting with mistborn), currently on book 3 of stormlight archive. can't put em down
I thought so too, until I read the 2nd Mistborn trilogy!
Now if anyone would invest in him continuing Elantris...
For programming I am reading HTML5 Games: Novice to Ninja, which I quite like so far. And JavaScript for Kids - both with the intent to entice my kids into game programming.
For work I am reading Learn dbatools in a Month of Lunches and outside of lingering questions about whether anything command line oriented matters in the age of AI, it has been really helpful in encapsulating solutions to things that are distinct problems in administering SQL Server.
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks comes to mind. I had no idea how rampant purposeful discrimination was so recently for example, but the point of the book is the HeLa cells - and biology is also not my forté so loads of new information there as well. It was very interesting in expected and unexpected areas for me
- Daniel Suarez' Kill Decision has only gotten more relevant since its release in 2012. Not sure I'd call this meaty though, but his thrillers are always good (near-ish future tech) and the author iirc also said this particular one is meant as food for thought and not only entertainment
- My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok
Upbringing of a painter and the beginning of his journey in 1950s New York in a Hasidic Jewish family. Existentialism, art, passion.
- The Art of Doing Science and Engineerig, by Hamming
Surprisingly fresh and piercing, even today.
- Miracle of Love, Ram Dass
Stories about Neeb Karori Baba, as mentioned in Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs.
- The Name of The Rose, Umberto Ecori
Murder mystery in a famous library-monastery in medieval Europe. Amazing portrayal of that time.
I have a books site: https://ritoghosh.com/books
It's a few months outdated.
I love these types of books and learned there's a term for them. A bildungsroman about an artist is called a künstlerroman. I went on a künstlerroman kick a while back. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Martin Eden. Roderick Hudson. I'm aware of My Name is Asher Lev and meant to get to that one too. Thanks for the reminder.
Extremely fluid writing, and you encounter a whole new world.
It is definitely good. You see the world from a very young person's eyes, but the nuances, complexities, etc. of adult life and wider worls still touches you unaltered. That's rare.
I will check out the ones that you mention.
Pick up the Penguin paperback (mine is from the "Modern Classics" series). It's cheap and great to read.
I think I've tried to read this twice, either this or Foucalt's Pendulum, either way I gave up early, Umberto Eco is difficult to read. Does it pick up and get easier?
I give every author that much.
By the way, the paperbacks have way too small font size, and now I am reading on Kindle.
(I also notice there is a bad typo in GP, but can't edit that now.
'Ecori', is of course, 'Eco'.)
I'm gonna recommend an author I never saw over here and that I found interesting.
Peter Kingsley. He's an academic who studied classical Greek philosophers and what he calls "the origins of western civilization" and he's also a mystic.
While reading him sometimes I think he may be mad, and at other times I think that his explanations make a lot of sense. His central idea (or what I got from him) is that at the origin of western civilization and its fundamentals there were mystics, not intellectuals. He includes among these mystics Parmenides and Empedocles. Then intellectuals gained popularity and took control of the discourse and diminished and ridiculed the real role of Parmenides and Empedocles and their teachings.
As a starting point, his shortest book "In the dark places of wisdom" is a very good introduction of his ideas and would allow a reader to know if he wants to read more or not. As a second book I think that "Reality" is a good choice.
Done: QED, Richard Feynman. Lectures on explaining quantum electrodynamics but with no more math than geometry.
Currently: One Good Turn: A natural history of the screwdriver and the screw, Witold Rybczynski. The discourse goes into his references in depth. It has yielded an excellent list of museums to visit.
On deck: Impossibility: The limits science and the science of limits, John Barrow. A re-read for me. Barrow discusses what we can never know in a way that’s like P vs NP but for the physical world.*
I've also picked up his Revanche series which is apparently in the same greater universe though perhaps not literally the same world, involving a fantasy version of papal intrigue, I'm only two chapters into the first book. Apparently all the series do cross over at some point, so we'll see how well he sticks the landing.
(1) Roadside Picnic (the book which "Stalker" game is based from).
This was a page-turner! Fascinated by the science artifacts & effects (like gravitational glitches, frozen black sparks, etc)
(2) "Childhood's End" by Arthur C Clarke (who wrote 2001 Space Odyssey)
The sheer time scale of the story is impressive, and the technology is so interesting - especially for 1950s! There are some interesting time effects too (like an unborn child telepathically channeling information to a conversation in the past!)
The Tarkovsky film wasn't bad either. I played a little bit of the game but increasingly I find immersion in video games difficult.
I hated Arrival. Years later when I read the original story, it was one of the most beautiful ones I've ever read. Particularly great if you've studied the calculus of variations.
I keep track of all my favorite books here: https://recleague.com/james/collections/books
(Full disclosure: I'm a cofounder of Rec League)
I've personally neglected national (Portuguese) authors for about a decade now, so I've started focusing on that; I'm currently reading "Livro do Desassossego" by Fernando Pessoa.
For the few months before that, I'd focused on some classics:
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- 1984 by George Orwell
- The Village by Ivan Bunin
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
- Siddharta by Hermann Hesse
I read quite a bit and love it; if only I could be paid to do it at my own pace and rhythm!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_(Camus_novel)
Reading now: - Hyperion by Dan Simmons (getting harder than two above, but enjoying it so far)
Recent completions:
- The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick. I found it well written, but ultimately lacking in something - I kind of wanted the other boot to drop at the end.
- Poor Charlie's Almanack. Stripe Press published this collection of Charlie Munger's speeches and I've found I broadly agree with him on a ton of stuff and am slightly excited by some of his ideas that are new to me.
I'm about to have some time off recovering from a planned medical procedure and expect to have a mix of sci-fi, good quality non-fiction and at least one heavy "literary" book. I'm a big fan of Borges, so I might reread some of that work, or maybe pick up some adjacent/similar authors like Calvino too.
A sampling of the unread books (picking the rightmost book on each of the 19 shelves of unread books): The Best American Short Stories 2020, The Riverside Chaucer, Flimsy Plastic Miracles by Ron Currie Jr, I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek, My Days of Anger by James T Farrell, Antología Poetica² by Federico García Lorca, Blurred Lines* by Vanessa Grigoriadis, Just Like You by Nick Hornby, Diaries by Franz Kafka, A Different Kind of Tension by Jonathan Lethem, A Writer’s Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham, The Magician’s Wife by Brian Moore, Father Elijah by Michael D. O’Brien, Challenging Problems in Algebra by Posamentier/Salkind, Cuentos by Alonso Reyes, All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva, Great American Desert by Terese Svoboda, A Silent Treatment by Jeanine Vanasco and The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House.
⸻
1. Thanks to most of these being IKEA shelves, with one antique glass-doored bookcase inherited from my grandfather which has four four-foot shelves, it’s not too much of a challenge to get the exact total of shelf space which is 487.68cm. There are a few places where the shelves.
2. Yes, I read books in Spanish.
<I>Poor Charlie's Almanack</I> is sitting in that pile somewhere. I might have to pick it up soon. And speaking of literary, maybe I should get back to that. I try to read 1-2 titles per year in that vein. Camus, maybe?
It was quite an engaging read, and lead to a series. You'll learn lots about the infrastructure of civilization along the way.
[1] https://bookshop.org/lists/elle-s-sci-fi-book-club
The entire cantos is great, tho I prefer the first two to the Endymion/Rise of Endymion.
I'm not stellar at this yet, trying to juggle three turns into progressing two fairly quickly with the third much slower...
Clive Barker, Books of Blood - Currently in volume three. I've always found horror to require, like fantasy, a concentrated effort on my part as a reader to sustain suspension of disbelief. But these are great fun even if that's difficult sometimes.
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We - With sci-fi for whatever reason I do not suffer from the suspension-of-disbelief problem, the worldbuilding is much easier to immerse myself in. (Before this I was reading Roadside Picnic which was extremely good)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago - The slow one, still very interesting, nonfiction is uncommon for me
It’s about the stock market crash of 1929, and done in way that leaves no stone unturned. the book could be thought of as an obsessive pursuit of financial journalism in order to truly understand every domino that fell and lead to the crash - and not just the high level story.
I’m only about a quarter of the way through, but it’s a great read!
[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37004370-the-memory-p...
As to the story: to protect herself and her nephew from a local lord with an ugly grudge, a courier gets sucked into helping an obnoxious prince take a dangerous route to bypass an avalanche and deal with an urgent, secret mission. The mission gets complicated when said prince ends up possessed by a haunt from ancient ruins; and of course, the courier has her own secret to keep...
I'm also reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, though I'm on a bit of a break after the third book. I'd like to continue soon.
If I'm in the mood for neither of those, I read the Mushoku Tensei light novels.
I'm also reading some less highbrow, yet highly entertaining novels that I'm obsessed with. I'm currently on book 16 in in Lindsey Davis' Falco series[0], which are murder mysteries set in Ancient Rome. I've been enjoying them non-stop ever since HN user "vintagedave" recommended[1] them around 4 months ago.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/series/42173-marcus-didius-falco
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48323766
Fantastic book and look into Death and what comes after, well, at least for your corpse.
My reading list is ahead of Halloween, so trying to plow through all of these
https://robheffern.palaich.net/booklists/halloween/
Let me know what you think and if you have recommendations or criticisms!
Mary Roach is great, though.
And yes, Roach is fantastic. The book is a bit dated these days, but still what a great read! Her prose and cadence are just my cup of tea.
The other two were much weaker; of the two Count Zero was least interesting though so at least it wraps up on a fairly high note.
I read the Bridge trilogy a decade or so ago (?) and I must re-read that soon too - I suspect Idoru will hit harder these days.
Question for some of y'all: Those who are listing 3 or more (sometimes way more!) books -- do you read them in parallel? I'm a dyed-in-the-wool serial book monogamist and can't fathom having like 8 or 10 storylines in my head at once.
No judgement, just curious and somewhat awed :)
It’s sort of like watching many TV shows at once, I suppose? Watch an episode of each per week.
It started off promising, with some hints about monte carlo methods implemented in spreadsheets, but kind of detours into statistics basics, layman summaries of the author's prior scholarly work, and various business consulting anecdotes. I did not, for example, expect to read a chapter on the FASB-II's flaws regarding options pricing. And a few are downright concerning a decade later. I would not, for example, brag about advising Wells Fargo executives on their employee incentive programs after the cross-selling scandal came to light.
The final chapters, which I have not yet gotten to, supposedly cover the solution to the flaw of averages. Given the book is 15 years old, I'm expecting it to be pretty dated implementation wise, but I might be able to apply it to Prometheus histograms or t-digests. And I've learned a few things, like Jensen's inequality, and found a few sheets demoing a sampling approach.
https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/player...
Deep Work by Cal Newport - Going through this book to help my focus, especially in the super-connected world we find ourselves in.
Every Tool's a Hammer by Adam Savage - Huge fan of Adam Savage and it is fun reading stories about him establishing himself and his views on making.
I'm also planning a reread of "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" by Neal Stephenson as his references to greater and greater resources being used for supplying computer power seems dangerously relevant to our current data center arms race our world is watching.
https://www.georgesaines.com/blog/2026/9/24/the-best-25-book...
I recently read another book (Autobiography of a Yogi) that included an excerpt from this book, and it piqued my curiosity into Gandhi’s struggles in India. So far I’ve found it different than other biographies I’ve read because the author is self-critical and reflective which helps in understanding him as a person and his actions.
I read after hearing that it was the #1 book Steve Jobs recommended his executive team read (!!)
The Meditation and Yoga techniques are still theoretical to me though and likely require some amount of practice to believe further in their benefits, or realize their value.
He knew he was right 800+ pages
Framley Parsonage 700+
Eustace Diamonds 800+
And currently reading:
The small house at Allington 800+
Now, why did I list the pages? Because I have ADHD and it's very hard for me to read even 100 pages. So that should say sth about the quality of writing Trollope has.
I have reviewed them on my blog (link on HN profile). But I will mention here:
Forget Dickens, and any other 18-to-19th century writer from Britain. Trollope is far more intelligent, his prose elegant like well-written code, his style inimitable yet persistent, his works useful but also entertaining and usually hilarious.
According to WKPD:
"It (The small house at Allington) enjoyed a revival in popularity in the early 1990s when the British prime minister, John Major, declared it his favourite book."
Also of interest:
Wilson, Jennifer Preston (2012). “On Honour and Consequences: The Duel in Trollope’s The Small House at Allington.” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 43: 169–186.
People complain about how it's written, but it's nevertheless an interesting exploration of the parallels between natural ecosystems and human economies. As someone with no particular interest or background in economics (and who hasn't read anything else by Jane Jacobs), I find it a fascinating and easy read.
I've found all three very enjoyable and unexpectedly applicable to real life for being philosophical texts.
nearing the end. i've found it a bit complicated to follow in some spots (there are several 'main' protagonists and it switches between them without much warning or introduction) but overall it's scratched the fantasy itch.
(i suppose it's actually 3 books, but i have the omnibus version)
Either of those two would work as a next read.
I'm reading Deadly Quicksilver Lies, right now.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/series/49491-garrett-files
Goodreads is commercial, but it does a good job of describing books and series of books.
[UPDATE] Ah. Figured it out. It's the trailing period. I think HN removes it from the link.
If your url gets linked incorrectly, put it in <angle brackets> and it should work.
I've read that very passage in the Ts&Cs, numerous times, and it didn't sink in.
It will, now...
As I was reading the account of the assault on Omaha and Utah beaches, a lot of the stories reminded me of the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan. Eventually the similarities got so great that I looked it up and, sure enough, the author of the script of SPR based those scenes on this book.
Every single vignette of horror which you see in that film really happened. If anything I think the film under-exaggerated the events unfortunately. I don't think I can watch that film the same way again.
Currently reading and enjoying: Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel.
Next to Read: Hollywood, Ending by John Green.
Apart from being an interesting book on fashion history, it also draws a lot of interesting connections & facts.
For example, that renowned Japanese magazine Popeye has this weird, almost construction catalog structure because it was inspired by... "The Whole Earth Catalog."
Or how in post-war Japan western formal wear was a punk-like form of protest of teens against elderly.
It's not for the faint of heart, it's relatively difficult, but it's very satisfying so far. You know the feeling when it's maybe an autumn evening and some blue light comes throught the window, hits the curtains a certain way and the shadows remind you of something from your childhood that you thought you had forgotten forever? Well, it's like this, on steroids.
Both books are largely about how the psychological defense mechanisms a person uses play a large role in determining how successfully they adapt to and navigate life.
Ask HN: What Are You Reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283087 - Sept 2025 (42 comments)
Ask HN: What are you reading Feb 2024 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39248780 - Feb 2024 (92 comments)
Ask HN: What are you reading these days? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38237730 - Nov 2023 (281 comments)
Ask HN: What Are You Reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21457827 - Nov 2019 (49 comments)
Ask HN: What books are you currently reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160091 - Jan 2018 (43 comments)
Ask HN: What books are you currently reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14859274 - July 2017 (80 comments)
Ask HN: What books are you reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14608397 - June 2017 (36 comments)
Ask HN: What books are you reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10175465 - Sept 2015 (79 comments)
Ask HN: What are you reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9636361 - June 2015 (37 comments)
Ask HN: What book are you reading right now? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8108932 - July 2014 (86 comments)
Ask HN: What Books Are You Reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7968124 - June 2014 (80 comments)
Ask HN: What books are you reading right now? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4596721 - Oct 2012 (40 comments)
Ask HN: What are you reading? What've you read lately? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3335496 - Dec 2011 (41 comments)
Ask HN: What are you reading right now? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3230965 - Nov 2011 (59 comments)
Ask HN: What books are you reading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2615647 - June 2011 (53 comments)
Ask HN: What are you reading right now? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865350 - Nov 2010 (298 comments)
What are you reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797070 - Sept 2009 (214 comments)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_J%C3%BCnger
Highlights from the past year or two:
Revelator by Daryl Gregory - Appalachian weird fiction with a tinge of cosmic horror.
The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias - Tragic story about the cartel underworld plus magic realism.
The Expanse (all of them) by James S A Corey (pen name for two writers IRL) - Everyone probably knows this one. Books were better than the show in many ways the the prose quality was pleasantly good. Fun read.
Tomato Red by Daniel Woodrell - One of the best openings I have ever read and I’ll leave it at that.
I like to read a wide variety of styles and genres, but the writing has to be good. I’ll drop a book if it’s got flat characters or clunky prose or cringey tropey stuff.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10226473/
The skin does add both fiber and nutritional value (gold skin is more enjoyable then green IMO), but it may not be well tolerated by all.
Austin worked for British Intelligence during World War II, running the Martians section and helping assess possible invasion sites for D-Day. After the war, as a philosopher of language, he helped bring ideas such as performative utterances and speech acts into the discussion.
A fascinating overlap between intelligence work and philosophy of language.
And because the Brewers are in the playoffs, "Catcher in the Wry" by Bob Uecker. Despite being a Cleveland fan, I have to admit the book is amazingly fun. Uecker was Uecker long before he became everybody's favorite baseball storyteller, and he was the Cleveland announcer in Major League.
It was a mix of fantasy & humor. It is a bit long but it is extremely funny & entertaining. It is the first fantasy book I have read other than the Harry Potter series (not sure if it is considered fantasy) but I loved it.
One of the best non-fiction books I read this year was Doppleganger: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/138505710.
I'm halfway through and is quite interesting and enjoyable. behind the scenes documentary view into his life, academic period, pre-DeepMind, forming DeepMind, raising capital, working on various projects like the Atari games, the AlphaGo period (currently immersed in). Definitely recommend
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/241434373-the-infinit...
Just started On The Equality of All Things by Carlo Rovelli and Holy the firm by Annie Dillard
The most impactful book I've read recently has been The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, which deals with a man in a reincarnation loop.
Since I was going through a bit of a reincarnation phase I also quite enjoyed Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore, although it's a bit jumpy and all over place.
As someone who fled the desolation of the rust belt this book spoke to me and I found it credible and compelling. My book club spent 4 hours discussing this book.
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen. (Much more disjointed than the film, but a quick read.)
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
On audiobook (I know, not technically reading):
Garth Marenghi's horror trilogy (Matthew Holness is one of the best narrators I've heard.)
On Kindle:
Cut Throat: the Vicious World of Rod Maclean by Wayne Thallon (I don't believe the half of it, but I know many of the locations discussed in it. I seem to find true crime my light reading these days)
An Angel at my Table by Janet Frame
The Summer Son by Craig Lancaster
Recently finished:
Sky Above, Great Wind by Kazuaki Tanahashi
Jew(ish) by Matt Greene
The House that Evolves by Pauline Hunter
The Inheritors by William Golding (made much less of an impact than the last time I read it.)
Finished Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia yesterday, and also have been reading Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee mysteries - currently on The Haunted Monastery.
Also, "Heaven on Earh", by Emma Wells, about nine or ten Gothic Cathedrals (mostly the history of their building and preservation). A bit too plain for my taste but includes interesting facts and anecdotes.
Finished recently:
-Flowers for Algernon, which I liked a lot.
-Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, so beautiful and surprising.
-The Great Gatsby, which I had not read yet and which I have loved reading.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HK6F7LJ2
Beyond that, I'm steadily working my way through Finders Keepers by Stephen King, and then I have a couple of John Scalzi books queued up.
That particular book bored me to death, but from the same author / series I recently read "Player of Games" and "Use of Weapons" and I can't recommend (both) enough.
Dungeon Crawler, I started the series recently but got bored mid 3rd book. It is quite more denser than the first 2, and it feels like never ending.
It was too repetitive.
I just finally finished “The Ferryman” (Justin Cronin), and “Vera, or Faith” (Shteyngart). I have “Reverse Centaur” (Doctorow) open and “Rainbow’s End” (Vernor Vinge) on deck.
Only semi-related I forced my son to explain to me why so many young people knew the song "Big Iron" by Marty Robbins.
https://www.goodreads.com/series/42766-quadrail
A few of my favorite reads so far this year:
- The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones
- Angel Down, Daniel Kraus
- Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
- Between Two Fires, Christopher Buehlman
- The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow
- The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy
- Nettle & Bone, T. Kingfisher
- The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett
- The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead
I don't usually do fiction outside of classics (Tolkien, Dostoevsky, Huxley, etc), so I'm hopeful this will be interesting.
Just finished Jill Lepore's "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State" -- a history of the popular fascination (esp. among idealistic tech types) for ending human-based governance and replacing it with computer automation (esp. via AI). I appreciated her coverage of the rise more than her case for the fall.
Instead I'm sneaking off to reread a Pratchett novel (he had very few duds until the Alzheimers really got its teeth into him).
After that/those I'm dithering between SS/GB by Deighton and some other re-read.
My wife just sent me a video of his: what I didn't know about central banking! TBH I'm shocked. Apparently we'd all be so much better if we had more local banks doing local lending to local businesses.
Explains a lot, actually, so I even mentioned him in an article I just wrote about my freelancing career. Now I know why the market has been increasingly impossible ...
I looked a little while ago and could only find an extremely expensive second hand copy and a not very good quality pdf.
Non-fiction: Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh.
Previous fiction: Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. Loved Ender's Game when I was younger, but for some reason never picked this up. It's brilliant, even better than Ender's.
Previous non-fiction: Endurance by Alfred Lansing. Well, I couldn't put it down. What a book.
It's definitely Miéville, but the weird doesn't cut in immediately.
The first 100 or so pages is about a young single British woman (Maur) in the 1970s/1980s. She brings up a son who becomes increasingly remote, joins the army, and then something happens to him, which is when the weird elements begin to appear (involving the disturbingly unpleasant lingering spirits of the dead). The second plot strand concerns a Brit soldier (Allardyce) whose unit participates in various weird events (also somewhat disturbing) set against British-empire post-colonial / cold war shenanigans in the 50s and 60s, although the two plot strands eventually connect.
One reviewer I saw described the first bit (which is 'mundane', in the non-fantasy sense) as a masterclass in how to present a character's interiority, and I'm inclined to agree. As with any Miéville, it helps to have access to a good dictionary. I'm a Brit who grew up at approximately the same time as Maur, which helped me understand some of the allusions (e.g. to 'the election', which is Thatcher's). But I had to read into the darker sides of British colonial disengagement to fully understand Allardyce's experiences. E.g. the so-called Malayan Emergency, a particularly brutal little war of independence in the 1950s.
In a way, it reminded me of Kraken, where Miéville throws in lots of references to real-world weirdness to better sneak his own inventions into the story world.
Also, "Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto"
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/82104
Its a pretty good history of the X-48 program.
Edit: also reading the "The Anduril Thesis" in parallel.
I am fed up of this "you should be fast with AI" and this book explains how your can really improve the global performance.
Not super complex. It is written so even management should understand it. But it makes you think about your organización.
Like the Ferrari paradox: give everybody in the city a Ferrari and the traffic won't improve or even be worse. The same with AI
I'd be re-reading Tolkien's _Old English Exodus_, but proofreading the typos got to be too much.
It's a great resource!
Very good way to discover new authors, and the proximity of different styles (I hope) develops my conscious awareness of them.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1005670.50_Great_Shor...
[0]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-emergency-with-geo...
From the title, it sounds very tedious, but I think it’s super cool. It chronicles the history of notebooking/journaling and the impact it’s had throughout time. Notebooks haven’t been been around and accessible for very long (relatively), and it’s interesting to hear about how somebody like Leonardo da Vinci used them to grow ideas. Makes you wonder how we possibly could’ve progressed without them.
The book is called “The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993”.
I'm going to read The Nerd Reich by Gil Duran next because that seems rather pertinent to the modern time. I haven't really looked at reviews and am going in blind.
Just started : Catch the Devil by Pamela Colloff, true crime about a con artist in Florida who traded overheard (probably fabricated) jailhouse confessions for a seemingly endless chain of get out of jail free cards.
It's an autobiographical history which recounts the lives of the author, her mother, and her grandmother throughout an extremely transformational century in Chinese history.
I went into this knowing little to no Chinese history, and it has opened my eyes to this fascinating country. I hope to visit China for the first time in 2027. Before I go, I'm doing a deep dive into Chinese history. Open to recommendations on what to read next!
<River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze> -> one of my fav all the time. a forigner teach in this small chinese city, and he write what he observes.
for more ancient chinese history:
<1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline> -> one of the most popular china's history book for these years. highly recommnded.
i read a lot but i doubt many of them has a non-chinese version. the above ones are the ones i can think of now.
also <The Search for Modern China> is highly recommmend, but i foget if i have read it or not.
oh also another book on how chinese characters are made, 《China: Empire of Living Symbols》。 writen by a Sweden author Cecilia Lindqvist. i love it very much
After this, I have The Gales of November by John Bacon and then The Power Broker by Robert Caro.
I just started reading The Blacktongue Thief (hardback) and The Name of the Wind (ebook). I've heard very good things about the latter, and although I'm aware that the series may never complete, I'm trying to not let that dissuade me.
On the other hand, and not to over-hype them, but The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear are probably my favorite non-fiction books. Way better writing and stories than DCC. Not everyone is a fan, but I think I've listened to them 6-7 times each at this point. I often notice new details on each pass, and I appreciate some parts more on subsequent listens than I did in the first one/few. Not having a third book sucks, but definitely still worth it.
https://archive.org/details/structuralfuncti0000arno/page/n8...
scifi - the murderbot diaries, old man's war.
* Fun - Vince Fynn's "Mitch Rapp" Series - a bit dated, but if you like Tom Clancy it's got a similar vibe.
* Beautiful/Thought Provoking - Things In Nature Merely Grow, by Yiyun Li
Recently, I remembered a short SF story that I read back in high school and tracked it down, "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers".
I find new wave SF to be really playful and enjoyable to read, not to mention that the experimentation with funky themes and formatting adds a lot of novelty. The above Japanese title is a nice collection of late era stories in this genre.
Fiction: just finished The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott; about to read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (for the 2nd or 3rd time)
I'm also reading Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne by David Gaider, the original writer of Dragon Age.
- Selected Stories - Anton Chekhov
- Death in Venice - Thomas Mann
- The Burnout Society - Byung-Chul Han
Currently I am reading an Austrian economics classic - Economics in one lesson by Henry Hazlitt
Great read on tyranny and it's adverse effects. Very relevant to what's happening in the world day.
It's a fascinating read on how loose the ethics were when experimenting with African Americans back then.
This book also makes me wonder about the current practices, which we do "normally", that the future scientists will consider downright crazy.
My goal is to read the history of ideas from Renaissance period till 2000s. Started with The Florentines by Paul Strathern. Then read The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick. Now at the enlightenment era. It has been eye opening to read about the life and times of some of the great minds like Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Locke and more.
It started slow (booting) but I'm enjoying the books (currently on #3), the universe-building and the length (10 books) of it.
Full of lovely lines such as “I hear they’re building a telegraph line from Maine to Texas. Have they stopped to ask, does Texas have anything to say to Maine?”
Master Alvin by Orson Scott Card Kinda impressed that he finished the series after 30 years. GRR Martin loses another excuse.
I read Artists Way a few years back, and did some of the recommended practices (daily pages, and artist dates) - it was effective in subtle and powerful ways.
Here's a few of the ones I've read and enjoyed:
“The Jigsaw Man” by Larry Niven
“The Night That All Time Broke Out” by Brian W. Aldiss
“A Toy for Juliette” by Robert Bloch (although I was surprisingly not a fan of Harlan's continuation)
“The Man Who Went to the Moon — Twice” by Howard Rodman
“Flies” by Robert Silverberg
I have a long-ish commute at the moment with some opportunities to read on the train, so I’ve been reading more. Been knocking out some of the books on my shelf.
Rereading the Lies of Locke Lamure. If only the sequel were half as good as it...
Heil Schicklgruber!
(For those unaware, in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer notes that the Grandfather of the mustachioed-one had the surname 'Schicklgruber'. Shirer suggests that history may have turned out somewhat differnetly if he hadn't changed it, as lets face it, it sounds rather silly).
It's a shame the author seems to have quite a pronounced (and historically irrelevant) distaste for homosexuality.
Try Charles Stross's Accelerando and the Laundry Files series if you need good sci-fi. Foundryside and Empress of Forever are also decent. If you want fantasy, The Name of The Wind and Discworld are classics.
Incidentally Mars is the only Kim Stanley Robinson book I liked.
These two feel especially relevant:
Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered - E.F. Schumacher
Tools for Conviviality - Ivan Illich
and
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - John Koenig
I have grown playing MMORPG's and this one brings the nostalgia vibes without investing the time into grinding for gear.
(re-reading) Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett
(re-reading) Invitation to Forth by Harry Katzan Jr
(reading to my son) Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl, Der Kleine Peter in der Katzenstadt, An Caisteal fòn Mhuir.
Got quite a lot going on at the moment, really, in terms of books.
Katabasis by RF Kuang - magicians from Oxford go to hell on purpose
And, meatier
The language of the night, essays by Ursula Le Guin
That sounds really cool! I love Ursula Le Guin but had never heard of this book.
The description of the actual world of shamanism leaves me feeling massively disillusioned. McKenna et al. did us a disservice by shaping the western popcultural idea of what indigenous shamanism is.
Not sure if this is specific to mestizo culture, but the shaman that the book describes looks to me much more like a superstitious, opportunistic charlatan than a clerical psychonaut.
Gordon Wasson did not reveal to the west the idea about ethneogens that Maria Sabina represented. He came to her with a preconceived goal of looking for god, which was not what she was using the mushrooms for.
Anyway, my point is that shamanism looks different through the lens of rigorous ethnography than it when conveyed to us by the influencial popcultural figures. I won't be able to explain it well in a comment, but I highly recommend the book, even if you only read fragments.
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold - This has been on my to-read list for years. Pretty great so far.
Nettle and Bone I really enjoyed
Some desperate glory also enjoyed
East of Eden very meaty if you want an epic
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Trilogy
- Hiroshima
- The Doomsday Machine
- Command and Control
Highly recommended if you’re feeling too happy and full of faith in humanity.
https://archive.org/details/taxationthepeopl033026mbp
It's from 1924 and US centric, old new ideas in there.
* That All Shall Be Saved by David Bentley Hart
* Almost Transparent Blue by Ryū Murakami
* The Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cormwell
* The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (rereading after his recent passing)
An indepth history of Stuxnet. A bit long but recommended. You can not find any other book which goes this much in describing a mallware (no code).
pretty much you've to sell dollars to high up decision makers. and promise ROI. pretty radical.
just have to put what I have been reading in practice.
The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (How to Think About Artificial Intelligence-Before It's Too Late) By Cory Doctorow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...
Tells individual stories of hedge funds and their founders such as Simmon, Tudor-Jones, Soros and more
Great lessons in how each thought about markets, how they lost and made money
Fascinating (to me) book, basically setting up the question, is human endurance limiting factor physical or psychological …
The American by Martin Booth
Mostly seeking design tips for a vacuum tolerant micro-positioning stage project. =3
Just finished "there is no antimemetics division" an absolutely astounding read
It explores why we love metrics in games, but hate them at work.
Playing Off the Rail: A Pool Hustler's Journey by David McCumber (1996) - hustling in the golden era of pool in the usa
I just want it do it right, for my child.
I will admit, I needed the spoiler afterwards to untangle it.
- Google News and the occasional full article
- Email
- Slack
- ChatGPT/ Codex responses
- Road signs
- Various things in various mobile apps I use
- Websites
- Movie/Show subtitles
Off the top of my head, that accounts for most of the things I read on a weekly basis.
No time for books.
So far read about 20%, seems like a lovely theory tying together a lot about how the mind works.
I read the Grapes of Wrath many years ago. I think Steinbeck is more effective in his shorter works.
Try to get a modern translation if you're not reading in original language.
Currently reading and recommending - Endurance by Alfred Lansing. Sir Earnest Shackleton’s attempt to cross the Antarctic.
God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre by Richard Grant about hiking through cartel-run Mexico alone
I normally read a lot of nonfiction and history and am trying to make a point to read more fiction this year.
Some people think the later books have lost the juice but I think as you approach 20 books the vibe is gonna shift a lot, it's definitely a lot more high-powered fantasy than the first ones which isn't everyone's taste.
Fiction(before bed): Quicksilver Neal Stephenson
Audio(during chores): Dungeon Crawler Carl(Up to book 6)
Next up:
Non-Fiction: Ten things I wish I knew about raising boys, Outdoor kids in an indoor world, Intentional(Chris Bailey)
Fiction: The rest of the Baroque Cycle, then moving onto The Laundry Files by Charles Stross, then the rest of Discworld
Audio: The rest of DCC then I'm going to switch to podcasts for a while nothing else planned after this right now.
Dungeon Crawler Card - Not for me but I might give it another chance
Bukowski - Post Office - Worth reading, Gen-Z might get triggered
...but this year I set myself the goal of reading 10 books. One of the things that has really helped, is giving myself permission to quit a book if I am not enjoying it after the first 50 pages, or if it's too much of a struggle.
Also having 2 books on the go at the same time has been helpful too.
I am currnetly reading:
+ The Eloquence of the Sardine - Bill Francis
+ What about you doing with your life - J. Krishnmurti (recommended by Naval)
I am enjoying the first, learning lots of interesting facts about fish and the ocean but the second is quite slow and difficult and I might give up soon.
Weaveworld, by Clive Barker. my 2nd read
Surface Detail, by Ian M. Banks
devtest reads of my WIP book on computer performance
* Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer -- post-apoc dystopian, somewhat cozy, told from a robot's perspective (who is joined by a companion cyborg dog)
* Blacktongue Thief by Chris Buehlman -- witty and snarky fantasy, solid character development and world building; and, if you like it, book 2 in the series (book 3 if you count a prequel) comes out soon
* Mortedant's Peril -- Fantasy mystery in a world where magic allows the "detectives" to touch the dead and sense their final thoughts/words; in that world, someone learns a dark secret from a victim...
* Trade of Blood -- Another fantasy mystery that is exceptionally well told; it's Book 3 in a series so I'd start with Tainted Cup if you haven't read that already
* The Infinite State -- new SciFi by Richard Swan (usually a fantasy author); a universe where ultra wealthy can establish colony planets, someone attempts to start a democracy.
I just started this last week after wrapping up DCC series and seeing it recommended in a reddit thread. I'm surprised that I'm enjoying it, it's not my usual genre
I’m slowly rereading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
I am perpetually rereading the works of Richard Rorty.
I guess it will take me years to have reason of both.
Non-fiction: 21st Century Monetary Policy
That book led me to Quantum Computing for Everyone. It's good so far, but more work than expected to follow along being that I'm dumb.
Since the question is what are you reading (not what have you read): Ant-Kind by Charlie Kaufman. It's too soon to say if it's good or not, but it has made me laugh out loud several times. I'm about 80 pages in, and it's only just now started to open up into Kaufman's recursive, meta story telling that makes his film stuff so cool.
I’m specifically talking about the New Testament.
I’m currently reading Hebrews 6.
I recently started it - currently 30% through. I am tryin to hold back judgement until I have completed the book, but I can definitely say its quite shocking, nearly every page.
https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/
3 & 4 I thought were quite poor.
I didn't really get this book the first time through.
At work I'm currently trying to read SF light novels from the turn of the millennium. I finished Murasaki no Qualia some time ago, and it's just as amazing as I remember the manga being when I read it as a teen. Right now I'm reading Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu. Sadly very few of these are translated. The Last and First Idol story collection is also a good read if you're interested in this genre.
Highly recommend the game for anyone who liked Dark or Primer (or any other fiction that features stable time loops).
Highly recommended if you want to challenge your view of the world.
1. "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny
Just finished reading: Middlemarch by George Eliot
Oh hell, what truly great novel. It’s a long collection of people’s inner monologues, and it’s confusing as hell at first that every Russian has at least three names. But so good.
Before this: The Subtle Art Of Folding Space… biggest pile of shit I’ve read in years. Fuck. So stupid. If you made me pick between reading it again and a Kristin Hannah… I’d just go get my wine glass and basic bitch sweatpants now. It was supposed to be “modern sci fi” it was actually a food snob that seems like they’re in a cult and trying subtly to tell you how everyone else is so fucking stupid except the smart people that choose to be mentally superior to everyone else. Bad bad bad.
I just finished 'All Quiet on the Western Front' - reading with https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicBookClub/. Really great book, though a bit heavy content - ww1 from a german soldier's pov, gets you to feel the mindnumbing senselessness and horror - highly recommend it if your tastes run that way.
Also reading Iliad, the Fagles translation, through https://catherineproject.org/ about a third of way through right now and we'll also be reading the Emily Wilson translation later this year. It's been fun discussing it with people. This translation has been a easy read, far easier than I expected. And the discussions make it thought-provoking. For meaty, this might work.
Also reading 'When Things Fall Apart' by Pema Chodron. This is slow going, thoughtful. I read a few pages every few days, never more than a chapter at a time. I suppose it's all variants of being fully in the present moment to some extent. And I think I might re-read it after I finish. It did get me thinking again about loving-kindness and tonglen. In this vein, 'Taming the Tiger Within' was also great - short and sweet, simple language but still thought-provoking.
Earlier this year I read 'The Road' which I loved, and highly recommend. Dystopian with language to match. On the fantasy side the 'Ana & Din' novels by Robert Jackson Bennett, think sherlock holmes but in a fantasy setting and magic for science. I liked the earlier ones in the series better or maybe I just read too many of them in a short period. Either works for a good read though I think Ana & Din might be easier.
Other slightly off the beaten path fiction recommendations would be 'Eagle in the Snow' - set in Roman times about an officer holding the line against attacking german forces, starts a bit rocky and I was lost a bit and found it hard to understand initially but totally loved it as it progressed. I came to it from a fivebooks recommendation. Also, CJ Sansom's shardlake series, another fivebooks recommendation I think. This is about a hunchback lawyer investigating something each time. I love how it gets us into the time period and the personalities involved.
Now that I'm done with the book for classicbookclub, I might start 'A Tale of Two Cities'
- Most Jewish victims of the Holocaust died by gunshot in the occupied USSR
- In March 1942, 80% of Holocaust victims were still alive and by February 1943 80% were dead.
- Per capita incomes were equal in the first and last years of the British Raj
- Indian grain exports increased in the 1880s and 90s and there were 3(?) different famines at that time
rattling around in my head in the same part that holds on to "Pakistan has never had a PM finish a 5 year term," "The Lions, Falcons, and Bills (non-exhaustive) have never won a Super Bowl," "There are no surviving contemperaneous attestations of Hamilcar and Hannibal Barca" and "the first drummer of the Beatles was called Pete Best and made an album called Best of the Beatles"
> - In March 1942, 80% of Holocaust victims were still alive and by February 1943 80% were dead.
Makes sense. A couple of things happened: 1942 Wannsee Conference in January 1942 - which I assume took some time during 1942 to get into motion.
Germany started losing, they realized they did not have the logistics to feed additional millions of people in the occupied territories.
will be giving my trainee this book too, and hoping we can discuss parts of the book we agree and don't agree with.
I have been reading The Bible. It has been a long time project and I have a long ways to go. I am much more agnostic that a true believer but it has been interesting. Hearing popular views about it and Christianity vs. reading The Book is sort of like the difference between reading a novel and watching the based on movie.
I have been wanting to read Donald Knuth's "3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated".
(https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/316.html)
My favorite example: see how all mainstream modern editions (NRSV, NIV, ESV, NASB, CSB, and even the NKJV) say "every man" (or something along those lines), rather than "any that pisseth against the wall" (literal rendering of the Hebrew): https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/1%20Samuel%2025%3A22
(I don't have a theology degree, but I do have an English degree. I have read parts of KJV, and it has literary significance, but it is not attempting to be a bare literal translation)
* New Living Translation (NLT): My main one nowadays. This one is not for everyone, but I find it very readable and was recommended it online. My one criticism is that the style is a bit too American. It works on a thought for thought basis.
* New English Bible (NEB): I have something of a soft spot for this one. It has the opposite problem to the NLT in that its style is sometimes too British. Nonetheless I always liked its text lay out and style. Sadly it got superseded by the Revised English Bible which is not so good. I mostly come across it second hand.
* New King James Version (NKJV): this one at least retains some of the literary qualities of the KJV while making the text more accessible to a modern audience. It does have some problems (mostly those that afflict other modern Bible versions).
The International Standard Version is online only, but its range of sources has piqued my interest as a study Bible, but its readability seems to vary. I hope it comes out in print.
I have Lorimer's New Testament in Scots. I find it a bit uneven. I know folk who love it.
As for BAD Bible versions, I'd out the following on the naughty stool. The Scholars' Version is gospels only, but is horrendous to read (its version of the Beatitudes says "congratulations to the..." as if they'd won Reader's Digest Prize Draw.) The New World Translation is the Jehovah's Witness version and had clunky prose, making it extremely unpleasurable to read. The Good News Bible is not as annoying as the other two but its English is oversimplified and directed at children and learners. The Message goes for colloquial English and doesn't always work. The Conservative Bible, like NIV and NSRVue allows its political biases in.
Also started "Sutskever's list" by Richard Heimann, which goes into the history of the current AI paradigm "one paper at a time". It's written for a curious audience : people who can vaguely understand the concepts, but not go into details. That means that I kinda "get" some chapters because I already read about the topics, and I'm completely stumped by some. But the "insider baseball" history is illuminating sometimes.
When I was young, thought that Raskolnikov was an example of an intelligent, moral person who was struggling with higher concepts which led him to murder. And moreover back then, thought he was a overall a good protagnist who was just in an impossible situation.
Now, realized the novel is more about psychology and how people who are overall good and others who are overall bad make choices, and then they have to mentally deal with these decisions. Yeah, think Dostoevsky is saying Raskolnikov was actually very misguided in the reasoning behind his murders. Eventhough his intentions were in many respects actually good, they were egotistically and overly idealistic. Eventually, Raskonikov realized he had deluded himself and that he was hyperinflating his own merits and value as a person over other people. And also, at a more basically level, he struggled with his conscience on whether to avoid being caught, commit suicide or turn himself in. He himself didn't believe he was an immoral person, and when he realized he had deluded himself, he struggled in the end on what course of action to take.
One downside of the book is by today's standards, it is very long-winded and often take several pages to go through something that would take a single page by many writers today. But think this also makes it more realistic, because most people in actual life don't get to the point that quickly. Really fascinating.
It’s a shame that, as you said, but modern standards the book has a lot of rough edges. If it were half as long it would be 10x better.
If you got through C&P unscathed, I’d *highly* recommend The Gambler. It is absolutely a modern, tight, fast paced thriller. It is a deep, disturbing look into addiction and compulsive behavior.
I found it as thought provoking and insightful as C&P but, crucially, I also enjoyed reading the whole thing.
* Dead Hand
* Atomic Accidents
* Hiroshima
* Command and Control
Starting today: “In the shadow of man”.
I'm not a doomer, but I'm trying to understand the perspective. Up to chapter 10, I'm still not convinced. There's too much hand-waving around what will happen. It's like: 1. AI smarter than us 2. ??? 3. We're dead. What happens in 2.?
I just got past the "extinction scenario" and I'm wildly unconvinced. I agree that AI can theoretically create a bioweapon. I'm unconvinced that an AI can hide its ability to RSI, find money to run its weights on a random GPU farm, train itself to be smarter _outside_ a lab with no human input, then somehow manipulate people to give it supplies to build a bioweapon which it uses to kill us all. I to believe that Yudkowsky was good at fanfiction; this senario did not demonstrate that. My number 1 question: why do they think an RSI capable model would be first developed OUTSIDE a frontier lab? The labs have more compute, more data, more human brains working on the problem. Also thousands of variations of that same model that escaped. The escaping model somehow acquires the millions of dollars it takes to run training to somehow RSI itself into infinity then decides to kill us all, all before the frontier labs manage to achieve RSI?
Come on.
Anyway. Finishing the book for completeness, but massively underwhelmed.
- "On Writing Well" by Zinsser
Not sure if this one qualifies as more meaty :)
I'm reading Information and Meaning in Evolutionary Processes by Harms and it goes off on how weak Dawkins is.
"Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence"
In my original comment, I Iisted some other books by Dawkins if you're interested -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49896133
- From Third World to First
Last finished: Human Use of Human Beings
The economy of anonymity by Amaya
Artificial Intimacy by Sherry Turkle, just out
Other books I’ve enjoyed recently:
The Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft - I read Endurance by Alfred Lansing last year so it was fun having a real Antarctic adventure in my mind while reading it.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy - I actually started this a couple of years ago and quit part way through deciding I couldn’t put myself through it anymore. I kept thinking about it though, until I finally picked it back up and finished it this summer. Horrifying, but quite a masterpiece.
If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky - I was about a year late to the party on this, but it still holds up. I would recommend it.
The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Malaby - Excellent! Fascinating seeing a glimpse inside of the companies currently eating the world.
Becky Chambers, the long way to a small angry planet (very good)
Asimov, Second foundation (just finished, not as good as Foundation but good still)
Maybe Knut Hansun, The last joy (Nazi sympathizer, might just put the book down - and book not blowing my mind)
Edit0: writing this and seeing Hansun was a Nazi collaborator - putting the book down
Always.
Chips wars, for me as a dev without a strong hardware background is a fascinating read into the history of Silicon Valley, from the 50s right up to nvidia and Taiwan semiconductor.
I had just finished the first "Dungeon Crawler Carl" and found it harmless and not worth the money. Frankly I'm a little surprised its a best seller. Do the later books get any better?
Hyperion is a first-time read and as I near the end I know I'll seek out the next one.
The end of the first book made me wish for a paper copy I could throw against the wall :-D
- Middlemarch
Something from every food group there.
My friends have begun saying they are reading books when they listen to them.
It enrages me.
For other people, it’s all good, we all walk a different path. If they think that then that’s ok. It’s all minor in the big scheme of things.
Just my opinion though.
There was an article on HN a month or two ago about how some books drive people to the kind of madness that would make them do a degree in literature. This is probably the one for me. Excited to read it again in 5 years and see it differently again.
https://what-are-you-reading-september-2026.aljosa-asanovic....
I was coding already before LLMs but nowadays any little idea for something useful can be done on 15 minutes.
From your profile, you're a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist so I'm not sure how much you tinker with code but if you've got a ChatGPT subscription you can just ask ChatGPT to build you useful little utilities and websites like this now.
It will publish it for you either privately or publicly under your own subdomain e.g. something.bookofjoe.chatgpt.site
Could be fun for you to try for anything you can think of.
I'm currently reading More Fearless Change by Manns & Rising. I've always enjoyed being a change agent, and I would've been more effective if I'd read this book a decade ago.
Next up, I plan to read Facilitating Software Architecture by Harmel-Law.
Oh, and every day or two I read aloud a chapter of Magic and Meaning Expanded by Burger & Neale to my wife. We're both magicians and big fans of Eugene Burger's work.
Also still working through Civilization and Capitalism by Fernand Braudel.
What I finished recently and was really surprised by: Der Geisterbanner by Karl Friedrich Kahlert from 1792.
I'm now working my way through "I Am Not A Robot: My Year Using AI To Do (Almost) Everything" by Joanna Stern.
https://joannastern.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purge_(novel)
"The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst" - This story is about the first round-the-world solo yacht race, and the one contestant who died at sea. His story is really strange - an anti-hero tragedy with a touch of mental illness. The author does a great job bringing the reader on this descent into madness.
"Protocols" - Andrew Huberman's recent book. Like his podcast, it's full of solid advice backed by published science - but also with some repetitive filler and product name drops. The sections on exercise and diet were not very informative to me, mainly because I've already incorporated most of that into my life already. The sections on light exposure and its relationship to sleep, melatonin and cortisol is the most fascinating new-to-me info. I've started morning/evening walking without my sunglasses to get those sweet sweet photons.
A beautifully written travelogue/nature book/eco activist screed that tours the world visiting rivers and the people engaged in living with and protecting them. Fascinating, hopeful, heartbreaking and lyrical. Really enjoying it (evidently)!
- The Left Hand of Darkness
- The Nerd Reich
- What Happened to Liberal Democracy?
- End Times Fascism, And the Fight for the Living World (Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor)
- The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity (Tim Wu)
https://a.co/d/08zSx2LD
DCC is strangely hypocritical - a massive commercial success where we the readers revel-wallow in the graphic suffering of the fictive protagonists/victims, and author & co are making truckloads of profits, precisely on the kinds of sheenanigans the books on the surface critisize :-). It is also a bit ironic, that the books/Carl critisize fascism, while at the same time, Carl is on a kind of one-man fascist/tyrant purging the existing elite, with summary and graphic executions. Sigh :-)
Having read Steve Jobs by him, I was quite excited to read more by him.
I'm not reading anything at the moment since I'm taking a break and watching season one of Deadwood and also re-watching season one of Boston Legal.
But when I'm done, I plan to re-read "The Cold War A Very Short Introduction" by Robert J. McMahon. I read it about five years ago and it's time to read it again.
Having said that, I can't pass on this opportunity to share the books I've read (some are re-reads) thus far this year that I recommend. I'll just list them while saying that they all come highly recommended by me.
In the famous words of Frank Zappa - So many books, so little time.
1. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris
2. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
3. Lying by Sam Harris
4. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
5. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
6. Cosmos by Carl Sagan.
7. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins
8. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
9. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
10. Mortality by Christopher Hitchens
11. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J. K. Rowling
12. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling
13. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
14. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
15. Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan
16. Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide to Atheism by Richard Dawkins
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168840-the-arab-of-the...
- https://www.goodreads.com/series/329945-sapiens-a-graphic-hi...
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/769712.Palestine
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/196618871-1177-b-c
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203767306-the-hidden-lif...
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/207003952-capital-ideolo...
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9844623-feynman
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23167775-the-age-of-self...
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38589785-to-kill-a-mocki...
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208512484-the-mythmakers
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61783727-the-bomb
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50159458-kent-state
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12959045-my-friend-dahme...
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32951507-the-park-bench
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6493321-logicomix
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218569864-insectopolis
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48638303-billionaires
Currently I'm reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/210384823-shroud
* Iain M. Banks is a bad writer. His books are predictable. You know the goodies (1990s neoliberals with space helmets) are gonna win. There's no moral uncertainty and not even really any jeopardy.
* I'm seeing an alarming amount of Dungeon Crawler Carl. Look, if you don't want to read, just don't read! There's no point reading rubbish. Just play a computer game or pick your nose or something. There's a thousand years of literature out there. Some of it is really good.
* Neil Gaiman. American Gods was so unbearable I couldn't finish it. How can any decent person like this vain, pompous writer?
I am judging typical hn-er tastes, sorry, but it's as if I thought PHP was the best programming language or something. No. It is not.
Genre is fine! There's great SF and fantasy. But bad writing is bad writing. Genre is not an excuse.
- Fiction: Pure entertainment, with no shame, although I do enjoy working in a mix of slop and more high-brow works. I generally go through one of these every 5-10 days.
- Non-fiction: Big, meaty, interesting book. These take me forever to finish but I really enjoy them. I get through like 100 pages in a good month.
- Children’s: I have been reading to my son, which is entirely for me as he’s only ~5mo old. But I have a stack of lovely children’s classics that I have greatly enjoyed going through.
Here’s what I’m currently reading and some recommendations on previous stuff I’ve read.
Fiction
Right now I’m finishing up The Kremlin’s Candidate. Not great, the series has been going a bit downhill. Some recent hits:
- The Dog Stars (Heller): Awful movie, incredible book. Highly recommended.
- True Grit (Portis): For everyone recommending Lonesome Dove, definitely get a copy of True Grit. A fantastically fun masterpiece. A real achievement.
- The Force (Winslow): The first 80 pages are deep cringe but it picks up into a really compelling and fast crime novel. Pulp for sure but fun.
- All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy): Incredible book. I could read it 100 times.
Nonfiction
- The Politics of Heroin (McCoy): Dense but very very good. First hand reporting of the CIA’s role in the global drug trade and how it has, to a surprising degree, shaped the modern world.
Children’s
- The Last Unicorn (Beagle): Surprisingly nice. Some rough edges but I’m enjoying it. If my son was able to understand more than just that he’s spending time with me and that I’m making comforting noises I think he’s enjoy it.
- The Wind in the Willows (Grahame): Stop everything you’re doing and go read this. Aloud, your kids if you have them but as a treat to yourself if you don’t. What a joy this is.
————
Some things I haven’t read that are on the shelf thaf I really want to dig in to:
- Challenger: History of the tragic NASA accident.
- First Casualty: Inside the CIA’s paramilitary ops and the early days of the Afghanistan war.
- The Great Game: Historic book on the power struggles of the British and Russian empire in Afghanistan.
- Lonesome Dove: I love westerns, I have this whole series on the shelf, and am kind of just waiting and keeping it in my back pocket for a rainy day.
- Power of the Dog series: I just know I’m going to love this. Cartel/DEA saga spanning decades.
- McCloskey’s CIA series: It’s slop, and the tradecraft is dated to the point that what is happening in the field now is completely unrecognizable from the dead drops and SDRs and such of the cold war, but… it’s fun!
On the non fiction side, I'm slowly chipping away at Joe Studwell's book How Asia Works, about East Asian development. In the first section of the book, the author argues that the foundation for successful development was boosting agricultural output -- instead of spending precious foreign currency on food imports, surplus agricultural output can be exported & intensive farming provides a way to soak up and use labour before other industries develop.
Studwell also argues for the importance of land reform in boosting agricultural output -- appropriating land from wealthy landlords & redistributing it to landless peasants & tenants. This happened in both socialist & capitalist societies. There was a huge demand for land reform from landless peasants. I was completely ignorant of this chunk of history & found it fascinating. Agricultural output increases on a per hectare basis when farmers have the incentive to work hard - unlike if they're day labourers or share croppers paying much of their output as rent. Landlords don't have an incentive to increase output as its easier for them to earn money from renting out their land & lending money. Studwell gives examples of small farmer-owned farms being much more productive than colonial plantation style farming. Developmental success stories (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) were those where governments supported their huge newly created markets of tiny landowner-farmers with subsidised fertiliser inputs, better varieties of crops etc & where peasants & tenants got a seat at the table to influence the land redistribution process. There are also stories of failures where wealthy elites got control of the land reform process & rendered it largely ineffective (the Philippines).