Ask HN: What books have you read in the first half of 2016? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What books have you read in the first half of 2016?

39 pointsadamnemecek52 comments

Also what skills have you acquired?

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"The Art of Profitability" by Adrian Slywotzky

"The Myth of the Rational Voter" by Bryan Caplan

"Fanatical Prospecting" by Jeb Blount

"Fooling Some of the People All of the Time" by David Einhorn

"Confidence Game" by Christine Richard

"Mouth Matters; How Your Mouth Ages Your Body and What YOU Can Do About It" by Carol Vander Stoep

"Adventures in Stochastic Processes" by Sidney & Resnick

"The Great Deformation" by David Stockman

"Efficient Electrical Systems Design Handbook" by Thumann & Franz

"The Goal" by Eliyahu Goldratt

"Notes on Discrete Mathematics" by Miguel Lerma

"Stochastic Calculus with Inﬁnitesimals" by Frederik S. Herzberg

"Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms" by David Mackay

"Coming Apart" by Charles Murray

"The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter

"In Other Words: The Science And Psychology Of Second-language Acquisition" by Ellen Bialystok and Kenji Hakuta

Unless you get paid to read for a living how could you possibly have completed all those? :) !

I can't answer for parent, but I've read 50 books so far this year.

I'd say I spend at least 2-3 hours a day reading, mostly at night before bed and also in the morning. On the weekends this is higher as I spend almost the whole morning reading.

When my first child arrives soon I imagine this will change significantly. :)

I want to know the answer to this one as well.

I have resorted to reading audiobooks on my commute to/from the office.

With a 25 minute commute (one way), I can finish on average 2 to 3 books per month by audio. This is in addition to the other reading I can get done in during the days and on weekends.

I have read 19 books so far this year on my Kindle, mostly trashy Sci-Fi novels, not that hard really if you turn the TV off :-)

His list does look a bit more complicated than mine tho!

How did you find the goal? I worked somewhere where they implemented buffer management, theory of constraints etc. I never read the book tho.

Eat That Frog! (Brian Tracy)- Lots of useful productivity tips. Motivating and practical.

Bleachers (John Grisham) - I learned a lot about the culture behind American Football and school/college sports.

The Wide Lens (Ron Adner) - I learned a systematic approach towards evaluating ideas and the environment around them so that I could determine what needs to change (outside of my innovations) that must be encouraged for my ideas to succeed.

The Martian (Andy Weir) - I got a "feel" for living on Mars being a reality potentially sooner than I appreciated.

Brownlow North (K Moody Stuart) - A book about a Scottish Evangelist. It was superb to see where he started from in his preaching, how he differed from everyone else, and how that was probably the key to his startling effectiveness.

Songs of the Spirit: The Place of Psalms in the Worship of God (Ed: Kenneth Stewart) - I learned an appreciation for the book of Psalms, though written long before it, it is clearly (by how it's written, what it discusses in the past tense, and what's only understood now) FOR the New Testament church.

In my Father's House (Corrie ten Boom) - a beautiful insight into what a Christian household can look like.

If you like Corrie ten Boom you'll love The Hiding Place, but I suspect you've already read it, it's a classic :-)

I intend to, but I don't have a copy yet :-).

I'm not going to list all 42, but here are the highlights:

How to Read a Book (Adler)

World Order (Kissinger)

Der Grundrisse (Marx)

The Grand Chessboard (Brzezinski)

Manufacturing Consent (Chomsky)

Gulag Archipelago (Solhenitzyn)

On War (Clausewitz)

The Hidden Persuaders (Packard)

Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (Dennett)

The Strategy of Desire (Dichter)

Skills acquired: intentional syntopical reading, prediction of geopolitical hinge points, and identification of absent context in media... I'm always looking for another book to read.

Do you often read blog posts? I think the only way I would manage to read 42 books in 6 months is if I stopped reading blog posts and programming resources. I'd like to know how you've manage to read 42 books

I'm wondering the same. Of you look at the books being listed in this thread, though, it's apparent there is little fiction or other material to truly savour: everything is skim-friendly.

You could probably get through one of these a week while on the elliptical or during your commute.

I wish people would qualify their posts with relationship status and employment type. If you have a partner whom you value, and are in the formative months (pre-alpha) of a start-up as a main developer (or hybrid, or one-man operation), is it really beneficial for so much new information to be making its way into your head?

gotta disagree here... there's really no skim-friendly material. everything requires involved thought and active, critical reading.

edit: also this is the first time i've ever heard marx or chomsky described as "skim friendly"

Not OP but I "read" about 150+ books each year (90 so far this year) and usually more than half of those are audiobooks that I listen to at high speed (2.5x-3x) while doing other things. The others I usually read at the gym. I don't often read blogs, but if I did I doubt they'd interfere with the audiobook fraction, anyway.

i don't really read blog posts. i just read to and from work, and at the cafe on the weekends. i also read during the evening at home sometimes.

Cryoshon - what's "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (Dennett)" like, I picked it up in a bookshop the other day as it was in the 'recommended' but the title really put me off (too markety) - is it any good?

belated reply: it's okay. a bit philosophy-undergrad centric, but entertaining nonetheless. if you're not acquainted with formal philosophy and philosophy of mind, i'd pick it up. dennett is notoriously biased to materialism, but he's intellectually honest.

I have just finished the Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, I can't believe it took me so long to get round to reading such classic sci-fi. Definitely recommended.

By "Foundation Trilogy" you mean the original 'Foundation' stories as gathered in the first three books ("Foundation", "Foundation and Empire" and "Second Foundation")?

Yes, that's exactly what I meant, is there some of the trilogy I should be reading as well? :-)

No, most (non-pedantic) Asimov fans refer to the first three books (F, F&E, SF - which yes are technically collections of short stories glued together as one) as "the Foundation Trilogy". I do recommend reading the Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth, they're worthy sequels to the "trilogy".

The Robot novels are also a top read and tie in with the later Foundation books in a satisfying way:

- The Caves of Steel

- The Naked Sun

- The Robots of Dawn

- Robots and Empire

I think that's what he means

I've read, at the behest of my spouse, The Hobbit and the trilogy of the Lord of the Rings. As someone who was never really "into" the whole world Tolkien had created, I must say I was won over by the end. Who wouldn't want to be a hobbit? At least, a hobbit who is not Frodo.

Every year or two I give a light reading to Andy Hertzfeld's compilation "Revolution in the Valley", which is a print edition of many (and probably some extras) of the stories available on www.folklore.org

I am also midway through "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (Robert M. Pirsig) and I must recommend it. It's got a lot of philosophy in it that I think is both accessible and transcendent all at once. It's actively changing my world view.

In terms of skills acquired, I don't typically read for that purpose. I learn skills primarily by active work, not passive ingestion of information.

Agincourt by Juliet Barker The story of a nerd, who loved forensic accounting and was thought unwarlike; but was knew an innovation when it was shot through his face (during an earlier battle in Wales) and used it to end the Age of Chivalry - i.e. Henry V.

What I learned was "always take enough arrows": even if your (relatively few) knights have to walk 'cause the horses are laden with literally millions of arrows. I'll write up a review one of these days, fine book. He was fighting piracy (it wasn't a needless war) so I don't he'd have liked Tor.

Skills - need to exercise the ones I have, not pile on more, just now.

Blindsight (Watts)

Between the World and Me (Coates)

Economics in One Lesson (Hazlitt)

Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn't Want You to Know---and What to Do About Them (Shapiro)

Los últimos españoles de Mauthausen (Hernández de Miguel)

Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit (Takada)

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm (Dartnell)

Historia mínima de España (Fusi)

Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders (Marquet)

What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars (Moynihan)

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems (Google)

Adventures in Human Being: A Grand Tour from the Cranium to the Calcaneum (Francis)

Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces (Arpaci-Dusseau)

Solo: An American Dreamer in Europe by Wright Morris, a memoir of spending part of 1932 and 1933 in Austria, Italy, and France. Not on the whole as rewarding as his other memoirs Will's Boy and A Cloak of Light, but interesting enough.

Adolphe and Le Cahier Rouge by Benjamin Constant. The former a devastating short novel, the latter a memoir, a portrait of the artist as a young twerp. (The things we boomers would say if something comparable had been published by a millenial!)

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff, a novel read for a book club. The less said, the better.

Autobiography by Henry James. Very slow going, but rewarding, a mind at work.

My Promised Land by Avi Shalets. A history of Israel and the Zionist project by an Israeli journalist. It covers a lot of ground that most Americans (I infer from my book club) don't know. It seemed to me that it could have been maybe 15% shorter, and that David Remnick should have impounded Shalets's thesaurus.

Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder by Isaiah Berlin. Well worth reading, but requiring more time than just its own reading, for now I have to read some Herder. I have already fought my way through some Hamann; the translation is heavily footnoted, as necessary for those of us who aren't handy with Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, and don't have the Bible memorized.

Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (vol. ii) by Egon Friedell. Clive James's recommendation in Cultural Amnesia put me onto this one. Most interesting, but slow going because my German is rusty.

[Edit: got rid of most of the "most interesting"s.]

Books: Manshu (Classical Chinese history book), Instrument Engineer's Handbook, lots of embedded books, some young child development books, Forgotten Masters of Thai Photography and a few other photography tomes, an airport trash novel.

Skills: Lots of hardware stuff (component sourcing/plumbing/pneumatics/etc.), additional detail in financial forecasting, video pitches, woodcut printing.

A lot of interesting titles floating around in this thread!

How do you guys choose your next book or Where do you find out those books which peak in the 'interestingness' factor?

Especially, those which are non-technical,fiction, pseudo-fiction etc..

I spend a couple hours once or twice a month in a used book store. I browse the history, fiction, classics, science/math sections and look for titles that align with what I've been thinking about lately. I also have a mental list of authors that I will buy on sight.

Same here but s/used book store/amazon/.

I like the browsing atmosphere of the small bookstore. Also I find it hard to get past all the titles that are currently being hyped if I go to amazon. I read more old books than I do new ones. But if I have a title in mind that I want to buy right away, amazon is my first stop

1. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

2. One L by Scott Turow

3. The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

4. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

5. Believer: My Forty Years in Politics by David Axelrod

6. The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

7. Augustus: First Emperor of Rome by Adrian Goldsworthy

8. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (re-read)

9. I, Claudius by Robert Graves

10. Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

11. The Fear Index by Robert Harris

12. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris (re-read)

13. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris (re-read)

14. Hannibal by Thomas Harris (re-read)

15. Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (re-read)

16. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (re-read)

17. Claudius the God by Robert Graves

Re-reads take hardly any time at all, so I'm not sure whether to count them. If you're not, then 11 books read so far.

Just finished with the first two volumes of Cixin Liu's trilogy. Really good stuff. :)

Not in order

1 - Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)

2 - The Trial (Franz Kafka)

3 - Beyond the door (Philip K Dick - short story)

4 - The eyes have it (Philip K Dick - short story)

5 - Seven brief lessons on Physics (Carlo Rovelli)

6 - I have no mouth, and I must scream (Herlan Ellison - short story)

7 - The art of simplicity (Dominique Loreau)

8 - On anarchism (Noam Chomsky)

9 - The difference engine (William Gibson, Bruce Sterling)

10 - Utopia (Thomas More)

11 - Sophie's world (Jostein Gaarder)

12 - Rete padrona (Federico Rampini - essays about the 'dark side' of the corporate web)

13 - The art of discarding (Nagisa Tatsumi)

14 - Symposium (Plato)

And a couple of very short philosophy booklets by Zizek (about the Matrix) and Baudrillard (about 'cyberphilosophy')

> Sophie's world (Jostein Gaarder)

A mindbender. I have fond memories of that book.

Where I'm Reading From, by Tim Parks

The Inevitable, by Kevin Kelly

Ideas that Changed the World, by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

A Reader's Manifesto, by B.R. Myers

Framed!, by Hari Singh

Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

Why Education is Useless, by Daniel Cottom

The New Diary, by Tristine Rainer

Raising a Happy, Unspoiled Child, by Burton White

Do way, way more in WorkFlowy, by Frank Degenaar

Unlearning the Basics, by R. Sativihari

The Devil's Pleasure Palace, by Michael Walsh

The Truth about Everything, by Matthew Stewart

The Big Questions, by Steven Landsburg

The Seven Mysteries of Life, by Guy Murchie

The Optimistic Child, by Martin Seligman

Systemantics, by John Gall

The Scientists A Family Romance, by Marco Roth

The Logic Of Failure, by Dietrich Dorner

Organizing Creativity, by Daniel Wessel

A Curious Mind, by Brian Grazer

Appointment In Samarra, by John O'Hara

"Mr Penumbra's 24 hour bookstore" - Robin Sloan (a brilliant mix of history, mystery, humour and technology)

"The Cuckoo's Egg" - Clifford Stoll (it really is as good as they always say ;-) )

"Winnie the Pooh" - A.A. Milne (delightful, not only for children)

"Sofie's World" - Jostein Gaarder (a novel about the history of philosophy)

several Discworld novels - Terry Pratchett (a series that manages to satirize fantasy and real life at the same time)

... as well as a few others, but those were the best.

I re-read The Cuckoo's Egg every couple of years, it is a fantastic book.

"Present Shock" by Douglas Rushkoff

"Super Forecasting" by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner

"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins

"The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control" by Walter Mischel

"Precision: Statistical and Mathematical Methods in Horse Racing" by C X Wong

"Functional Swift" by Chris Eidhof, Florian Kugler, and Wouter Swierstra

__ DIDN'T FINISH __

"Thinking in Forth" by Leo Brodie

"The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" by Philip K. Dick

__ QUEUED FOR READING __

"Porcelain" by Moby

"Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari

So far, the best book about startups I have read is Traction, it's extremely useful overview of all the ways to get traffic/customers.

I also making my way through GEB, it's relly interesting, though hard to read.

And I am reading "Rationality: From AI to Zombies", it is a collection of rationality essays by Eliezer Yudkowsky, and it's amazing.

Eliezer's book is long, but his writing is great. Definitely worth a read.

I've been mainly reading SF Magazines for the first half of 2016.

Books read:

- Animal Weapons: The Evolution of Battle by Douglas J. Emlen

- Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien

Magazines read:

- Interzone: Issues 262 - 264

- Asimov's SF: July 2015 - March 2016

- New York Review of Science Fiction: Issue 330 (Special issue with tributes to the late David Hartwell).

Long After Midnight, Ray Bradbury

Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

Thieves' World, Robert Asprin

Tales From the Vulgar Unicorn, Robert Asprin

Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams

Quantum Computing Since Democritus, Scott Aaronson

Reamde, Neal Stephenson

Fool's Assassin, Robin Hobb

Big Planet, Jack Vance

* In Defense of Liberal Edication By Farred Zakaria

* Confidence Men By Ros Suskind

* Dark Money by Jane Meyer

* Better by Atul Gawande

* The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

* Essentialism by Greg Mckeown

* Contagious by Jonah Berger

* Sapiens by Yuval Harari

* The Pentagons Brain by Annie Jacobson

* Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

* The Only Game in town by Mohamed El-Erian

* The Industries of Future By Alec Ross

Mostly portuguese poetry.

I've read the "How to make friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie (pt edition).

Highly recomend it to anyone who wants to improve people skills.

1. Alas Babylon, Pat Frank

2. A Talent For War, Jack McDevitt

3. Endymion, Dan Simmons

4. Programming iOS 9 ( 50% ), Matt Neuburg

5. Yes Please, Amy Poehler

6. The Nature of the Beast, Louise Penny

I am Malala by Christina Lamb and Malala Yousafzai

The Children of Men by P D James

Global Brain -Bloom

Captive Mind -Milosz

Machines of Loving Grace -Markoff

Station 11 -Mandell (fiction)

Sapiens -Harari

Revenant (do not remember author/fiction)

Argonauts -Nelson

None

Why don't you read? Or is it just this year that you are taking off?

Mainly habit I guess. I don't imagine enjoying it. That said I wouldn't mind reading hitchhikers guide to the galaxy again. Or thing explainer.

Ah I just remembered though... I've read dozens of kids books this year at bedtime :) for my daughter of course

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