alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you reading?
I'm plowing through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which is not particularly challenging as sci-fi/LitRPG goes, but entertaining enough. I'm also wrapping up Doctorow's _Enshittification_, and I'm looking for something a little meaty to keep the brain working...
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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.
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.
- "Foundations of Analysis" by Belding & Mitchell
- "On Writing Well" by Zinsser
Rereading Pale, slowly:
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?
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
An Introduction to General Systems Thinking by Gerald Weinberg. I've found his writing style to really land with my brain.
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
"Lost Worlds" - by Patrick Wyman, fascinating prehistory about meso and neolithic 'civilizations', their lives, their rises and downfalls. Really amazing stuff
Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky
"Correction" from Bernhard. Wow. This is in its own league of weirdness and yet it flows...
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.
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.
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.
Email Storyselling Playbook by Jim Hamilton
The Intellectual Life by AG Sertillanges. Note that it does presuppose a Christian worldview, so ymmv depending on your belief.
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
Why Greatness cannot be Planned.
The authors argue that rigid, goal-oriented planning and metric-driven objectives actively prevent true innovation and groundbreaking achievement.
Terry Pratchet's entire corpus
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"
London Falling, fascinating story about a piece of London's underbelly. Same guy that wrote Say Nothing, which is also great.
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
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)
The pillars of the earth. It took me a while to get to it but what a book.
"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac. My first time though this one and it's...well...a trip.
Eichmann in Jerusalem
Airframe by Michael Crichton. It's riveting.
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.
Half way through Dungeon Crawler Carl book 8, really got hooked on the whole universe haha.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, the manga adaptations of The Shadow over Innsmouth and The Shadow out of Time, Progress and Poverty.
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
Iain M Banks' Culture series. It's hilarious (not really) how badly these books are mis-read by wannabe tech dictators.
"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.
Binging on Barbara Ehrenreich: Nickeled and Dimed, Dancing in the Streets, Natural Causes
Le Comte de MonteChristo, an African history of Africa and Hold me tight
The output of LLMs, largely :-/
Helliconia Summer
Arkady Martine right now. Pretty good.
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).
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.
Just recently started watching Reacher S1 and it was absolutely amazing so started reading the book and wow - like its absolutely amazing
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...
Samuel Butler's adaptation of Homer.
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.
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)!
I'm reading A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine, it's the sequel to A Memory Called Empire. I'm enjoying it!
„Practical Engineering for Inventors“. It’s not really made to be read from beginning to end but I do like to le
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.
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.