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Comment by activitypea | Hacker News Reader

I've been looking for something like this, hopefully other users can weigh in if the curation is any good.

Reviewing some of the books on computer science, there's an English writing book recommended for "Computer Science for Data Scientists", "Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow" for Artificial Intelligence, for Naval History (20th Century) it's two WWI books, one inter war period, one WWII and then one on the British Submarines since then... not a good overall history, and for Ancient Rome "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" which has important significance for understanding the evolution of the study of Roman history, but is not a good source anymore.

In short, this seems to be taking some famous books related to a field without actually selection the five "best" ones.

Curation is solid. Depends on who they pick as the subject matter expert, but for example, their Shakespeare biography recommendations are themselves from one of the best living Shakespeare biographers. [1]

I find "Five Books" picks better than Amazon recommendations, and faster than Google/Reddit searches. Example: search "wine book" on Amazon and it's all wine textbooks and pretty-but-vapid coffee table books. Meanwhile, Five Books will suggests Kermit Lynch's fantastic cult classic wine memoir [2].

[1] https://fivebooks.com/best-books/shakespeare-biography-james...

[2] https://fivebooks.com/best-books/randall-grahm-wine/

Personally, I think Amazon’s recommendation quality has declined precipitously over the last year or so. I find the way they do the recommendations page now to be totally worthless. Often, more than half the books recommended are different formats of books I’ve already purchased from them. The old format, by genre etc., was much more usable. Goodreads does a better job, but it’s far from perfect, e.g., mystery recommendations under science, etc. In reality, I frequently get better recommendations by searching books on Hacker News.

I looked through the sci-fi and fantasy sections and there were some odd choices. For example, Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation was recommended as a "climate change novel" book. It's hard for me to see how this makes any sense.

Other weird suggestions:

* Ender's Game under Best Apocalyptic Fiction * Parable of the Talents under Best Sci Fi Books on Space Settlement - this is real stretch since the book takes place entirely on Earth, though it does feature a religion that focuses on spreading humanity to other planets.

I wondered about Annihilation too.

I mean... I guess the climate did change, but it didn't seem like that had anything to do with anthropomorphic climate change, which is surely the implied idea of the category

Based on my limited perusal of areas I have some familiarity with, I'd say they're pretty good.

Could I bicker? Yes. But it would be in "these aren't quite the top five but they're in my top ten" type as opposed to "why are you recommending Mein Kampf as a cookbook".

Is recommending "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins as a "best book on Quantum Theory" good enough for your taste?

Anyway, any list of "The best books on X, recommended by Some Noname" almost by definition is not going to be very reliable, so that's all I can say. Just another bullshit website to earn commission via Amazon referral links by recommending random bullshit to innocent victims. I recon it might have been more useful if it was entirely generated by ChatGPT.

I think that usually the best books about a topic are textbooks, and by the look of it this site doesn't suggest many

As a generalization I have to disagree, at least in America for high-school subjects. I looked at both the math and biology texts from recent years. The math texts were written by people who didn't understand math, and the biology text was so focussed on the No Child Left Behind Act requirements that it was rubbish. (Also look for Richard Feynmann's experience reviewing textbooks). Undoubtedly there are good textbooks out there, but they are just as much in need of review and recommendation as non-textbooks.

I'm from America but not from the US, so that probably makes a big difference

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