Ask HN: What are some great fiction reads for someone that reads non-fiction | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are some great fiction reads for someone that reads non-fiction

37 pointsstpapa59 comments

Most of my reading recently has been non-fiction, and I'm looking for recommended good fiction books to read.

Any must read fiction?

I'll second someone else's recommendation for The Martian, that was just a really fun read you can just burn through because it is so enjoyable.

If you want another really fun read, Ready Player One was fantastic.

I've also enjoyed the Old Man's War saga, there are 6 books but you can skip book 4 since it is a retelling of book 3 from the POV of another character. This is a space saga and I really like the universe he created.

In the hard sci-fi genre, I really enjoyed The Forever War.

And for just pure world building fantasy, the Game of Thrones books (The song of Ice and Fire series) are some of the best written books I've ever read.

On the mars issue the mars saga (red mars, blue mars and green mars) is also pretty amazing to read.

More than a few mentions of The Martian, going to add that to my list. Thanks.

Eh, I'd give it a shot by I quit after the first few chapters. I didn't like the narrator's voice/tone at all and the writing was definitely not my favorite.

While I cannot recommend any particular books, I can recommend that you look into the "Hard Science Fiction" genre. They are very realistic, yet still have a cool aspect of fiction. The Wikipedia page for Hard Science Fiction has a list of good books in the genre.

Besides that, off the top of my head, I would say books by Isaac Asimov (Foundation series) or Arthur C. Clarke (Space Odyssey series).

My standing recommendation in the SciFi genre would be any Culture novel by Iain M. Banks. Truly utopian SciFi, and an interesting depiction of a post-labour, post-scarcity, post-human, AI-symbiotic, "human" civilisation.

It's not hard SciFi, but close. Banks really understood that spaceship battles are about mass, velocity and energy, and technobabble doesn't save the day.

> not hard SciFi, but close

I would say it is pretty much space opera (every single technology is handwaved away). It doesn't make it less awesome though.

That's fascinating! Do you know why this would be called 'space opera'? And could we also say things like 'western opera'?

I think for "simple" western movies the term was "horse opera", related is "soap opera", but in science-fiction it is not seen as such a negative term anymore and the definition has expanded to cover a wider range of works. Futuristic with not much in the way of technical details, hero figures, grand conflicts is roughly what makes a space opera now, and at least some of Banks' works fit right in there.

Another "hard sci-fi" suggestion: Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. Goes into a lot of detail about some potentially interesting things (moon science and orbital mechanics come to mind), if you enjoy that. I learned that I don't, but still really enjoyed it for the great story.

I don't read much fiction myself. "Siddhartha" by Herman Hesse was recommended to me by 3 different people on 3 different occasions, so I decided to read that one. It's a great little book that will make you stop every few pages and think about life.

Dune.

I mostly read non-fiction myself, so, just like you, I looked for something else amd randomly chose Dune. Loved it.

Brilliant world building and a story arch that keeps on giving. And there are 7(?) books in total.

Yes, indeed. Dune. Lets talk about the why. Its much more than an average fantasy because it contains a lot of angles. It is full with psychology, politics, and sociology. Specifically, it touches on subjects like discrimination & racism, oppression/tyranny, managing, infiltrating, warfare, and various eastern philosophies (since the Atreides are forced to suffer). Did I forget anything? Please, do improve my answer! :)

A few more points:

I'm allergic to clumsy exposition and Herbert, by and large, did a very good job.

Many times you can read what the characters are thinking. This gives you many situations where you get a sense just how tormented someone feels, but how he needs to react in order not to lose control.

Fremen suffering in general. How it shapes their rituals, culture and further development of the story. Interesting also how it clashes with other cultures. There's also a nice part about how they must continue to suffer along, lest they become weak.

A few analogies to our dependency on oil.

The Great Maker <3

I'll second The Baroque Cycle (or Cryptonomicon: it doesn't matter which). But might I also suggest the works of Terry Pratchett, particularly Discworld? Sir Pterry's work is among the best I've ever read.

If you're looking for something a bit fluffier than the above, then I would suggest The Dresden Files. Sure, it's mindless fluff, but man, it's good mindless fluff. The same applies to The Codex Alera (which apparently resulted from a bet that the author couldn't make a good book from an awful idea: the idea given was the lost roman legion crossed with Pokemon).

I can also suggest Ready Player one in this category. Ready Player One is essentially geek culture (especially gaming culture) furiously... well, you know. Giving itself one. But it's a fun ride (unlike Armada. But that's another story).

Finally, I can reccomend The Laundry Files. Do you like computing? Do you like lovecraftian nightmares? Go buy these now. The first book is okay, but has a rather nasty problem, sort of: It keeps winking at the audience incessantly. I didn't mind too much, myself, but I know others have been put off by it. Don't worry, the winking lessens to a manageable rate (although never quite fully goes away: after all, this is a series about a CS Student turned Sysadmin turned hunter of unspeakable monstrosities named Bob Oliver Francis Howard. Think about that for a second). And it is one of very few horror series that I have enjoyed. Take that as you will.

Let me throw in the name of Jorge Luis Borges, specially the short stories in the book "Fictions". "The Library of Babel" is a short story that many programmers appreciate.

I'm a little partial to The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald writes as though painting through the forrest with a brush made of wind.

I've never seen the movie, and I don't intend to; the writing in this book takes the imagination on a ride like I've never felt before or since

The correct answer really depends on what you're into, and what kind of person you are. There are a lot of subcategories in fiction (just like there are in non-fiction).

Lord of the Rings is much more than mere fiction. It is possibly interesting from a linguistic PoV as it contains an entirely new language called Quenya developed by Tolkien. It also contains a lot of subjects which are relevant IRL.

Without getting further into LOTR I agreed with another poster on Dune and attempted to explain the subjects it touches in another reply to your post.

Problem with both of these (as well as say GoT) is there are movies made of them.

You might also be interested in stories which are based on non-fiction, but are written in a story telling kind of way, greatly adding to suspense. In that category I read the books Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick and Kingpin by Kevin Poulsen [1]. If you're interested in following a suspenseful hacker story I can recommend them both.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13240924

> You might also be interested in stories which are based on non-fiction, but are written in a story telling kind of way, greatly adding to suspense. In that category I read the books Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick and Kingpin by Kevin Poulsen [1]. If you're interested in following a suspenseful hacker story I can recommend them both.

Another excellent book along those lines is "The Cuckoos Egg" by Clifford Stoll. (And he's awesome person too.)

LoTR is not something I can recommend. When I read it, it was a miserable trek, and I read obsessively. It was a book written by somebody who cares more about the language then they do they story, and it shows.

That's not necessarily bad, but unless you share that point of view, I'd give it a miss.

Anyways, in the same vein as Ghost in the Wires, I recommend The Cuckoo's Egg and Exploding the phone, which are both fantastic.

+1 on Ghost in the Wires. You could also try On wings of Eagles, a narrative of a rescue of EDS employees during the Iranian Revolution.

Wikipedia tells me that the genre is called Non-fiction novels.

I'll take your word on that one. I've been more of a movie/docu person, and have seen a movie based on that story, Argo [1]. The movie was good. Non-fictional, based on the real story, slightly romanticized/more suspenseful.

While I'm trying to steer more towards reading books I made the rule to not watch a book of a movie I've seen. It just doesn't work very well for me (other way around seems fine).

So yeah, the movie spoiled it for me...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_(2012_film)

If you don't want to venture too far out of your comfort zone, A. S. Byatt writes fiction books that read like non-fiction (much in the way that Erik Larson writes non-fiction that reads like fiction). At the same time, Byatt is a fantastic writer with a great literary imagination.

Douglas Adams's "The Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy", a sci-fi comedy adventure fiction. It's the book where this appears: Answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. The novel is adapted from a radio drama show, so reading it feels like someone is telling and describing you a story verbally.

Gah. Why didn't I suggest this? That's ideal.

I'm going to a very different route than my colleagues: Sandman by Neil Gaiman. It's a series of graphic novels which delves deeply into theology, philosophy, and the human condition.

Since it's in the form of a graphic novel, it's much more like "reading" a TV miniseries, and makes for a great introduction to Neil Gaiman's writing style (which will take you straight off the deep end into the fantasy genre). They're also easier to pick up and set down as the whim strikes.

If you really enjoy the setting, the Lucifer series of graphic novels takes one of the most interesting characters from the setting and expands upon it. It was adapted to a TV show as well, much to the chagrin of anybody who actually enjoyed the graphic novels.

My vote (behind Dostoyevsky and Hesse) would be Kafka, Vonnegut and Joyce.

I started reading sci-fi(mostly hard-sf) after I read the commonwealth saga, 'Pandora's star' and 'Judas unchained'. It was just really entertaining and unlike anything I've read. Also really recommend 'Snow crash'. Also adding a couple fantasy recommendations: Lies of Locke lamora, and any basically any novel by Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn: the final empire, Warbreaker, The way of kings etc.)

If you're into social issues, Ursula Le Guin wrote several novels that combine sci-fi with social and political philosophy in a package that feels somewhat non-fiction-y. My favorite are The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Meanwhile, a more recent novel of hers, Lavinia, is a fascinating reinterpretation of ancient Roman epic fantasy.

Margaret Atwood is another author who doesn't get mentioned a lot around here but whose works of SF(she prefers "speculative fiction" to "sci-fi") I've enjoyed a lot. Her MaddAddam trilogy is weird but entertaining. You'll probably either love it or hate it. Many of her other works focus on issues of sex and gender in various past and future settings, some fictional, some historical.

Of course, I as well as a lot of other commenters in this thread are assuming that you'll be into sci-fi and fantasy, because that's what most computer geeks like. But even if you aren't a sci-fi fan, Le Guin and Atwood aren't typical sci-fi, so you might find them interesting anyhow.

>If you're into left-wing politics, Ursula Le Guin wrote several novels that combine sci-fi with left-wing preachiness in a package that feels extremely overbearing. My favorite are The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Meanwhile, a more recent novel of hers, Lavinia, is an SJWish mockery of ancient Roman epic fantasy.

>Margaret Atwood is another author who doesn't get mentioned a lot around here but whose works of SF(she prefers "speculative fiction" to "sci-fi") I've enjoyed a lot. Her MaddAddam trilogy is weird and preachy. You'll probably hate it. Her other works focus on SJW ranting about issues of sex and gender in various past and future settings, some fictional, some historical.

>Of course, I as well as a lot of other commenters in this thread are assuming that you'll be into ham-handed left-wing message fiction, because that's what we like.

>Le Guin and Atwood are typical ur-SJWs, so you might find them pretentious and tendentious.

FTFY.

Thanks for the chuckle, but if Le Guin and Atwood sound SJWish to you, I think you and I have very different definitions of what it means to be SJWish. They are the last two people I can imagine who would agree to the blatant censorship that is taking place in today's academic and literary circles in the name of SJWish-ness.

The Dispossessed does get preachy, as does the MaddAddam trilogy, but only because their worlds are chock full of preachy people, each with their own stash of dirty laundry. That's kinda the point that those books are trying to make. I would read them any day over some blogger trying to be preachy about the One True Javascript Framework.

So how about I tolerate the anarcho-capitalist stuff that some of the other suggestions not-so-subtly drool all over, and you tolerate a bit of preaching in the other direction.

I rarely read fiction, but am loving "Sacre Bleu" by Christopher Moore. If you like art, artistic and clever turns of phrase and plot, comedy about serious things, wonderfully twisted fictionalized versions of historical figures and events, then you will enjoy it.

Wikipedia: "Sacrebleu" is a very old French profanity meant as a cry of surprise or happiness.

The book lives up to both of those feelings.

Anything by Haruki Murakami. Start with "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" and never look back. Supernatural and super good.

I discovered him from the old puzzle site thisisnotporn and loved "Dance Dance Dance" and "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World".

Some great suggestions here, but mostly well within the engineer comfort zone (Adams, Gaiman, Tolkien, Asimov, Pratchett, Weir, Sanderson, Rothfuss). If you're feeling like trying something a little different, I'd highly recommend Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. It's historical fiction set in Tudor England, and follows Oliver Cromwell who is a kind of fixer for Henry VIII. Beautiful language, but Mantel also has an ability to enter into the mindset of the times in a way that can be striking and alien.

I have a fear that engineers on here are all reading and watching the same things. Intellectual monocultures are boring and potentially fragile. Let's make 2017 the year where HN reads a few books that aren't about wizards or engineers in space.

The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. This trilogy is a great mash up of science history and sci-Fi (almost)

Well, "fiction" is an incredibly broad category (if it can even be called that). And "must read" is highly subjective ;-)

If you're just looking for some light entertainment, go for sci-fi or fantasy (Lord of the Rings, anyone?). But if you don't mind some slightly "heavier" reading, have a look at the classics. In some cases they can be a little tricky to understand, but they are called "classics" for a reason...

Specific suggestions (incomplete and in no particular order): Shakespeare's plays, Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice", Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe", Harper Lee's "To kill a mockingbird", JM Barrie's "Peter Pan", Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories...

It seems that everybody has been recommending sci fi and fantasy... Well, so will I.

- The Lies of Locke Lamora: fantasy (think fantastic Renaissance Venice), fairly light read, very well written, great characters.

- Accelerando: from our own cstross. Postuhumanist episodic scifi, pretty much a required read for the average HN reader.

- The Book of the New Sun: fantasy (or is it?), On the surface episodic adventures of an executioner, but it is built on multiple layers. Not an easy read, but masterfully written. Might require multiple reads. Long series.

- Blindsight, bleak diamond hard scifi, about first contact, consciousness and life. Not an easy read, but strongly recommended.

I second Accelerando and Book of the New Sun. Both challenging in their own ways.

Since the theme of procrastination and self-discipline is quite popular on HN, I would recommend OP and everyone here "Oblomov" and "Frigate Pallada" by I.A.Goncharov.

I read Non-Fiction also, but in school I remember really enjoying Animal Farm. Basically I felt it was basically a Non-Fiction book with a Fictional story to get the points across.

Two short stories:

- Rashōmon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashōmon_(short_story)

- Three Questions http://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/short-stories/the-th...

Science fiction:

- House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

- A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

All of which were recommended here on HN and I really love them, especially House of Suns.

My favourite book to recommend is 'Carter Beats the Devil' by Glen David Gold. Perhaps the best praise I can give it is that I've recommended it quite a lot, with many varied friends and relatives reporting they found it most enjoyable.

I find it difficult to describe why I personally love it, but if you get into reading fiction, think about putting it on your shelf.

Wouldn't call it must read, but I found Joyce's Dubliners quite entertaining and at least close to stuff that's recommended for serious reading.

The last book I thoroughly enjoyed was Scalzi's Redshirts, but it's probably less funny if you're not familiar with Star Trek at all.

You've been a bit broad with your question, so you've got a wide variety of type and level of book.

My suggestion is to start with short stories. Ted Chiang or Greg Egan have got some great collections of short stories, although they're both SF.

Dostoyevsky

+1 - Dostoyevsky is a must have.

There are many fictional books that tell so much truth about humanity, but I would recommend Karel Capek's novels as those aren't very popular nowadays. Particuraly: The "Absolute at Large" and "War with the Newts".

Just about any Graham Greene book: The Power and the Glory. The Quiet American, The Ministry of Fear, The Comedians, Our Man in Havana etc.

The power of One by Bryce Courtney.

Wow. If you ever wanted to see how a fiction book could make you feel and appreciate literature.

I read 'Ready player one' and I really enjoy it.

Right now I am reading 'Seveneves' recommendend by Bill Gates.

I'll agree with everyone saying The Martian and add The Neanderthal Parralax (Trilogy) by Robert J Sawyer

Carl Hiassen's books regularly cause me to laugh so hard I have trouble breathing.

The Three Body problem by Cixin Liu is very dense, but entertaining and has depth.

For sci-fi with some Indian spice have a look at River of Gods by Ian McDonald

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Depends what non-fiction you read. Hemingway would be a good bet.

The Martian (Andy Wier)?

Jacek Dukaj - Other songs

For me - the best book ever. Other are just worse.

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