Annual survey of book recommendations | Hacker News Reader

Annual survey of book recommendations

bloomberg.com

56 pointsmatco1131 comments

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For those of you getting motion sick but still want to browse the list:

1) hop into your browser console

2) enter this: document.getElementsByClassName("glActive")[0].classList.remove("glActive")

3) enjoy the motionless black background

Also, can someone please let Bloomberg know about this thing called "inclusive design"?

wow, that background has to be the most annoying background I've experienced in say last 10 years on the web

I ended up reading the comments here before the list (habit with HN). I was thinking 'it can't be that bad' before going to the article and in fact it is worse.

What I don't understand is, surely their online reader numbers are plummeting. Why do they not recognize they are alienating users? Its almost like the logic is, "well we lost more users, so let's make up for it by adding more ads and intrusive design that supports them to stop the bleeding", not realizing they are just making it worse.

Its like when I go to a page and it tries to load 16-30 JavaScript's from god knows where.

Its why I try to make pure css-html5 pages, almost to counter balance the craziness of webdev these days.

A side comment about the nausea-inducing motion background. The Bloomberg story credits shown at the bottom include: "Design and development: James Singleton"

When you go to James' website showing off his portfolio[1], you see the websites he creates have busy motion and pulsating colors. Apparently, there are lots of media buyers that like that and keep paying for his services. (E.g. a previous Bloomberg feature with the disembodied head of Elon Musk bouncing around and a flashing "CLICK TO ENTER".[2])

It's definitely a different design aesthetic from Mike Bostock (d3.js) of The New York Times.

[1] http://jamespants.com/

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/elon-musk-goals/

The moving background made me motion sick, had to leave the page before i could finish

It's hard to believe anyone would pay for that. That is atrocious.

To give the designer the benefit of the doubt, it might be optimized for tablets or TVs or something. On a desktop, the combination of motion and content resizing with scrolling is fundamentally irksome.

I largely judge the design based on my device. It’s an iPhone and fairly common. If the design still makes me nauseous, I blame the designer. Perhaps it was designed for a tv or tablet or whatever, but they showed it to me.

I guess the title is misleading... It should be "The Best Books of 2017 according to finance people and CEOs"

My thoughts exactly.

And professors, deans, judges, economics advisors, ....

They aren’t even books published in 2017. Just books the respondents read in 2017.

Sapiens is great and I was late and read it this year. But it was published in 2015.

I prefer this kind of list, but the title should be accurate.

> Extreme Ownership

Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

> Grant

Ron Chernow

> Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy

Dani Rodrik

> Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought

Andrew Lo

> The Best Investment Writing, Volume 1: Selected Writing From Leading Investors and Authors

by Meb Faber (editor),‎ Jason Zweig (contributor),‎ Patrick O’Shaughnessy (contributor),‎ Morgan Housel (contributor),‎ Corey Hoffstein (contributor),‎ Barry Ritholtz (contributor)

> Janesville

Amy Goldstein

> The Man Who Could Be King

John Miller

> My Own Liberator

Dikgang Moseneke

> Hillbilly Elegy

J.D. Vance

> Small Great Things

Jodi Picoult

> Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

> Born to Run

Bruce Springsteen

> The Content Trap

Bharat Anand

> The Gene: An Intimate History

Siddhartha Mukherjee

> Shoe Dog

Phil Knight

> Attitude: Develop a Winning Mindset on and off the Court

Jay Wright

> The Euro and the Battle of Ideas

Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, Jean-Pierre Landau

> 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy

Hamilton Helmer

> Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change

Ellen Pao

> Bellevue

David Oshinsky

> The Woman Who Smashed Codes

Jason Fagone

> Stealing Fire

Steven Kotler

> Hit Refresh

Satya Nadella

> Thank You for Being Late

Thomas Friedman

> Supernormal

Meg Jay

> The Inevitable

Kevin Kelly

> Economics for the Common Good

Jean Tirole

> It’s What I Do

Lynsey Addario

> Gotham: 1898-1919

Mike Wallace

> The Good Daughter

Karin Slaughter

Thanks. Taking deeper look at the titles and authors, it seems to be a reading list for the people who frequent Bloomberg, not necessarily the best books or so.

Fyi, your copy&paste leaves out _who_ recommended each book. For some, they'd prioritize reading a book mentioned by VC Marc Andreessen over Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

I don't quite understand why this comment got downvoted. I thought the information in the article could have been presented in a MUCH more concise way, (and certainly less vertigo inducing).

Disclaimer: Non native english speaker - I am doing my best so please ignore my errors...

I read a bunch of the books on the list the most interesting to me that I have not read for now are:

- The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change

- Stealing Fire

- Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought

- The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Has anybody here on HN read those? Are these any good? I am usually quite sceptical regarding Amazon recommendations (or some random CEOs thoughts), but most of the time love books recommended on HN...

In turn my thoughts about some of the books on the list:

- Shoe Dog: Probably the best and most inspiring biography/memoir of any entrepreneur I have ever read. If you are thinking about starting a company or are a founder you will love it!

- Sapiens: Fantastic book that completely shattered parts of my worldview. In my opinion a must read for everyone! (Gave it away as a present for many of my friends - almost everybody liked it)

- Extreme Ownership: The best book regarding leadership I have ever read. At first I was skeptical about the "military-parts" of the book, but they have been useful in illustrating the underlying principles the book covers. If you are in any leadership position (top management, middle management or leader of a very small team) it is definitely worth your money.

>The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change -

I read that book and it's not bad. The main idea is that having a mindset of being protective of your content is flawed. The bigger opportunity is "network effects" like community, crowdsourcing, etc. It's the platform, not the content.

If you already agree with that, your time would be better spent reading "Modern Monopolies" because it has more tactical ideas for execution: https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Monopolies-Dominate-Century-Ec...

Thank you for the recommendation - never heard of it but sounds promising!

Ordered it and am looking forward to reading it.

Recommending "The Inevitable."

Bloomberg's recommendation list last year was superior. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-bloomberg-book-list/

Also check the recommendations from McKinsey, https://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/leadership/what-ceos-...

This list ommits "The Spider Network" - to me, one of the best books of 2017. It tells the inside story of the LIBOR scandal in a riveting manner.

And for math, reddit has you covered https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/7i9t5y/book_recommend...

I'm not sure if this is relevant but that background is causing me motion sickness and disabling js removes all of the information. I can't read it very easily when I really want to...

Completely agree.

these are so contrived...the correspondence of highbrow book <-> endorsement is just too well-aligned...I would find these lists more amusing and insightful if they included trashy sci-fi fantasy pulp, The Far Side compendiums purchased in an airport bookstore just to lighten a day, biographies of total idiots, etc etc. you know, things people ACTUALLY enjoyed

I also get suspicious of any high-intensity CEO telling me about 1000+ pages books they read within a short period of time after publishing. "Grant" (which I will soon start) is over 1000 pages and was published in October. No, no Lloyd Blankfein, you have not read this to completion yet while simultaneously running a huge bank, sorry. No one with ANY day job is going to have that book finished any time soon, let alone a Fortune 100 CEO

Going back to my MAD magazine backlog....

There's certainly a social incentive to choose highbrow books, but saying that people can't enjoy those is weird. Besides, what would be the point of recommending trashy pulp? They're entertaining, but there's plenty of them, no need to recommend. And generally I can't even remember the titles a week after reading them - easily read, easily forgotten.

No, no Lloyd Blankfein, you have not read this to completion yet while simultaneously running a huge bank, sorry. No one with ANY day job is going to have that book finished any time soon, let alone a Fortune 100 CEO.

Why? Reading 1000 pages takes what, 12 hours, if you're not particularly fast. If you just read for 30m a day, that's less than a month. What's so unbelievable about that?

Is ~80 pages per hour an average reading speed? That sounds fast to me!

It is absolutely not average. 200wpm would give ~22 hours. In this crowd, I can imagine 10-12 hours would be feasible (especially if you skip/skim the occasional boring paragraph). Anyway, who needs retention when you get to announce you read a 1000+page book?

When I said particularly fast, I meant for a regular book reader, not an average person. I'd compare it to touching your toes: being able to do it doesn't make you an athlete, even if the average fat slob like me can't do it.

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