Ask HN: What Are You Reading?
I haven't seen one of these in a while so I figured I'd ask - what are you reading and what do you recommend?
Through a Camel's Eye by Dorothy Johnston although admit I'm having trouble getting into it. Will give it another 50 pages before I decide.
And today started listening to Dune Messiah on audiobook. I loved the first book which I've reread many times, but didn't enjoy the following books at all when I read them years and years ago. Decided to give them another try.
Recommend:
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North for beautiful prose, charming writing and an inventive story. Her first and best book under that pseudonym.
Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard and The Moons of Barsk by Lawrence M. Schoen for making me care about anthropomorphic elephants.
Children of Time and Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky for almost making me care about non-anthropomorphic spiders.
I Am Not a Serial Killer and sequels by Dan Wells for tricking me into reading a horror novel when I at first thought it was a thriller, but really enjoying it anyway.
The Lost Man by Jane Harper for being similar but so far a lot better than Through a Camel's Eye.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/33942804-phillip-rhode...
To narrow it down a bit... I just read Start at the End, and that motivated me to finally pick up Human Universals (which I originally discovered via a talk from Alan Kay). So I'm reading Human Universals now, and then intend to re-read Start at the End again after that. I sort of feel like there's a connection between the content of these two that I want to explore.
Beyond that, picking my way through the various items on that Goodreads list. Some are getting more attention than others, and some are only still on my "currently reading" shelf because I've been to lazy to take them off, despite that title having been "stalled out" for years.
Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, vol 1-3, by Werner Jaeger
Diary by Witold Gombrowicz
Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach by Sedgewick
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
The Linux Programming Interface by Michael Kerrisk
Tomie: No Use Escaping by Junji Ito
L’homme aux cercles by Fred Vargas
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces by Arpaci-Dusseau
I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong.
The Weird by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
The Federalist Papers, ed. by Kesler
The Anti-Federalist Papers, ed. by Ketcham
Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann, new translation by John Woods
Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine by Alan Lightman
Loren Eiseley in the Library of America Edition
Tu rostro mañana by Javier Marías
The Complete Essays by Michel De Montaigne, translation by Screech
Earning The Rockies by Kaplan
Desperate Remedies by Thomas Hardy
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert
Nature Stories by Jules Renard
Mac y su contratiempo by Enrique Vila-Matas
Olinger Stories by John Updike
Greek Science in Antiquity by Marshall Clagett
At The Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell
100 Diagrams That Changed The World by Scott Christianson
Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire by Peter Wilson
Alec "The Years Have Pants" by Eddie Campbell
Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane
Bartleby y compañía by Enrique Vila-Matas, on why writers give up or why they may be reluctant to write. It’s a mixture of fiction and biography, hard to tell which but fun searching for authors who may not exist.
Las Constelaciones Oscuras by Pola Oloixarac. I think many in HN would like her work, this novel in particular.
El Ejército Iluminado by David Toscana.
Primavera con una esquina rota by Mario Benedetti
La Casa Verde by Mario Varga Llosa
2. Crafting Interpreters. Would recommend this to people curious about compilers/Interpreters over the dragon book. Much much easier to read.
Benjamin Franklin - Walter Isaacson: Biographies are immensely underrated. A good biography has had the effect of raising my own aspirations by orders of magnitude. Not sure what it is exactly about them. Being reminded that accomplished figures were humans first and foremost is always good. Either way, struck by the practicality of the man -- something I'm looking to emulate in my own life.
Phenomenal book by a molecular biologist turned monk who talks about happiness being a skill that can be developed through practice. Powerful, well grounded in science, one of those books that can shift your worldview in a supremely positive way.
https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Guide-Developing-Lifes-Impo...
Recommend. Addict turned neuroscientist who doesn't hold back, so a good mix of gritty details—
> After I got sober, it took me a little over a year to go a single day without wishing for a drink, but it was more than nine years before my craving to get high abated.
—and science.
Before that: "Educated: A Memoir" (Tara Westover)
Recommend. A good break from typical non-fiction books: easy to read, sometimes thrilling, and emotional.
Before that: "The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America" (Margaret Pugh O'Mara)
Don't recommend. I really wanted to like this book, and I believe some of the themes are important and aren't often discussed. E.g., the support the Valley received from politicians, the lobby groups, the size of military spending back in the day…
It's possible my expectations were in the wrong place—I wanted to be inspired like with "The Idea Factory" (Jon Gertner), "The Soul of a New Machine" (Tracy Kidder), "Dealers of Lightning" (Michael A Hiltzik), etc.
I've followed his wild ride since the beginning and have always had mixed opinions about his motives, but this book is as craftily written as it is interesting/informative.
He quite purposefully and methodically shares many personal anecdotes and intimate details of his life that put a very human face onto his story. Whoever helped craft and edit this book (with Snowden) deserves much credit - if not second billing.
A worthy read as it fills in many of the missing details of when and how.
I recently read "The Black Swan" which I thought was an important read in spite of how unlikeable I find the author, how long the book is, and how tangled up the ideas are. It felt like a bit of a crazy rant, but worthwhile.
Thanks!
It is a book about how we got to wear the clothing we are wearing, essentially a book about the history of fashion over the last 2000 years.
For a guy who owns 20ish pairs of black t-shirts you might not think I cared about fashion, but it is really the history of the ordinary person, politics and technological change.
https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0...
Mythos by Stephen Fry - an irreverent take on Greek mythology which is fun and entertaining.
This book is a wonderful book that anticipates the present future.
Not all of this book foretells, but I am reading it because I want to be able to have such foresight.
Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane. Poetic landscape history, reminiscent of Sebald. Good stuff.
Click here to kill everybody by Bruce Schneier. Scary.
Machines like me by Ian McEwan. First McEwan I read for a while but I liked it more than I expected. I thought the AI bits were quite good.
The deep history of ourselves : the four-billion-year story of how we got conscious brains by Joseph LeDoux. Bit disappointed in this one, it seemed like there should have been a better story here.
The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life: David Quammen.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff. Makes CS careers look less appealing.
Great account of the history of the conflict in Vietnam up to and including the Vietnam War
The first is A History of the World in 12 Maps by Jerry Brotton. The main idea of the book is somewhat like a visual variant of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: that our maps shape our perception of the world and, in turn, our place in it. I actually tried going into this book with a skeptical mind. I first took on the premise that you can't say much about world history by just looking at maps; maybe the crudeness of various Mappaemundi make them unsuitable for educated speculation. I am pleased to say that, by the end of the book, my premise has been completely obliterated.
HN Readers might find the final chapter particularly interesting. It reads on Google Maps and demonstrates that even today in an age of satellite imagery, a map can't claim complete objectivity.
(I'd like to note that in a couple of instances, Brotton gets some technical details wrong. There is an especially glaring one in the Google Maps chapter the hunt for which is left as an exercise to the reader. It does not really affect his main arguments and I really enjoyed the book despite these errors that bite at my attention to detail.)
The next one is Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles. This is lighter in content than 12 Maps and deals mostly with obscure figures (in world history) and yet has emerged influential to the modern-day library. The big thing that piqued my interest in this book is the part about Nazi Germany. I know, I know, any discussion can be maneuvered towards Hitler and especially one about censorship. But Battles shows how libraries are, more than anything, social institutions; how even in a bleak time and place such as Nazi-occupied Europe, make-do libraries can support a community.
He also touches on the other side of the coin. We are used to thinking of libraries as benevolent institutions of knowledge but we rarely think of them as ideological apparatuses to curtail knowledge. Highly recommended even for non-bibliophiles. At least, enjoy entertaining stories behind libraries even if you don't get a grand takeaway lesson from it all.
(Edited for formatting.)
“Prisoners of Geography: 10 maps to tell you everything you need to know about World politics ”
I’ve only read a couple of chapters but it’s best read along with a physical map :)