Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?

280 pointsth33ngineer258 comments

Is there a book, paper, report or article etc. that really stood out?

I read "Crucial Conversations" this year. It feel like it has the potential to be life changing. Need more time to tell what impact it really has.

It introduced me to a new topic, which is analyzing social situations and apply problem solving skills to them. Something that never occurred to me for some reason. I now realize there are smart people working and having interesting thoughts and conclusions in this topic. So much more to explore. (Open to recomindations too!)

The book also seems to give more useful information about how to handle difficult social situations. I was pretty down on work and becoming cynical (still am though hah!) The advice I often get is stuff like be agreeable, don't rock the boat, dont say anything with passion ("corp speak"), to get ahead and get what you want. This feels bad to me. Often it appears in corporations the only people that are getting ahead are those types of yes people. I feel like this book gave me the tools to have differing opinions and express them successfully.

I also liked the book shows that a lot of these difficult conversations are actually in your control. Most people seem to have terrible communication skills I'm learning. Often I would write off a bad conversation as the other person just being an asshole or difficult or something. after reading this it seems like it is possible to handle a lot of these a lot better.

Disjointed thoughts off the top of my head, but I found the book pretty enlightening. Id recommend it if you struggle with expressing your opinions in emotional conversations.

Buying this off the strength of your recommendation. That sounds exactly like what the doctor ordered. I'm getting worse at expressing myself the older I'm getting, and I'm finding it impairing my personal life, work life, social situations, etc. Will give this one a read--thank you!

Likewise – it's been on my to-read list for ages, will schedule it as my Christmas reading thanks to OP's comment.

When I find myself nervous about a meeting, I go back to this book and outline the steps it suggests, not just the gist of it, but I walk through the steps. It's like having a colleague who wants to help you be a better person.

Another drop in this bucket.

I read it once and took some notes. Haven't looked back on either the source nor my notes (until now!), but the book came to me at a time when I was dealing with a lot of inner-organizational bureaucracy on a small-scale, but was utterly frustrating.

The book gave me new frameworks, and was reco'd to me from someone within the org who I was confiding in on the top-level. But ultimately, the frameworks weren't enough to change necessary structures – because those in power and with influence didn't want to change their attitudes, goals, and approaches.

As "negative" as that sounds, the book helped in part for me to understand the four major buckets for how decisions get made:

• command, from on high to everyone below you who must carry out the orders

• consult, to invite input but still one leadership board/ leader makes the final call

• vote, where majority decides what'll happen after being presented with options

• consensus, where a decision is made only after everyone agrees

These frameworks helped me to understand that whatever was causing obstructions/ friction, was because people in power were presenting things as if they were based on consultations leading to majority votes, but ultimately, there was a lot of game-playing from the top leaders who wanted to use those tactics as cover to ultimately have their own way.

Helped me to accept that things were the way they were, and there was no need to exert unnecessary energy. And from then on, to discern first and foremost what the decision-making dynamics are in any group endeavor, be it small-teams or entire orgs, and to go from there.

Very cool stuff, for me at least.

A bit tangential question.

> I read it once and took some notes.

Curious to know how you go about taking notes for the books you read.

So I'm a bit extreme.

I'll either write quotes from a book by hand or type it out on some word processor. But there are times I've typed out or written out entire chapters from a book. And one book I almost transcribed pretty much from end to end.

I think it's pretty inefficient. And I definitely don't recall perfectly. But it does help a lot of the info lodge in deeper than just active reading. Might just be a belief I hold, and I don't really recommend others to do it because it's definitely a lil kooky and time consuming.

Crucial Conversations was mandatory material for managers at Facebook, and I feel it's so impactful for any communication channel that I recommend to all my professional friends IRL. Also in that vein, I highly recommend Nonviolent Communication.

Interesting. What other books are mandatory reading for managers at Facebook?

Not a reading but Managing Bias: https://managingbias.fb.com/

I ordered both - "Crucial Conversations" and "Nonviolent Communication" - as audio books. Both turned out to be super dry. Same analogies and scenarios over and over again, eventually got tired of listening them; will try again now.

I find using the website Short Form to help with get to the meet of these self-help books. Can't recommend that enough.

> Often it appears in corporations the only people that are getting ahead are those types of yes people.

That is why I love consulting. The managers that hire me often express themselves to be as critical as possible on the current way of working or possible problems. This does not allow me to be blunt, because I still need to convince people of another way. But at least I do not have to pretend and worry about my position.

I put your book on my reading list.

Who is the author? There are two books with the same title.

https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Conversations-Talking-Stakes-... Based on the description. I read this too and it was enlightening. So +1.

Yeah this is the book I was talking about

Reading it right now, but I already think it's the test thing: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

I was (and still am) obsessed with productivity. But I more and more my tasks had felt like something I needed to get done, to afterwards finally be able to relax and profit from them. But this time never came and I just got busier.

The book does a great job at explaining how much of our daily grind is based on a refusal to accept our finitude. And once we accept our finitude, we can get a lot more done in a happier way.

This book was definitely one of my highlights. The number of times I exclaimed “I’m really not the only one that feels that?!” Was too many to measure. It really forces you to confront time in a way that I haven’t stopped thinking about since.

I'm having the same experience. And what I love, is that he proposes solutions that work, without sugarcoating things.

One of the biggest learnings from this book so far, is that a certain level of anxiety is inevitable. Especially when you're doing work that is meaningful to you.

Being able to accept that anxiety and still continue is what makes all the difference.

The audiobook, read by the author, is terrific.

I can imagine. He has a short, spoken course on the Waking Up mediation app that closely mirrors the book and I found it amazingly well done.

I also recommend his mailing list, "The Imperfectionist". He only sends out an essay maybe once a month but they aren't posted anywhere so you have to subscribe.

Thanks for your recommendation! I added it to my reading list.

I realize this isn't really the intent of the question, but I read "The Count of Monte Cristo" this year for the first time and it's now my favorite book. It's a classic that I just had never bothered with and the story sucked me in. The redemption, revenge, scheming, secrecy. It was phenomenal.

I reread this book over and over. What a captivating masterpiece.

Such a delight. And every time I reread it I wonder why the serial story (it was published in 18 parts over a year and a half) hasn't made a comeback given how desperate sites are for eyeballs.

There's definitely stuff like that out there, generally the genre is called "web serials". Worm is a superhero type story that ran over a period of years and is probably the most widely known example. Another personal favorite is Scott Alexander's Unsong, which has a delightfully weird mix of religion and rationalism and science fiction/ fantasy.

I think most of these kinds of things tend to lack mass appeal, but they're out there, and when you find one that tickles your fancy it can be pretty addictive!

Very popular suggestion on Reddit. I'm looking to read the an unabridged translation.

Absolutely one of my favorite books. The unabridged, modern (early 2000s, I think) retranslation by Robin Buss is the best English version, IMO. It's long, but worth every page.

I love it so much. I am sad that the Halas and Batchelor animated version I watched as a kid seems to be unobtainable :-(

I _strongly_ suggest searching out the modern Robin Buss translation (Penguin books sell it in the Uk) rather than the public domain version as the text is far clearer and several large redactions are replaced.

It has been a long time since I read it, but it is truly a mindbending story. The intricate details and relationships are extraordinary, and I am amazed Dumas was able to come up with all of it. I remember the pacing being also quite good.

I reread it every other year. It's so much fun. It's a shame how much the movie adaptations have toned down Dantes. It seems like the perfect book for a TV show due to its serial nature

It's been so many years than my memory of it is pretty vague, but I remember loving this book.

This was also my favorite 2022 book.

I don’t think it would have been on my list without others recommendations

Yes! I’m glad to see so much love for my favorite book on here. It is truly an epic read.

Best paper I read was "Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (2011)".

https://pages.lip6.fr/Marek.Zawirski/papers/RR-7687.pdf

CRDTs get a lot of hype on HN, 95% of the time it's for collaborative editing. But they're much more than some JS library to build an app around - they're a formalism of distributed systems that are strongly eventually consistent. What this means is if the mathematical properties [0] of CRDTs hold, there's no conflicts, no rollbacks, no user intervention - provided the same data is received by every node (in any order, mind you), they will all be in an identical state without a consensus.

For me this is massive, and I'm convinced this has big industrial applications, ie distributed systems in domains where the source of truth is most naturally modelled as append only events. In this scenario, the whole database is a single CRDT.

Also - and I hope I'm not outing myself as a pleb here - but each time I re-read it I discover new things, stuff I might have glossed over, didn't fully understand, or didn't appreciate before.

So yeah, have to hand it to this paper. It's really broadened my horizons.

[0] way less scary than you think. If you're comfortable with first year abstract algebra, operations, sets, relations etc you'll be fine.

thanks for sharing this. Was looking to read about the space.

> In this scenario, the whole database is a single CRDT.

But why? These ideas are elegant but usually not practical. Performance usually ends up forcing us back to ole faithful (mutability).

In this scenario I am talking about an append only data model. I admit to not understand the concept of an immutable database.

CRDTs are useful to be aware of, but they are not a silver bullet they might appear based on the paper and online sources.

They are conflict-free only because they hide conflicts by forcing a consistent order on concurrent updates. How do they do it? By using logical clocks to version events. A logical clock is not magic. It orders concurrent events arbitrarily. Is this correct? In practice, probably not, meaning that more recent updates can be lost in favor of less recent updates. What does 'recent' mean? For a user it means latest in physical time. Just because the system doesn't know any better than to arbitrarily order a pair of events (that appear concurrent), doesn't mean the user doesn't know which event comes first. This is why not everything is implemented as a CRDT and conflicts will always exist in use cases where updates must never be lost.

Fiction

I discovered and read Blake Crouch this year

- Dark Matter

- Recursion

- Upgrade

- Pines

I also discovered and read

- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

- Gravity by Tess Gerritsen

- A Man by, At the End of the Matinee Keiichiro Hirano

It's between Recursion and Project Hail Mary for me. I am leaning more towards Recursion.

Non-fiction

I discovered and read the following this year

- Deep Work by Cal Newport

- The Millionaire Fastlane by M.J. DeMarco

- Zero to One by Peter Thiel

- How to Start a Business Without any Money by Rachel Bridge

- Creative Gene by Hideo Kojima

- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

- The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

- Show Your Work, Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon

- Press Reset by Jason Schreier

I would say Deep Work and Steve Jobs had the biggest impact on me.

Programming

I am learning Elixir using Elixir In Action by Sasa Juric.

Project Hail Mary was such a fun read. I burned through it in 2 days, and was sad when I finished it. 10/10 would recommend

It was way too short, but also just long enough.

If you enjoyed PHM, you might also like: - For a more horror take, "There's no Antimemetic Division" https://qntm.org/scp. Without spoiling, it's about people trying to fight against a threat that's impossible to remember about. - Ted Chiang's "Understand". Again without spoiling too much, it's about a man whose intelligence rapidly increased. - Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality. Yeah, I'm serious, if you like the "smart character solves problem by thinking" it's amazing.

Everything by Qntm that I've read has been great. Incredibly imaginative. I recommend Ra and Fine Structure in addition to the Antimemetics stuff.

I didn't like Ra nearly as much as Antimemetics... It started out really strong and then took a very weird turn. I should get around to reading Fine Structure though.

Recursion, Blake Crouch was an amazing ride.

I’ll third that. It was so much fun!

Supposedly there will be a Netflix adaptation.

Newport's work led me to read 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, which I regularly think about. It's a refreshing read on time management.

If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend to read „Becoming Steve Jobs“, too.

Isaacson‘s book isn’t “wrong” per se, but it makes the wrong point, imho. There really have been two Steve Jobs it seems (but crucially, NOT in a Jekyll & Hyde way!), and Isaacson didn’t get that.

I really enjoyed Recursion but am disappointed by Upgrade (finishing it atm).

Been loving Blake Crouch as well. It can be a little light but it's at least gripping every time.

Favorite Technical: The Pragmatic Programmer. This is something that I should have read much earlier.

Favorite Fiction: Pale Fire. Just pure astonishment. Left me speechless with how he made the language sing.

Also great (in no particular order):

- The Sewing Girl's Tale (non-fiction)

- The Odyssey (poem)

- Tropic of Cancer (novel)

- Tenth of December (short story collection).

- Endurance (non-fiction)

- The Billion Dollar Spy (non-fiction)

- Agent Sonya (non-fiction)

- Agent Running in the Field (novel)

- Little Dorrit (novel)

To be honest, I love most of the stuff I read this year. Only a handful of books I didn't like enough to read through.

+1 for Endurance, and if you enjoyed that I also recommend The Terror (which is historical fiction but had a similar feel to me)

I also recommend Lost Moon (which is sometimes published as Apollo 13). I've joked with people it's the same story, except in outer space. If by "story" you mean getting the feeling every 20 pages or so of "they are dead now for sure," then it's not really that much of a joke.

I read both of these around the same time and loved them both.

+1 for The Odyssey. I started it during an off year, almost as an intentionally-irrelevant book to pick up and forget about, but it ended up being a genuine gem; one I remember fondly, and often.

I was blown away by Lolita, but couldn’t finish Pale Fire. The poetry felt like satire to me. And reading online about it I found mixed opinions on that!

I certainly agree that Lolita is the best work of Nabokov. For _Pale Fire_, it's a weird narrative, and I think for the first read, linearly going through the book, first the poem, and then just enjoying the story in the commentary is the easiest way to go. Think of it as a mad man trying to tell you a story, while referring to various far-fetching clues hidden inside a normal poem.

> The poetry felt like satire to me

The commentary is completely twisting the meaning of the poem, so there's a strong mismatch between what Shade wrote and whatever the hell Kinbote was thinking. If you try to understand the poem from the point of view of the story, it might seem that the poet was writing very weirdly about the story, when in fact, it was Kinbote who made up all the far-fetching links.

If you think of the poem as its own thing that is not related to the story told in the commentary, just simply a long poem, by Shade and about Shade, it will make much more sense.

Anyway, that's just my read. It's certainly a strange enough book that there are plenty of mixed ideas of how to read it.

Book: You Are Not Expected to Understand This: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World by Torie Bosch [1]

Came across this book randomly on Twitter and picked it up. The book is broken into 26 essays about significant pieces of code (defined vaguely), ranging from the Morris Worm to Pagerank to the popup window and the 1x1 invisible gif and how these shaped the modern tech landscape. Lovely read overall, and really shows how pieces of code you work on today can end up having long lasting impact on how society perceives technology as a whole. Best of all, it's not a heavy read, but offers a lot of concise info that can send you down wormholes of wikipedia.

Paper: Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service [2]

Database systems have always been a passion of mine, and the paper from AWS about how DynamoDB works internally is an incredible look into what makes a NoSQL DB platform capable of serving 89 million requests per second _(this is in the intro)_ which is incredible scale. Always good to see how engineering decisions shape products, and it's been interesting to see Dynamo take shape over the last decade _(though I recommend most folks to stay away from it because of it's mad pricing)_

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60254955-you-are-not-exp...

[2]: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/atc22-elhemali.pdf

the dynamo db paper was a great read. I was reading it repeatedly just for the fun of the numerous topics/choices it introduced to me.

Easily The City & The City by China Miéville.

The premise is great, the characters are fun, the plot will keep you engaged.

A noir detective story about a murder that happens in the space between two cities which are in superposition. That is, they share the same geographic space, but citizens are forced to live in only one of the cities by a seemingly omnipotent power called Breach that maintains the borders of the two cities.

I have heard good things about this book. I have it on my Kindle and plan to read it next year.

Besides The City & The City I really enjoyed Kraken and Un Lun Dun by China Miéville.

Kraken is the hunt for a giant squid after it vanished from a London museum.

Un Lun Dun is a young adult story of two friends who end up in a whimsical version of London.

I'll have to check them out!

I was first drawn to TC&TC because I was told Disco Elysium draws from it, and boy howdy was that right. Something is so wonderful about a crime procedural in an entirely fantastic universe.

That's funny, I just added Disco Elysium to my Steam wish list yesterday.

You will not be disappointed! Possibly my favourite game of all time.

IIRC Kraken was described as 'an explosion in an ideas factory'. I liked the ideas but about half way through began to wish that Miéville would calm down and explore in more detail some of the characters / concepts he'd introduced earlier in the novel.

Amazing book. I would love to see a film adaptation. I also recommend his Bas-Lag series starting with Perdido Street Station.

I've not seen it but there's a mini-series adaptation

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7205264/

Great BBC mini series. Faithfully follows the book.

Great book. I read it a few years ago and still think about it often, especially when I’m walking by a homeless person on the street

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius. This year and every year.

It is kind of a stereotype though of tech dudes to be into stoicism, but whatever, this book really just puts me in such a good frame of mind any time I open it.

> kind of a stereotype though of tech dudes to be into stoicism

I like this book but completely disagree with your stereotype. In fact, I find the tech dude stereotype to lack perspective, resort easily to anger and personalization, stew in thought, and accuse others for their suffering.

I think both of you might be right, as my impression of the stereotype is more that the tech dude is “into” stoicism, but falls short in practice.

Welp that's me exactly.

Perhaps the fact that tech dudes have trouble with perspective and emotion control and how to live a good life also draws them to stoicism as a way out, thus resulting in (perceptions of) a lot of tech dudes being into stoicism

Which means we need it that much more.

If you like older wisdom books like this, I’d recommend the essays of montaign.

Marcus wrestles with being a man, montaign wrestles with being a human.

I re-read The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson; it represents what I love about Sci-Fi: Interesting ideas on the edge of plausibility; a speculative society based on their consequences; a clever story and setting. Leaves me with a "Could be build that?" feeling.

It's inspiring one my current side-projects; a molecular and protein modeler/simulation.

Perhaps try The Baroque Cycle next if you haven't already.

I read Quicksilver and started on The Confusion this year but still haven’t felt like it’s grabbed me. When did it start getting more exciting for you?

I have; it was great fun!

This is my favorite book. I have a signed first edition.

I'm super happy to see someone else appreciates it :-)

I was late by a year to it, but Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun was both fascinating and, typical for Ishiguro, almost lethally concentrated melancholy. A literary take on AGI and religion from the cleverly written perspective of an AI assistant device, mixed with a coming-of-age story and a meditation on the disposability of modern technology.

How did you feel it compared with some of his other works? Personally I enjoyed it, but to me it wasn't quite on the same level with some of his other books like the buried giant or remains of the day.

Kazuo Ishiguro's entire career revolves around memory: remembrances, sometimes unreliable, and always moving. If you like Ishiguro can I recommend W.G. Sebald? Rings of Saturn is like nothing I've ever read before.

I subscribe to Asimov's bi-monthly (6/year) sci-fi short story magazine and there's always one or two stories that really stand out every issue. It's always a treat when a new one turns up in the mailbox. https://www.asimovs.com/

Collections of short sci-fi stories can be thoroughly refreshing. It gives the author the space to explore outlandish concepts (societal, philosophical, technological, etc.) that wouldn't work too well stretched out to a full novel. From recent anthologies to paperbacks collecting a bunch of stories around a theme from the seventies: there are gems in every one of them (misses too of course).

I find it a good way to explore authors I haven't read anything by as well.

Rabbit Test by Samantha Mills [0] is the heavily researched, hard sci-fi that retains its close intimacy on the impact on regular people that I think science fiction should be going towards. It's realistic, heavy-hitting, and doesn't bullshit on the politics involved.

https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/rabbit-test/

Holy shit, that was a great read.

Ok, that story alone is a reason to get back into short stories. Great stuff.

Now _that_ was some good sci-fi. Hard hitting, fascinating, and damn does it make its point. Thanks for sharing.

I've been reading the Foundation series, and it's quite good.

Aside from that:

"The New Right" by Michael Malice

"The Storm Before the Storm" by Mike Duncan

"The Anglo-American Establishment" by Carroll Quigley

"Numbers Don't Lie" by Vaclav Smil

Books that weren't good:

"A Short History of Man" by Hans-Herman Hopper

"The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil

"After Evangelicalism" by David P. Gushee

Gene Wolfe.

The whole Solar Cycle (The Book of the New Sun, Urth of The New Sun, The Book of The Long Sun, The Book of The Short Sun), Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, There Are Doors, The Sorcerer's House ... .

Wolfe is a genius.

Before that I also finished Malazan.

The Gene Wolfe's novels are outstanding. I think it should be more well-known. I just heard of him by coincidence in a blog post that appeared in my RSS feed, and no one that I know had ever heard of him.

I fizzled on Malazan. Despite warnings that the first book isn't that great - but the series is! - I really enjoyed it. However I subsequently found the second book to be an unsatisfying grind and then so was the third where I stopped half-way.

I have just started The Book of the New Sun and am hopeful it will be a better experience.

There is No Antimemetics Division by qntm [1]:

An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it. Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn't share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams...

But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can't record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you're at war? Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day

[1] https://a.co/d/hqdu0We

The Rustonomicon (WIP) made Rust things click in a way that really benefitted me: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/

Definitely in the running!

I'd also recommend "The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work": https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-en.pdf

Yeah 2022 was the year in which rust transitioned (to me) from "frustrating waste of time language" to "wait a minute, the standard library is really good, the tools are really good, I could probably make useful software with this".

Though curious why a book describing unsafe rust made rust click for you?

It made me better understand how Rust works and how it is designed, and in doing so, it really untangled how borrowing/ownership works.

I liken it to paint a tree, full of leaves which obscure its branches. I might never paint the branches, but understanding how the branches are shaped will help me draw a better tree.

This was in tandem with reading the Rust book, being active in the IRC, and writing programs to learn! The Rustonomicon just happened to have what I needed.

Three Body Problem trilogy. Most unique sci-fi I have ever read.

In the same vein of "interesting sci-fi thought experiments", I keep coming back to Hurley's The Stars are Legion as an amazing (and disturbing) exploration of what a society that used biology the way we use electronics could look like.

Nice! I have this on my 2023 TBR. Cannot wait. I read Netflix is picking it up for an adaptation?

I'll tell you what I tell others when I recommend it - the trilogy is so good that I am jealous of your position of having not yet read it!

Related, from a few weeks ago: Ask HN: Best books read in 2022? – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33849267

and this thread also has the same comment in it. the same question was asked only a couple weeks before that one.

I think hackernews could aggregate some of these types of repetitive questions and topics better?

https://hackernewsbooks.com/

didnt know about that, though one downside is that it doesnt encourage discussion of the book recommendations. Though idk how much of that actually happens anyway

Yikes, missed that one! Thanks for sharing.

The Once and Future King, by T.H. White.

The Sword in the Stone is probably my favorite Disney movie so I was delighted to discover the movie was based on a book which was even better.

It's a super book. Remember the first meeting of Arthur and Merlin, when Merlin says "how long since we met?" and then has a tear in his eye?

He also wrote The Goshawk which I can recommend.

One of my favourites of all time. The singing Cockney hedgehog is such a gem.

The best works of fiction I read:

- Count Belisarius by Robert Graves

- The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

- The Expanse (all of them)

- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

And the best books on software development were:

- Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach by Mark Richards and Neal Ford

- Multithreaded JavaScript by Thomas Hunter II and Bryan English

- The Programmer's Brain by Felienne Hermans

The Bone Clocks is what killed David Mitchell's work for me. Really like Count Belasarius though, but I have always liked my heroes heroic, especially the historical ones.

Are there some books that you can recommend?

Of course. Not looking at a bookshelf or doing much effort to recall, but enjoyed the Baroque Cycle by Neil Stephenson, almost anything by Gore Vidal. On the nonfiction side, I will always recommend books by Nick Lane, especially the first one I read: Oxygen - it made me wish that I had continued my Biochemistry studies into university.

The Bone Clocks is fantastic - probably my #1 go-to when someone asks me for a book recommendation.

I've been listening to the history of Byzantium podcast and Count Belisarius is on my list of things to read. Great to hear that it's good!

I can wholeheartedly recommend it. Grave's Claudius series is also great!

If you enjoyed The Bone Clocks, consider trying the other books in that same universe. Like The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (particularly if you enjoy its historical setting of Edo period Japan on the artificial island of Deshima where the Dutch were allowed to operate a trading post), or the shorter Slade House.

Of course Cloud Atlas is well-known and a good read.

Utopia Avenue, his latest work about a fictional band in the 1960s, is a very pleasant and frankly fun read too, although different from the others. In typical Mitchell fashion, it does loosely connect to his other works and that weird über-narrative he is building. I'm looking forward to see what he'll end up doing with that.

I already read Slade House, Cloud Atlas, number9dream and Ghostwritten. I'm REALLY looking forward to all the others! :)

Here's a few:

* Matthew Klein & Michael Pettis - Trade Wars Are Class Wars

* Bruno Latour - We Have Never Been Modern

* Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (had never read it before, probably book of the year for me)

and of course, Matt Levine's Money Stuff, which is good every year!

Been getting into sci-fi novels recently. Favorite has been stuff by Adrian Taichovsky [1]. A lot of it is premised on "what if animals were (engineered) smarter". His novels usually explore how cognition / language / culture would evolve over millenia for different species.

(minor spoilers) For example, one story describes bees that form a hivemind. Another describes how language would work with only colors. Another describes how society would evolve if knowledge was genetically inherited.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Tchaikovsky

The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman So simple and clear. I listen to it once or twice a year.

How to Fight a Hydra by Josh Kaufman A heroes story about doing hard things.

Courage is Calling by Ryan Holiday I didn't actually finish this one. I just go back to it for about 20-30 minutes every time I need a boost. I save it for when I feel overwhelmed and it snaps me right out of it.

Clean Code, the Clean Coder, and Clean Architecture by Robert C Martin Amazing. I am better for reading these.

Venture Deals by Brad Feld Saved me a lot of time and heartache

The Metaverse by Matthew Ball The first real definition of the Metaverse I've ever heard. Loved it.

The Stormlight Archives by Brandon z Sanderson. I'm on book 4 now eagerly awaiting the release of 5. Easily one of if not the best series of his.

Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.

One of my colleagues wrote a thesis on medical applications of machine learning in leg rehabilitation. He was also a big Stormlight Archives fan, so the foreword of course contained Dalinar's answer to the most important step a man can take.

As a perfectionist in recovery, this book was extremely illuminating: https://www.newharbinger.com/9781684038459/the-anxious-perfe...

I often felt like they were describing me to myself as I was reading... Highly recommend if you deal with perpetual dissatisfaction with your performance or achievements and would like to learn how to accept yourself for who you are and live a "lighter" existence.

Are you linking to another book or is the tile wrong?

quick shout-out to https://literal.club/ as a hopeful successor of GoodReads, which has been in a state of disrepair if not abandonware for several years now. Literal is a terrific product and I hope it gains traction.

as for my own entries…

- Lapvonia by Moshfegh and Hollow by Catling are both sort of magical-realism set in medieval European villages, which would normally be considered "fantasy" but I assure you are very much not fantasy novels as any normal reader would consider. They are rather stories about the medieval setting set from the perspective of how people a thousand years ago understood and perceived their real world.

- and also on that medieval-tales motif, The Mere Wife by Headley is a contemporary retelling of Beowulf (the hero is a cop named Ben Wolff), great fun and well-styled.

- Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Beaton is winning tons of awards and deservedly so.

- Termination Shock and Ministry for the Future are stabs at possible approaches for solving climate change by very prominent SF writers, which miss the mark for various reasons, but worth a look as they're the dominant themes for the next few years of science fiction.

There's also BookWyrm, which is ActivityPub-federated and has less of the library-management focus in favor of the now reading/just finished status updates: https://docs.joinbookwyrm.com/

quick shout-out to https://literal.club/ as a hopeful successor of GoodReads

Before I sign up: does it do 'people who liked this book also liked...' ? And/or are the recommendations based on previous books I put in there myself ok?

It's "free" for the user, so how do they make money?

Starting FORTH by Leo Brodie - Written in a casual, funny, beginner friendly way, and even though I'm not a beginner I still enjoyed it immensely. Now if only Forth were more popular!

Edit: realised OP said `thing' not `things' so I deleted some books.

I recently had an idea for a spellcrafter game that uses forth. check back in several years?

Will do! Also, nice name. Alekhine's games have given me great pleasure over the years.

The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe.

Absolutely astounding, the best book I've read in my life. Gene Wolfe has become my favorite author ever. Each time I reread the book I discover a million things I didn't notice before.

"Einstein's Fridge" was great to learn about the history and development of thermodynamics at a fairly high level.

"Good Inside" on becoming a better parent was also great and taught me a lot.

"Every Tool's a Hammer" on becoming a better maker.

"Crafting Interpreters" on learning about and building compilers.

All were really great reads.

Also read Crafting Interpreters recently and enjoyed it.

Mme. Bovary. First it just was an exercise to show to my wife how _descriptions_ are _action_. I was trying to improved her everyday writing, you know, memos from work, informal/formal letters. I'm reading French just a little as English. So we are doing this... _exercises_ based upon an Spanish translate. And there it was. Just like I used to be remember it: fabrics that suddenly becomes a living creature embracing Emma B. nee Rouault, feelings that forms heavy lakes falling upon her, light that is light and sound and it taste like aluminum. Sorry to inform: is not a novel about couples, not even about a couple, not even about Emma. It's all about how you can tell a thing, whatever thing, not thinking about it as static dead thing but a living, fiery, not a few times menacing, whatever.

I cannot understand what you’ve written here.

I read Madame Bovary a long time ago because in the old days when we visited East Berlin from the west they forced you to exchange some money into the worthless Ostmark. The only thing worth buying were books and even those were printed on terrible paper. I ended up with Madame Bovary and absolutely loved it, depressing as it is.

John Green's "The Anthropocene Reviewed" was surprisingly a great joy to read. It was a light in the dark for me. He makes me feel thankful and appreciative of being a part of the human race without coming off as cheesy or contrived. And it's funny, too.

I second this. I listened to the audiobook. I cannot recommend it enough. The depth of intimacy is unparalleled. It seems, to me, to be a brilliant and vulnerable satire of modern social rating system and social networks. The way I am near tears listening to some of the most private moments about this man's life, followed up by "I give Academic Decathlon 4 out of 5 stars" is a hilarious reminder that the rating systems we use online are so deeply detached from the experiences they represent.

« Axiomatic » sci-fi short stories by Greg Egan. I think it’s the first time fiction has clicked for me. It’s hard sci-fi so the science is accurate and that helps a lot. And the fact that they’re short stories helps because of my modern day short term attention span…

I finally read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down[1], which has been on my list for years.

Cultural/anthropological journalism tends to fall into a handful of traps (fawning over "exotic" cultures, or dismissing them as backwards), and this is one of a small handful of books that avoid those errors. I highly recommend it to anybody who's interested in medical anthropology, or more generally to anyone looking to understand (a tiny fragment of) the immigrant experience in the US.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12609.The_Spirit_Catches...

Fiction: The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier. Very fun novel somewhere between sci-fi and literary fiction, best read without having spoiled anything about it.

Non-Fiction: The Bright Ages - Matthew Gabriele. Very nuanced well written popular history of the medieval period

Journalism: Not from this year but I read it this year the first time: Largely photographic piece about the drug war in the Phillipines: (warning, very disturbing/gory) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/07/world/asia/ro...

"The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

If anyone can recommended some other "beginner" books for learning genetics I would really appreciate it.

The gene machine (centres around nobel prize winning discovery of ribosome structure)

Time love memory: influence of genes on time keeping, mating, neurobiology.

She Has her Mother's Eyes is a good one. But of course if you want to learn properly you need something more comprehensive than books like these.

Haruki Murakami's "Novelist as a Vocation" has been inspiring for me. It's a memoir about his path as an author. I find that his discussions of topics such as writers block relevant to my technology work.

The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. Grim and gritty, with phenomenal character development that hones in on the fallibility of people. The narration by Steven Pacey is incredible, if you'd like to go that route.

Pacey is seriously incredible, they could not have possibly found a better voice for the series. I listened a few years back and loved it. I really need to get around to the other books in the setting, I read Best Served Cold right after the original trilogy and then moved on and never came back.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel.

Might be worthwhile to read this after Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel. While not a formal trilogy, there are a lot of connections and quite honestly they are each totally amazing.

Last Night in Montreal, by the same author, is also great, and totally different from the above three.

I read Station Eleven after Sea of Tranquility, and I really liked the connection in that direction. So I don't think the ordering is so important.

Really looking forward to reading The Glass Hotel as well! Emily St. John Mandel may be my new favorite author.

The end of the world is just the beginning by Peter Zeihan. It is an amazing walkthrough of the modern global economy and how it is changing based on changing demographics and politics. Highly recommended.

I was not initially impressed with Zeihan. He's a bit of a know-it-all and is very fatalist with his predictions.

That said, I've really come around on him lately. His predictions are broadly accurate, and it's very refreshing to see a version of the world that rises above political noisemaking.

"When We Cease to Understand the World" was fascinating historical fiction, which felt more like fiction because the stories were so out there and well-written. Many times I looked up the wikipedia entry on some character or event, only to discover that some of the more bizarre and out-there parts of the story that I had assumed were fiction were actually fact.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4462913650

The road to serfdom and the constitution of liberty by fa hayek. Really nails home why the individual is the moat important organizational block of society and how to protect that. Why nations fail and the narrow corridor by daron acemoglu were also excellent and gave more practical ideas on how to make institutions that work well (and also protect individuals). Wanting by luke burgis was also a really good jntro to rene girards ideas that like drive social interraction.

The two recent books by Madeline Miller, "Circe" and "The Song of Achilles"

"Crossroads" Jonathan Franzen

"Agassi" Andre Agassi - I don't normally read sports memoirs, but this one came highly recommended by a woman author that I have read recently so I gave it a try. As a tennis fan who pretty much alway routed for the other player when he played (except when he played Pete Sampras), I found the book totally engaging. Highly recommended.

I was a big Sampras fan, curious on details of your exception. I don’t follow off the court/field drama so was he a huge jerk or something?

Sampras was a great player, but I never really liked his style of play. As a baseliner, I far preferred Courier and Agassi. As a serve and volley player, I far preferred Edberg and Rafter. Maybe it's unfair to compare him to the best of given styles since he was competent all around.

Agassi, though he's careful to give Sampras his due as an opponent, has some very interesting observations about him as a person in the book.

Cool. Good points that I never really realized. I was young and pretty newly minted tennis fan at the time so I think his style just stood out to me as different and seemed dominant. I didn't get much of the nuance you mention, but I remember thinking of him as a "power player" compared to others who tended to be more quick and nimble.

I finally got around to reading Neuromancer, and it was pretty stellar. Not the best story, but man, Gibson's prose is phenomenal in my opinion.

I love the opening line of Neuromancer:

> The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Fiction: Gideon the Ninth - which was both funnier than expected, given it's about necromancers, and also a great view of how very technical discussions appear from the outside

Non fiction: Probably "Becoming Trader Joe" really shows how business decisions are path very situational and path dependent. i.e. the whole store brand schtick of Trader Joe's started because of alcohol regulations

Gideon the Ninth was hilarious. Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy and Martha Wells' Murderbot series have a similar mix of great storytelling and snark.

A few suggestions on the heavier side since I had an interesting year.

Attached, The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find--and Keep-- Love: Why do people ghost, lovebomb or keep long term relationships. There are a few reddit groups that are incomprehensible if you have not read this, afterwards you see things differently. Not a happy book regardless of the title. Thais Gibson therapist on youtube that also suffered personally has good content.

The body keeps the score: Read this second, it describes the physical effects of various mental health related events. People swear by this again and again.

Complex PTSD, from surviving to thriving: If you need to read this you are at the point that you have figured out that something has gone very wrong with you or someone close tou you. Thr chapter on cptsd emergency is very chacteristic. Also read the respective reddit threads.

The topics above are very to the point and the situations they describe affect in a subtle way a lot of people. The first also assist in understanding parent children relationships.

Life After Lifestyle by Toby Shorin: https://subpixel.space/entries/life-after-lifestyle/

Enjoy this piece and some of the themes in it, weird DTC brands, authenticity, manufacturing culture. It seems to make sense of the current moment we live in.

Napoleon by Andrew Roberts. It's one of those rare works of history that is both highly informative and a real pleasure to read.

It helps that Napoleon lived one of the most extraordinary lives in human history.

Key takeaway, in the saucy words of the great man himself: "Fortune is a woman. The more she does for me, the more I will require of her."

I just posted a list of articles earlier today.[0] Choosing one article and one book, I would go with

- Stylized Facts in the Social Sciences by Daniel Hirschman

- 1177 B.C. by Eric Cline

[0] https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-articles-2022/

I really enjoyed this Dan Luu article https://danluu.com/nothing-works/

It's something I had been thinking about for a while but didn't have the knowledge required to put it into words. I end up linking it a bit.

Fiction

--------

Termination Shock - Neal Stephenson

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

Shards of Earth - Adrian Tchaikovsky

Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir

Gnomon - Nick Harkaway

The Gone Away World - Nick Harkaway

The Apollo Murders - Chris Hadfield

Nonfiction

----------

Mindf*ck - Chris Wylie

1776 - David McCullough

Apollo 8 - Jeffrey Kluger

Someone on Hacker News recommended The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan. The audiobook is just fantastic, read by the author and you can tell how passionate and concerned he is about the subjects he’s talking about. It’s a long book but worth the read.

I finally got around to reading The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which was pretty great. Also the Richard Burton movie (read the book first).

Best paper, easily:

https://nebuchadnezzar-megolm.github.io/

Isaacson's biography of Da Vinci. Beautiful man.

The biography went really deep into his art and pointed out what made it so special. As someone who knows nothing about art, this gave me a wonderful new perspective both on Da Vinci and on art in general.

You might enjoy Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane if you enjoyed the Isaacson biography. Fantastic writing and a very very interesting man as well as incredible artist.

The Precipice by Toby Ord

https://theprecipice.com/

An amazing nonfiction book that at times reads like science-fiction. A grand overview of various existential risks humanity faces and what we can do to decrease the chances. As it stands, the author estimates humanity's survival chances to be 5/6 per 100 years, given today's state of things. This is equivalent to playing a Russian roulette - not something we can maintain for the long term. So now is one of the most important times in history of humanity: preventing our not-unlikely total destruction.

The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. It definitely lives up to its reputation.

I have an audio-book of this! And a flight next week!

See, I love Bulgakov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but I really didn't get Karamazov (it's a personal failing, not attributing it to the work).

There are some beautiful aspects of the book that will always stay with me. The Grand Inquisitor monologue is captivating, Alyosha is a deeply interesting character, Mitya's stories of gallivanting on a troika through Russia, and everything that is Grushenka...

But as a whole, I can't say I understood it. I didn't understand how these characters came together, or how the ending tied these (albeit interesting!) stories together.

Karamazov was the first Dostoevsky book I read. When it came to The Idiot, I was shocked by how different the writing style felt. It flowed more, the dialogue drove a lot of the narrative, and it generally was just a lot less dense.

I'm hardly an English Major let alone a scholar of Russian Lit so I'm sure the thoughts here are pedestrian.

I had a similar feeling after finishing the book. This YT video really helped frame the book for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UBOA00EAQw

Thanks! I should seek out more analysis... Master & Margarita is my favourite book, but I don't think it'd crack Top 10 if it weren't for the end notes.

"So good they can't ignore you" - the book has a contrarian viewpoint on how you don't look seek out the field that you are most passionate about, but rather you work at getting good at something and the passion finds you. Makes so much sense!

"Do hard things" - title is self- explanatory, real growth happens under pressure.

"The Snowball" - this is such an important book - not just great financial advice, but also filled with life advice from the sage of Omaha. It's over 1000 pages long, but it's so honest.

I discovered Patrick Radden Keefe's writing this past year, and loved his writing style enough to immediately pick up a second of his books.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

I've also been listening to a lot of audiobooks and was really impressed by Rosamund Pike's reading of The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan (Book 2 of the Wheel of Time series) for Audible; enough that I'm waiting to listen to Book 3 to when her reading of it is released next summer.

After Terry Pratchett's death in 2015 I started rereading all of Discworld in publishing order, I had read about half of them before.

This year's batch included _The Fifth Elephant_ and later _Night Watch_, and they're really fantastic. The pinnacle of the series? I have about ten books left to find out.

Also _The Loom Of Life_ (in Dutch, its Dutch title translates to "Why are there so many species") and it was a nice dense introduction to biodiversity and ecology.

And others less worth mentioning.

The Guns of John Moses Browning. One of those where you didn't realize how someone you likely don't know much about has impacted every human on the planet.

The same two books I read every year.

7 Habits of highly successful people How to win friends and influence people.

Both books seem to be used in thousands of newer books, borrowing the same themes.

Bill Browser's Red Notice and then Freezing Order.

They read like fiction and gave me a whole new appreciation for how Russia works, plus international politics and investing.

Sadly, Porn by Edwars Teach (better known as The Last Psychiatrist).

He has a very opinionated style, so if it doesn't work for, you'll hate it. At the same time, I've found it extremely insightful about human nature and it forced my to face some parts of myself that I wasn't aware of and didn't like.

Very much love-or-hate read, but worth trying. Just maybe check out his old blog first to see if his style is bearable for you.

I finally got around to reading Moby Dick this year. I found it to be about 100x better and more approachable than I expected, and there’s so much to meditate on while reading it that I am excited to read thru it a second time.

Also, 2 new Cormac McCarthy novels just came out and I re-read the boarderlands trilogy and blood meridian this year to prep myself. I can’t recommend these enough, even tho it was my second time reading

Jack Four by Neal Asher. sci fi first person mega action. impossible to put down. Close second would be Hail Mary by the guy who wrote the Martian.

Strugatsky - Roadside picnic

A small sci-fi novel where a fantastic premise is explored. The most interesting part is the description of the role of the different characters in relation to the mystery (which is not explained in the book). See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic

Best is hard! But "Owls of the Eastern Ice," about fieldwork in Siberia studying owls, is definitely up there.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/22/owls-of-the-ea...

Re-read „It’s Not Luck” by Elijahu Goldratt; maybe it’s not „epiphany”, but very good instruction on tackling seemingly „impossible” projects.

For some reason "Who We Are and How We Got Here" (David Reich on early human history via DNA) was just a delight, to have so many open questions be slammed shut.

"The Need to be Whole", from Wendell Berry, is deeply thought-provoking in a sort of spiritual-political way, though far too long for how much it has to say, and questionable at times.

I couldn't finish the Reich book. He knows so much but I thought it was very badly written - long sentences winding out of control.

Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective by Ken Stanley and Joel Lehman. This book was a fascinating read for anyone with ambitious objectives (or an interest in optimization algorithms). Ken is such a deep thinker, I love when he's on podcasts or gets interviewed, and reading his book was a real treat.

River of the Gods by Candice Millard https://www.npr.org/2022/06/15/1105189330/river-of-the-gods-...

Cryptonomicon. A classic but deservedly so.

Neville Shute's novel 'On the Beach', from 1957.

I won't spoil it -- Wikipedia has a synopsis if you want -- other than to say it's end-of-times dystopia. But from 1957. It's delightful.

My friend Tim:

> Just finished On the Beach. Simple and profound. Just need some Zoloft and I will be great. Thanks for the recommendation.

If you like old movies, don't miss the 1959 adaptation!

I looked it up, but this from Wikipedia put me off:

"Nevil Shute was displeased with the final cut of the film, feeling that too many changes had been made at the expense of the story's integrity. After initial collaboration with Kramer, it was obvious that Shute's concerns were not being addressed; subsequently, he provided minimal assistance to the production. Gregory Peck agreed with Shute but, in the end, producer/director Stanley Kramer's ideas won out. Shute felt that [SPOILER REMOVED] ruined a central element of the novel, that is, [SPOILER REMOVED]."

So I'm not going to bother. I'll leave the book's memory as it is.

Always with Honor (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55807906)

Memoir from the leader of the White Army during the Bolshevik revolution. Sparked an interest in Russian history for me.

"The Idea of the World", by Bernardo Kastrup. A complete departure from my materialistic view of the world, and - in spite of certain arguments made in the book, with which I disagree - offered me the chance to learn something that now requires more reading on the topic.

Four novels stood out:

- Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

The novel explores aging, careers, and relationships. As I plod further into middle age, I felt like it was written for me.

Amor Towles is a brilliant writer. I enjoyed all three of his novels:

- A Gentleman in Moscow - Rules of Civility - The Lincoln Highway

If you're into historical biographies, I highly recommend The Last Lion by McMasters on Churchill. Really puts things into perspective about how close Germany came to owning Europe.

It's really 3 books, 5000+ pages, not a quick read but worth the effort.

Oh! I'm about 1/4 of the way through book II. Can't recommend enough for history nerds!

"Stories of Your Life and Others" by Ted Chiang (from 2002). Contains the short story that the movie Arrival was based on, and a bunch of other cool stories as well. Definitely the best SciFi I've read in a long time.

An Elegant Puzzle- Systems Engineering Management. The content is great, and the design and typsetting are fantastic too. It helped formalize a lot of half thoughts I had floating around my head in regards to engineering management.

Systems of Engineering Management.

Leaving out the of makes it sound like a much more interesting book, IMO ;)

This book: https://www.amazon.in/Heavyhands-Ultimate-Exercise-Leonard-S...

What was your takeaway?

Paradais by Fernanda Melchor was the only book I literally could not put down till I finished. It’s a short book, but extremely visual. I read it maybe six months ago and the whole story has played through my head since then.

Thanks for the recommendation, I just grabbed a copy.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut was that book for me this year. It's an odd blend of fact and fiction covering a handful of 20th century physics and math discoveries. Alexander Grothendieck, Einstein, Schrödinger and Heisenberg all appear.

Children of the Arbat(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Arbat)

Pretty scary book about Russia circa 1930-1940

"The Beautiful Tree: a personal journey into how the world's poorest people are educating themselves" by James Tooley. It's a very interesting book about low-cost private education.

I read "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist" this year, and the authors make great points. The ones that stuck with me the most are those regarding Kant's scepticism.

2 books: The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism & The New Traditional Woodworker. Both of these I read separately and in the end became convinced that they are indeed unintentionally related.

- a collection of lydia davis short stories - 'on earth we're briefly gorgeous' by ocean vuong - latest noon magazine - lorca poems - 'dirty work' by larry brown

"Slight Edge" by Jeff Olson was pretty good. Lessons from the book helped me make progress towards my bigger goals every day. You don't need to read the entire book to get value.

The Inner Game of Tennis

The meta-crises framework co-developed by Daniel Schmachtenberger

https://consilienceproject.org/

Injustice by Brad Nelsen

Fascinating execution on a fun sci fi idea: intergalactic prison from the inside. Delightful and creative character development and a cathartic conclusion!

I reread Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, which despite having been published ~50 years ago, still seems prescient and with relevant commentary on modern life

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*** by Mark Manson?

I'm thinking the question mark at the end means maybe you do give a f**. :-)

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society - by Eric A. Posner and Eric Glen Weyl

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177502/ra...

The book recommends radical changes to how we deal with private property, voting, immigration, large stock investors, AI stuff, and more. It felt like an honest overview of various economic policies across the past (pointing out how radical many changes were) and a set of reasonable proposals for how to improve our currently-broken system.

By far the best thing I’ve read in years is the blog about obesity and its mysteries, slimemoldtimemold.com. Can’t recommend it enough.

Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein by John Launer.

What Is a Minor Literature? by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari.

“Man’s Search For Meaning” made me think a lot.

This book was a revelation for me. Logotherapy, or the idea of finding meaning in one’s trials and tribulations as a path to therapeutic recovery (and even becoming grateful for them), got me out of a lifelong spiral of self-pity and resentment.

The erogamer. For all its flaws, it has many amazing moments. It made me think about life and how people change as they age.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.

It was Matt Crump’s saga about his cheating students at crump lab.com. It was taken down, but it was a great read.

Everything’s on Andrej Karpathy‘s blog.

Reincarnation Blues, by Michael Poore. Takes on some serious stuff but never takes itself too seriously.

"The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann" by Ananyo Bhattacharya

I read the first two fiction books I'd read in a long time this year:

- Children of Time

- Children of Ruin (the sequel)

Finally finished the "Gervais Principle" essay, was real high quality.

Business: Team Topologies Non-Fiction: Be Love Now Fiction: The Lost Metal

Thinking fast and slow, and Principles. Both live up to their reputation.

let's talk about owls with diabetes by David Sedaris. Never has a book made me laugh out loud more than this one. It's completely ridiculous and crazy, but I loved every minute of it.

Anna Karenina by Tolstoy The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

The sixth principle Farnham Street blogs

The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley

The Bobiverse

Build by Tony Fadell (iPod, Nest).

"Mathematics for the Non-Mathematician" - Morris Kline. An oldie but a goodie. Don't expect a gripping writing style. Actually, don't expect to read more than a few sections at a time. But if you get through it you will come away with a much better mathematical intuition.

"The Body Keeps the Score" - Bessel Van Der Kok. tl;dr on this one is: the DSM V is woefully inadequate.

Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari

That Hideous Strength

1492 by Charles Mann

I'm guessing you mean either 1491 or 1493?

The Bible (ESV)

The Bible (NASB95)

The news that lockdown ends.

"The Ministry For the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson and "Termination Shock" by Neal Stephenson provide compelling approaches to dealing with climate change, in the form of thriller novels.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com