Ask HN: Best books you read in 2013 | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best books you read in 2013

11 pointsdudurocha15 comments

My favorites were Decisive, by the Heath brothers, Little brother, by Cory Doctorow and I listened to the Graveyardbook, by Neil Gaiman.

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Non-fiction:

On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkins

How To Create A Mind - Ray Kurzweil

The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker

The Origin of Wealth - Eric Beinhocker

The Signal and the Noise - Nate Silver

The Money Culture - Michael Lewis

Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations - David Warsh

Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing - John E. Kelly III and Steve Hamm

The Idea Factory - Jon Gertner

Winning The Knowledge Transfer Race - Michael J. English and William H. Baker

Wellsprings of Knowledge - Dorothy Leonard-Barton

If Only We Knew What We Know - Carla O'dell and C. Jackson Grayson

Started, but haven't finished yet:

The Discipline of Market Leaders - Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema

Marketing Warfare - Jack Trout and Al Ries

Naked Statistics - Charles Wheelan

Wiki Management - Rod Collins

Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal - Ayn Rand

Fiction:

NOS4A2 - Joe Hill

The first four books in the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman

Innocence - Dean Koontz

Deeply Odd - Dean Koontz

Doctor Sleep - Stephen King

The Black List - Brad Thor

Most of The New Lovecraft Circle - an anthology of Lovecraft mythos stories by contemporary writers

And started re-reading Asimov's Foundation last night. I've read the original trilogy before, but this time I intend to read all seven books. But I'm starting with Foundation and going to the end, before going back to the prequels.

How would you compare 'On Intelligence' with 'How to Create a Mind'?

Good question. I felt like there was some significant overlap between the two, and I think that's borne out by commentary from other people who have read both. I think a few people have even accused Kurzweil of borrowing a little too freely from Hawkins' HTM idea. But, to my mind, they complement each other well. Between the two, you get a strong dose of case for thinking of the human mind's primary algorithm being some form of pattern-matching.

For anybody who is interested in AI topics, and who hasn't read either or both of those, I'd really recommend reading both.

'Graph Databases' by Ian Robinson, Jim Webber, and Emil Eifrem

'Hackers and Painters' by Paul Graham

'Virtual Reality' by Howard Rheingold

'Stack Computers: The New Wave' by Philip Koopman

'Thinking Forth' by Leo Brodie

'WIMP Programming for All on Acorn RISC Computers' by Lee Calcraft and Alan Wrigley

'Frank Herbert' by Timothy O'Reilly

'Modern Painters: volume 1' by John Ruskin

'Aratra Pentelici' by John Ruskin

'The Art and Craft of Drawing' by Vernon Blake

'The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci' by Dmitri Merezhkovsky ('romance' in the old sense of 'biographical novel')

'Prehistoric Avebury' by Aubrey Burl

'A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Walter M. Miller

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut 1984 by George Orwell To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie My Antonia by Willa Cather (1918) On the Road by Jack Kerouac The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson Mccullers The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934) Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf Ulysses by James Joyce

you read all this in 2013? I call bullshit.

Why? 20 books, 500 pages each on average, that's 10k pages. Divide by 300 days, that's about 30 pages a day. Certainly doable for fiction.

its not the question of "is it possible?", its just that these are always listed amongst the 'top 100 books of all time' and each needs more than just 'reading time' you cannot read Ulysses and 1984 the same month, physically you can, but that would be useless.

Why would it be useless? Do you imply that top 100 books are harder to read?

top 100 books deserve more time.

Actually, the better the book is, the faster I read it.

Why? One of the years I bothered keeping track[1], I read a hair over 50 novels (I think the actual number was 51 or 52), and a handful of non-fiction books I didn't bother counting. And one of those was Moby Dick which isn't exactly a fast read.

For somebody who likes to read and has time to read, that list doesn't seem outlandish to me at all. shrug

[1]: http://www.jroller.com/mindcrime/entry/fictionlist

Non-tech books, I read and liked in 2013:

Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini

$100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau

Anything Your Want by Derek Sivers

The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar

Are You a Stock or a Bond? by Moshe Milevsky

The Most Important Thing by Howard Marks

Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In no particular order:

The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati

True Grit, Charles Portis

Thoughts, Marcus Aurelius

Its not all about me, Robin Dreeke

The unwinding, George Packer

Lives of the Laureates, William Breit

AntiFragile, Nassum Taleb

Loup Garous, which the internet tells me is by Natsuhiko Kyogoku. The only dystopia I've read which was both legitimately scary and utterly plausible.

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