Ask HN: What was the best book you read in 2013? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What was the best book you read in 2013?

29 pointsKopion27 comments

The Silo Saga, by Hugh Howey. Originally self-published and released as short Kindle "Singles", the first section of the series is collected in "Wool". The Omnibus collects the first five singles, and is $6 on Amazon[1]... but if you want to test it out, the first single he released is still available for free in the Kindle store. It ranks among the best zero dollars I spent all year.

Behind that, I really enjoyed "White Noise" by Don Delillo, though I did have some problems with characterization (basically, all the characters were the author), and Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism

http://www.amazon.com/Wool-Part-One-Hugh-Howey-ebook/dp/B005...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Wool-Omnibus-Silo-Saga-ebook/dp/B0071X...

This is my list(Most of these books aren't from 2013): 1. The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff by Jane Smiley

2. Halting State by Charlie Stross

3. Levels of Life by Julian Barnes

4. The Particle At The End Of The Universe by Sean Carrol

5. Churchil Bomb by Graham Farmello

6. The Science Of Memory by Charles Fernyhough

7. The Anatomy of Violence: The biological roots of crime by Adrian Raine

8. The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and our gamble over Earth’s future by Paul Sabin

9. Experiencing Art: In the brain of the beholder by Arthur Shimamura

10. The Spark: A Mother’s Story of Nurturing Genius by Kristine Barnett

The Count of Monte Cristo .. not sure why it took me all these years to read it, but it was one of the best books I've ever read.

I'm reading this right now (in my 30's) and LOVING it! It's a hefty read, but the story--though I've heard the story before, seen movies, etc.--is so great it's fantastic.

I'm 31, so I'm about the same age .. I've heard of the book before, but didn't know much about it, and haven't read it until this year. It truly blew me away, almost from first page. It will be one of the very few books that I re-read.

"Quiet" http://www.thepowerofintroverts.com/about-the-book/

I make note of the books I read in 1-2 sittings because I can't put them down. This year these were:

    Five Billion Years of Solitude - Lee Billings
    Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
    Grand Ambition: An Extraordinary Yacht, the People Who Built It, and the Millionaire Who Can't Really Afford It - G. Bruce Knecht

1. The Ocean at the End Of The Lane - Neil Gaiman

2. Ancillary Justice - Ann Leckie

3. The January Dancer/Up Jim River/In The Lion's Mouth/On The Razor's Edge - Michael Flynn

4. Ghost Spin - Chris Moriarity

"The power of habit" http://charlesduhigg.com/the-power-of-habit

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Abundance by Peter H. Diamandis

Power of Habit - Charles Duhigg

Lean Analytics - Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz

Serve to win - Novak Djokovic

Honorable mention: Sell More Software - Patrick Mckenzie

For me, it's a tie between Daemon by Daniel Suarez and The Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell.

Ender's Game, for the 8th time or so, which I wanted to re-read again before watching the movie

Did you like the movie?

I had to read Linear Algebra by Hoffman and Kunze for a class. It was really applicable and useful.

One of these:

Robert Bellah - Religion in Human Evolution

Frank Kogan - Real Punks Don't Wear Black

Jerry McGill - Dear Marcus

Mark Kurlansky - The Big Oyster

CODE by Charles Petzold

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

For Whom the Bell Tolls

I've been on a Hemingway kick ever since.

100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

Think & Grow Rich

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

1984 by George Orwell

A book I actually finished? I'd say One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com by Richard Brandt. It's not the whole story though. Bezos is portrayed in a favorable light throughout.

Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information.

There's a great collection of essays in The Philosohy of Law (edited by Richard Dworkin), which gives a characterization of legal philosophy/thought in Western Analytic tradition, and Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Murray Bookchin), a sort of historical analysis on how the post-structuralists' thought played subnarrative to the orthogonal political philosophy of that tradition.

I tend to read longform articles. Thanks, news!

- The Hero's Journey

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