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kstrauser 26 minutes 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.
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.
r-bryan 9 minutes 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.
agnishom 3 minutes 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"
chadd 5 minutes 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
creature_x 5 hours 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!).
raddan 24 minutes 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.
sotix 2 hours 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 8 minutes ago [-]
... how did you both misspell the title? It's the Count of Monte Cristo .. unless this is a different language.
iamagurgle 1 hours 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
thisoneisreal 4 hours 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 hours ago [-]
We must be kindred spirits! Any recs for me ?
bpshaver 25 minutes ago [-]
Kindred spirits or these are just about the top 3 most often recommended books on Reddit and similar platforms. Nothing wrong with that.
thisoneisreal 2 hours 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.
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
> Siddhartha
I also loved The Glass Bead Game, and Steppenwolf
simpaticoder 4 hours 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 hours ago [-]
Dern! I was really looking forward to reading the prequels, in no small part because how much I love Gus's character.
KerryJones 4 hours ago [-]
I am also reading the Count of Monte Cristo -- I suggest reading up on its origin, it's fairly interesting.
genghisjahn 5 hours 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.
JKCalhoun 2 hours ago [-]
Do the audiobook then. That’s how I read it.
fyskij 5 hours ago [-]
Read The Count of Monte Cristo for the first time this year too. Kinda obsessed with it for a month
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).
mindcrime 6 hours 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 hours 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 hours ago [-]
Should have screamed instead of laughing.
godshatter 5 hours ago [-]
I'm on Book Seven of DCC. Very fun. Looking forward to reading Book Eight.
jesuslop 3 hours ago [-]
What drove you to an analog computing book, may I ask?
mindcrime 3 hours 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.
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 1 hours 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.
I recently described finishing Fire Upon the Deep as saying goodbye to a very dear friend. A great book.
largePanda9 5 hours ago [-]
Great series! Give Children of Time a go next if you haven’t already.
askvictor 5 hours 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
pelican0 4 hours ago [-]
Don't miss out on his "The blabber", a novella in that universe with an adorable character.
tastyfreeze 38 minutes 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
rdoherty 4 hours 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 hours 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.
wepple 4 hours ago [-]
Seeing like a state is my next book to read. Weirdly, I cannot recall the chain of interests that led me to it.
pchristensen 4 hours ago [-]
I’m also reading Seeing Like a State!
cl42 34 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
jppope 6 hours 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.
equinumerous 14 minutes 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.
shruubi 44 minutes 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.
glokta 2 minutes ago [-]
Dust of Dreams was the hardest book of the series for me.
nomagicbullet 6 hours ago [-]
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 5 hours 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.
simpaticoder 4 hours 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 hours ago [-]
That's a different, older collection.
Joe_Boogz 2 hours 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.
jppope 6 hours ago [-]
"Exhalation" was very good. Not every story was great, but as a whole is was lovely
upupupandaway 3 hours 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".
opesorry 3 hours 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.
rheffern 29 minutes ago [-]
Stiff, the life of human cadavers, by Mary Roach
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
Let me know what you think and if you have recommendations or criticisms!
pastel8739 24 minutes 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.
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.
sotix 2 hours ago [-]
It's a great read and fun to pair with 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451.
pjmorris 6 hours ago [-]
Last year I read 'Amusing Ourselves' and 'Technopoly'. A very interesting thinker.
pjmorris 6 hours 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 5 hours ago [-]
that would probably be a great companion to 'Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety'.
pjmorris 4 hours 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 hours 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 hours 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.
Rendello 11 hours 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 7 hours 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.
largePanda9 5 hours ago [-]
SSC Boston member by chance?
Rendello 4 hours ago [-]
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!
langfo 41 minutes ago [-]
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 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 4 hours 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.
wombat-man 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I wouldn't say it's bad... but it's not for me. did not finish.
jerkstate 3 hours 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
nephihaha 2 hours 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 1 hours ago [-]
the last scene is absolutely bonkers, if that helps you get through it
haroldp 4 hours 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 hours 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 4 hours ago [-]
The audiobook version I listened to had different narrators for main text and footnote with audio cue when footnote started as well.
metaphor 25 minutes ago [-]
Current Fiction:
- The Last Contract of Isako (Fonda Lee)
- The Dregs of Empire (Christopher Ruocchio)
Current Non-Fiction:
- The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Richard Hamming)
- Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays (David Foster Wallace)
latortuga 6 hours 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 hours 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 1 hours 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 :)
xelxebar 40 minutes 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.
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.
gtg239a 45 minutes 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.
david927 4 hours ago [-]
You can't entirely judge a George Sand novel partway through. For my money, it destroys any Brontë, Austen, or Dickens.
bpshaver 24 minutes ago [-]
Eliot*
imperialdrive 5 hours ago [-]
Something about it though, feels good to meet folks that have read it.
jeremyscanvic 5 hours 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!
jcubic 9 hours 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.
largePanda9 5 hours ago [-]
Reading this now as well! Also was on the bookshelf for over a year, glad I finally cracked it open
p4ul 6 hours ago [-]
This is an excellent book! We give a copy to everyone that joins our team.
6 hours ago [-]
BeetleB 5 hours 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.
electroweak 10 hours 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 10 hours ago [-]
Tell me more about the abridgements. Which one now, which one next?
electroweak 9 hours 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.
sea6ear 1 hours 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.
GarnetFloride 56 minutes 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.
AlexErrant 22 minutes 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.
fasterik 3 hours 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.
1potato 2 hours 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 2 hours ago [-]
I just finished “There is no antimemetics devision”, qntm has my respect it was an incredible book.
specproc 2 hours 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 2 hours 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 2 hours ago [-]
That one is on my list to read very soon!
nicois 1 hours 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...
jtgi 51 minutes 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
pastel8739 22 minutes ago [-]
I just read Killers of the Flower Moon, which was great.
greatquux 1 hours 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!
ultrasounder 35 minutes ago [-]
Notes from the underground, myth of Sisyphus and Thus spoke Zarathustra. All three in parallel
mysterydip 6 hours 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 hours ago [-]
So, so good. Changed the way I read comics and I've been a lifelong fan of the medium.
PyWoody 9 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours 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.
phugoid 5 hours 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!
asphodele 4 hours 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.
jonahx 2 hours 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:
Big fan of Camus; I found The Fall and The Plague to both be stronger books than The Stranger
colechristensen 4 hours ago [-]
I didn't realize it was published under two separate english translated titles
tarr 2 hours 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.
aaronbrethorst 6 hours 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.
rvshchwl 4 hours 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 hours 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.
rkp8000 3 hours ago [-]
I would also highly recommend Gandhi the Man, by Eknath Easwaran.
jdfellow 6 hours 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
spudlyo 4 hours 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.
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 6 hours 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 5 hours 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 hours 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 2 hours 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. "
If you don't like to be sad, at least wait to forget most of it before watching the Prime Video series.
aditya_rs 5 hours ago [-]
The series is also cancelled, so no point wasting time watching it either.
mcmcmc 5 hours ago [-]
It’s a classic, but this is absolutely true
> Jordan doesn't portray women well.
tugs braid
laweijfmvo 1 hours 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.
tobyjsullivan 4 hours 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.
quuxplusone 10 hours 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 4 hours 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.
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 5 hours 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 4 hours 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 55 minutes 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
MattSteelblade 5 hours 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.
Game_Ender 2 hours 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.
upupupandaway 3 hours 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.
jadijadi 2 hours 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).
shawn_w 3 hours 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.
ky-hy 5 hours 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 5 hours 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.
jldugger 5 hours 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.
Oanid 2 hours 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.
schmookeeg 3 hours 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 :)
tarr 2 hours 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 2 hours 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.
ferguess_k 11 hours ago [-]
This is my 13th round to recommend "The Soul of a new Machine" as well as "Showstoppers".
Kon5ole 5 hours 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 6 hours 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)
le-mark 3 hours 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.
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.
arrowleaf 5 hours 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.
storywatch 3 hours 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.
gorgoiler 4 hours 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.*
ChrisMarshallNY 6 hours ago [-]
Glen Cook's Garrett P.I. series[0]. It's a perennial fave (I've read it many times, in the past).
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.
rsyring 2 hours 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.
NishanStepak 9 hours ago [-]
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.
analog31 3 hours ago [-]
Moby Dick. I'm further through then I've ever gotten before thanks to a long airplane ride.
lucb1e 6 hours 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
2snakes 2 hours ago [-]
Proofs and refutations by laktos
Basic mathematics by lang
Mathematics for nonmathematician
Hail mary andy weil
Just picked up player piano linked here
delichon 6 hours ago [-]
You've Been Pooping All Wrong by Trisha Pasricha MD. Get a bidet, eat more fiber and kiwis.
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.
dcminter 5 hours 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.
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.
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.
travisgriggs 2 hours 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 4 hours 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 6 hours ago [-]
Just got Exit Party from my public library, looking forward to it!
gb2d_hn 5 hours 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 5 hours 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 53 minutes ago [-]
Another great story from Ted Chiang is "Hell is the absence of God"
kaypro 2 hours 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.
edoceo 3 hours ago [-]
Taxation The Peoples Business
by Mellon, Andrew W.
It's from 1924 and US centric, old new ideas in there.
asxndu 54 minutes ago [-]
Wall Street Stories by Edwin Lefèvre
zem 5 hours 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.
WillAdams 6 hours 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 5 hours 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!
GaryBluto 4 hours 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
askvictor 5 hours 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)
Ancalagon 2 hours 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.
trinsic2 6 hours 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.
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!
forger2001 6 hours ago [-]
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).
jtip 1 hours 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
It started slow (booting) but I'm enjoying the books (currently on #3), the universe-building and the length (10 books) of it.
elinfame 34 minutes ago [-]
Vingt Ans Après
cleandreams 4 hours 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.
neverkn0wsb357 5 hours 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
euthymiclabs 4 hours ago [-]
The Score, by C. Thi Nguyen.
It explores why we love metrics in games, but hate them at work.
NDlurker 2 hours ago [-]
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. Pretty good world building. Haven't got too far into it yet.
bgleb 4 hours 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 4 hours 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 4 hours 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 4 hours ago [-]
Hyperion is amazing, it's one of those books I wish I could read again for the first time. Enjoy!
vwake 6 hours 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.
michaelmior 3 hours 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.
dmbche 2 hours 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
akkartik 10 hours 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.
ghostbrainalpha 3 hours ago [-]
Starting Goblin Emperor based on your recommend.
aeve890 10 hours 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 10 hours ago [-]
That's the one I mean! Can never remember the names of the books/series, hence the gesture.
mcv 5 hours ago [-]
I've taken a hiatus in my journey through Iain M. Banks' Culture novels to reread 1984.
lp92 10 hours ago [-]
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.
ngokevin 4 hours 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.
I have grown playing MMORPG's and this one brings the nostalgia vibes without investing the time into grinding for gear.
MrDrMcCoy 3 hours ago [-]
Currently going through Bobiverse, Dungeon Crawler Carl. Recently finished the Dark Profit Saga (Orconomics). Highly recommend all of them.
john_strinlai 6 hours 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 4 hours ago [-]
I’ve read most of GGK’s books but never got to that one.
john_strinlai 4 hours 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.
shawn_w 2 hours ago [-]
Tigana is my favorite GGK book.
apt-apt-apt-apt 4 hours ago [-]
I'm reading tons of Claude, all I do everyday is read all day
stevenwoo 4 hours 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.
RGS1811 4 hours ago [-]
I just finished Wilfred Sellars “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”
I am perpetually rereading the works of Richard Rorty.
Oscalemor 5 hours 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.
ojbyrne 3 hours ago [-]
Currently, “Football” by Chuck Klosterman. Basically about the cultural impact of (American) Football. Pretty good.
paulorlando 5 hours 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.
Avicebron 3 hours ago [-]
Gardens of the Moon - Steven Erikson
mgbmtl 45 minutes 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)
2 hours ago [-]
ElCapitanMarkla 5 hours 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 5 hours 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.
weldu 4 hours 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.
almost_usual 5 hours ago [-]
Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane.
sho_hn 5 hours 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 4 hours 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.
ItsMattyG 5 hours 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
fk_fk 5 hours 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.
gyre007 6 hours 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.
godzillafarts 5 hours 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 5 hours ago [-]
Haha I've been trying to do the reverse :)
0xB0D 3 hours ago [-]
Gnomon
Just finished "there is no antimemetics division" an absolutely astounding read
danielheath 5 hours 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.
no-dr-onboard 10 hours ago [-]
The Intellectual Life by AG Sertillanges. Note that it does presuppose a Christian worldview, so ymmv depending on your belief.
arwhatever 5 hours 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.
largePanda9 5 hours 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.
mattmar96 5 hours 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.
andsoitis 12 hours 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.
lbeckman314 3 hours ago [-]
Lord of the Rings — second read after ~15 years, excited to revisit!
jeffnv 6 hours ago [-]
"Lost Worlds" - by Patrick Wyman, fascinating prehistory about meso and neolithic 'civilizations', their lives, their rises and downfalls. Really amazing stuff
largePanda9 5 hours 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
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 5 hours 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 5 hours 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.
robertkoss 5 hours 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
ramesh31 50 minutes 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.
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.
jrop 5 hours ago [-]
An Introduction to General Systems Thinking by Gerald Weinberg. I've found his writing style to really land with my brain.
SplitVengeance 5 hours 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.
abstash 10 hours 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)
tantalor 5 hours ago [-]
The Cuckoo's Egg, by Cliff Stoll
n1ivih 5 hours ago [-]
Such a good one, enjoy!
cheschire 3 hours ago [-]
I'm on book 3 of the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown.
softwaredoug 11 hours 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
shhsshs 6 hours 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 11 hours ago [-]
Wait until you hear a detailed explanation of the magic system for the 5th time. Still a good series.
leros 10 hours 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.
softwaredoug 10 hours ago [-]
Well I often forget the rules, so its useful :)
pykello 4 hours ago [-]
- "Foundations of Analysis" by Belding & Mitchell
- "On Writing Well" by Zinsser
amadeoeoeo 5 hours ago [-]
"Correction" from Bernhard. Wow. This is in its own league of weirdness and yet it flows...
dmillar 6 hours ago [-]
London Falling, fascinating story about a piece of London's underbelly. Same guy that wrote Say Nothing, which is also great.
tobadzistsini 8 hours ago [-]
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, the manga adaptations of The Shadow over Innsmouth and The Shadow out of Time, Progress and Poverty.
bix6 6 hours 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
1-more 5 hours 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 5 hours 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.
moka_labs 2 hours ago [-]
Psychology of Money
loganfrederick 4 hours ago [-]
Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky
hackernud3s 4 hours ago [-]
Well, I guess that was inevitable, wasn't it?
focusedone 6 hours ago [-]
"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac. My first time though this one and it's...well...a trip.
sieste 3 hours ago [-]
Ready Player One, together with my 9yo boy.
arch_deluxe 6 hours 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 6 hours 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?
johnobrien1010 3 hours ago [-]
Actually, Nevermind: Essays by Taylor Tomlinson
kurttheviking 4 hours 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.
imperialdrive 5 hours ago [-]
Half way through Dungeon Crawler Carl book 8, really got hooked on the whole universe haha.
CajaVacia 3 hours ago [-]
Abaddon´s Gate, James S.A. Cory.
From the Expanse thrilogy.
Very very good scy-fi
ssttoo 6 hours ago [-]
Binging on Barbara Ehrenreich: Nickeled and Dimed, Dancing in the Streets, Natural Causes
perrygeo 5 hours ago [-]
"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.
hackernud3s 4 hours 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
jlengrand 5 hours ago [-]
Le Comte de MonteChristo, an African history of Africa and Hold me tight
undopamine 10 hours 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).
rearview 10 hours ago [-]
Just recently started watching Reacher S1 and it was absolutely amazing so started reading the book and wow - like its absolutely amazing
bityard 4 hours ago [-]
Airframe by Michael Crichton. It's riveting.
buckhx 10 hours 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 10 hours 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.
nephihaha 1 hours 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.)
pyjarrett 5 hours ago [-]
Discourses by Epictetus
david927 4 hours ago [-]
Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.
lbrito 3 hours 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.
JoeAltmaier 4 hours ago [-]
Terry Pratchet's entire corpus
sim04ful 10 hours ago [-]
Samuel Butler's adaptation of Homer.
sanswork 6 hours 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.
black_puppydog 4 hours ago [-]
Iain M Banks' Culture series. It's hilarious (not really) how badly these books are mis-read by wannabe tech dictators.
SubGenius 12 hours ago [-]
The Rouse by China Miéville, great read so far.
andy_ppp 4 hours ago [-]
The output of LLMs, largely :-/
nottorp 5 hours ago [-]
Arkady Martine right now. Pretty good.
leandot 11 hours ago [-]
The Immortal Great Souls from Phil Tucker. Very enjoyable fantasy with unique world and characters.
leandot 11 hours ago [-]
The Immortal Great Souls by Phil Tucker. Very enjoyable fantasy with great world and characters.
FumblingBear 6 hours 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!
AbbeFaria 11 hours ago [-]
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
aerodexis 6 hours 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 5 hours 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 10 hours 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 -
In my bag right now I have: The Fox and the Jewel by Karen A. Smeyers and The Spiral Dance by Starhawk.
snicky 11 hours ago [-]
Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China's New Social Order
Not sure if this one qualifies as more meaty :)
firefax 3 hours ago [-]
Eichmann in Jerusalem
black6 4 hours ago [-]
Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker
Tomte 13 hours ago [-]
Back issues of The London Review of Books.
tocs3 12 hours 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 10 hours 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 9 hours 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".
Finally got to Dostoevsky's Brother Karamazov. This will take a while.
jppope 6 hours 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 2 hours 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.
snovymgodym 4 hours ago [-]
It's good.
Try to get a modern translation if you're not reading in original language.
hwc 5 hours 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.
aerodexis 6 hours ago [-]
I'm hyped for you. This one is a massive banger.
chistev 10 hours ago [-]
Read Crime and Punishment?
jtagrgh 3 hours ago [-]
Helliconia Summer
lbrito 6 hours ago [-]
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff. Can't recommend it enough
api 3 hours 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.
herpdyderp 5 hours ago [-]
I haven't read books in years. I read an incredible amount of code, does that count?
kidnoodle 4 hours 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)!
ekjhgkejhgk 6 hours 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 2 hours 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
dyauspitr 3 hours ago [-]
The pillars of the earth. It took me a while to get to it but what a book.
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.
bcrosby95 4 hours ago [-]
City of Stairs
kevinor 6 hours 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 6 hours ago [-]
I recently read this and followed it up with "Only the paranoid survive", a story of Intel by Andy Grove.
nozzlegear 3 hours ago [-]
I'm reading A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine, it's the sequel to A Memory Called Empire. I'm enjoying it!
dgellow 3 hours ago [-]
„Practical Engineering for Inventors“. It’s not really made to be read from beginning to end but I do like to le
Razengan 3 hours 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.
checkyoursudo 5 hours ago [-]
The Nerd Reich
azaras 4 hours 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 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mertbio 6 hours 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?
tonymet 4 hours ago [-]
Reading a number of books on the Manhattan Project / Cold War / Soviet Nuclear Program
* Dead Hand
* Atomic Accidents
* Hiroshima
* Command and Control
judicious 11 hours ago [-]
Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century by W. David Marx. A fascinating and approachable read.
ex-aws-dude 5 hours ago [-]
Reading Gödel, Escher, Bach but I've been stuck on the MU puzzle for days
josters 6 hours 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.
pringk02 9 hours 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.
misiti3780 6 hours 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
bowsamic 6 hours ago [-]
Antigone by Sophocles
28304283409234 5 hours ago [-]
"Escape from Capitalism", by Clara Mattei
atlasunshrugged 4 hours 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
My friends have begun saying they are reading books when they listen to them.
It enrages me.
asp_hornet 2 hours 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.
SV_BubbleTime 3 hours 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.
chistev 10 hours 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 2 hours 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.
shoo 2 hours 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).
louwrentius 5 hours ago [-]
Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris - a re-read about the history of Silicon Valley, highly recommended.
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_/
Also, "Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto"
* 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
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!).
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'm going to need a nice, short book after this one.
- 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.
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.
when you’re done, read Umberto Eco on it: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/10/28/the-cult-of-t...
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).
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.
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
(I know you probably didn't mean movie.)
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...
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...
I recently described finishing Fire Upon the Deep as saying goodbye to a very dear friend. A great book.
Historical books that are great... Empire of the Summer Moon, Undaunted Courage, Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates
* 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.
- "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".
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.
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.
https://www.goodreads.com/series/42766-quadrail
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.
> "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.
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
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...
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.
- The Last Contract of Isako (Fonda Lee)
- The Dregs of Empire (Christopher Ruocchio)
Current Non-Fiction:
- The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (Richard Hamming)
- Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays (David Foster Wallace)
- 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sadly found I could have been reading a better abridgement, which I'll get for the 2nd reading now.
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.
Master Alvin by Orson Scott Card Kinda impressed that he finished the series after 30 years. GRR Martin loses another excuse.
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.
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.
Rereading the Lies of Locke Lamure. If only the sequel were half as good as it...
Playing Off the Rail: A Pool Hustler's Journey by David McCumber (1996) - hustling in the golden era of pool in the usa
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.
He has a knack for being critical and optimistic at the same time. Funny too!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_(Camus_novel)
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 Power Broker by Robert Caro.
Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka.
The Time Tax by Annie Lowrey.
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.
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
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
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...
> Jordan doesn't portray women well.
tugs braid
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.
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.
I keep track of all my favorite books here: https://recleague.com/james/collections/books
(Full disclosure: I'm a cofounder of Rec League)
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.
[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.
[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37004370-the-memory-p...
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).
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.
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.
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.
https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/player...
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.
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.
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'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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_J%C3%BCnger
- 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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
Currently reading and enjoying: Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel.
Next to Read: Hollywood, Ending by John Green.
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.
https://archive.org/details/taxationthepeopl033026mbp
It's from 1924 and US centric, old new ideas in there.
I'd be re-reading Tolkien's _Old English Exodus_, but proofreading the typos got to be too much.
It's a great resource!
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
Fiction: just finished The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott; about to read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (for the 2nd or 3rd time)
[0]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-emergency-with-geo...
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!
The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (How to Think About Artificial Intelligence-Before It's Too Late) By Cory Doctorow
It started slow (booting) but I'm enjoying the books (currently on #3), the universe-building and the length (10 books) of it.
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.
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
It explores why we love metrics in games, but hate them at work.
Reading now: - Hyperion by Dan Simmons (getting harder than two above, but enjoying it so far)
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.
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
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".
Its a pretty good history of the X-48 program.
Edit: also reading the "The Anduril Thesis" in parallel.
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)
I have grown playing MMORPG's and this one brings the nostalgia vibes without investing the time into grinding for gear.
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)
I’m slowly rereading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
I am perpetually rereading the works of Richard Rorty.
- 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)
Currently reading and recommending - Endurance by Alfred Lansing. Sir Earnest Shackleton’s attempt to cross the Antarctic.
I’m specifically talking about the New Testament.
I’m currently reading Hebrews 6.
I normally read a lot of nonfiction and history and am trying to make a point to read more fiction this year.
Just finished "there is no antimemetics division" an absolutely astounding read
The authors argue that rigid, goal-oriented planning and metric-driven objectives actively prevent true innovation and groundbreaking achievement.
https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/
3 & 4 I thought were quite poor.
- 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
https://archive.org/details/structuralfuncti0000arno/page/n8...
I guess it will take me years to have reason of both.
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 thought so too, until I read the 2nd Mistborn trilogy!
- "On Writing Well" by Zinsser
Nettle and Bone I really enjoyed
Some desperate glory also enjoyed
East of Eden very meaty if you want an epic
- 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.
- Hiroshima
- The Doomsday Machine
- Command and Control
Highly recommended if you’re feeling too happy and full of faith in humanity.
* 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.
"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.
Dungeon Crawler Card - Not for me but I might give it another chance
Bukowski - Post Office - Worth reading, Gen-Z might get triggered
Highly recommend the game for anyone who liked Dark or Primer (or any other fiction that features stable time loops).
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.)
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.
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
Not sure if this one qualifies as more meaty :)
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)
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.
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.
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)!
https://a.co/d/08zSx2LD
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.
- The Left Hand of Darkness
- The Nerd Reich
- What Happened to Liberal Democracy?
* Dead Hand
* Atomic Accidents
* Hiroshima
* Command and Control
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.
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.
God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre by Richard Grant about hiking through cartel-run Mexico alone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purge_(novel)
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.
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'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
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).