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
I haven't read books in years. I read an incredible amount of code, does that count?
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.
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"
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)!
15,000 miles in a ketch
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
Always.
The pillars of the earth. It took me a while to get to it but what a book.
Email Storyselling Playbook by Jim Hamilton
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.
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.
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.
The Nerd Reich
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?
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
Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century by W. David Marx. A fascinating and approachable read.
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.
Reading Gödel, Escher, Bach but I've been stuck on the MU puzzle for days
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.
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
Antigone by Sophocles
"Escape from Capitalism", by Clara Mattei
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
Does anyone consider audiobooks reading?
My friends have begun saying they are reading books when they listen to them.
It enrages me.
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.
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
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).
Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris - a re-read about the history of Silicon Valley, highly recommended.
[dead]
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff. Can't recommend it enough