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...
Comments
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
"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
Airframe by Michael Crichton. It's riveting.
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).
Terry Pratchet's entire corpus
Just recently started watching Reacher S1 and it was absolutely amazing so started reading the book and wow - like its absolutely amazing
Discourses by Epictetus
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...
Iain M Banks' Culture series. It's hilarious (not really) how badly these books are mis-read by wannabe tech dictators.
Samuel Butler's adaptation of Homer.
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.
The output of LLMs, largely :-/
Arkady Martine right now. Pretty good.
Eichmann in Jerusalem
The Rouse by China Miéville, great read so far.
Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker
The Immortal Great Souls from Phil Tucker. Very enjoyable fantasy with unique world and characters.
The Immortal Great Souls by Phil Tucker. Very enjoyable fantasy with great world and characters.
Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China's New Social Order
Not sure if this one qualifies as more meaty :)
In my bag right now I have: The Fox and the Jewel by Karen A. Smeyers and The Spiral Dance by Starhawk.
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.
Helliconia Summer
Finally got to Dostoevsky's Brother Karamazov. This will take a while.
I haven't read books in years. I read an incredible amount of code, does that count?
Email Storyselling Playbook by Jim Hamilton
The pillars of the earth. It took me a while to get to it but what a book.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff. Can't recommend it enough
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 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"
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.
15,000 miles in a ketch
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
Always.
City of Stairs
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.
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.
The Nerd Reich
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.
Reading a number of books on the Manhattan Project / Cold War / Soviet Nuclear Program
* Dead Hand
* Atomic Accidents
* Hiroshima
* Command and Control
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?
Does anyone consider audiobooks reading?
My friends have begun saying they are reading books when they listen to them.
It enrages me.
Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century by W. David Marx. A fascinating and approachable read.
Reading Gödel, Escher, Bach but I've been stuck on the MU puzzle for days
Half way through Dungeon Crawler Carl book 8, really got hooked on the whole universe haha.