Ask YC: favorite books | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: favorite books

43 pointscellis80 comments

with the exception of programming/technical books, what are your faves?

Mine: lotr,ugly americans,the new new thing....

"Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn

This philosophy of science masterpiece illustrates how a community evolves its mental model or paradigm - from a long-accepted world view, to a crisis caused by evidence that contradicts the prevailing model, and then at last to an acceptance of a new paradigm.

http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/Kuhn.html

My other favorite bit is how the old dying dinosaurs fight the on-coming revolution.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Richard Feynman)

What do you care what other people think? (Richard Feynman)

- Godel Esher Bach

- The Development of Mathematics, by E. T. Bell

not that i understand mathematics that well, but this book gave me many ideas of how an abstract/complex thing like mathematics can evolve through history, i found that exciting

- when i was a teenager i liked a couple of books by Martin Gardner

I like how GEB ties together everything with 'strange loops'.

The concept of how small pieces of something can form into something else entirely, is fascinating. How does a bunch of your cells form into you? How do a bunch of notes from a song form something so grand? How does a collection of 'inanimate' material form something animate?

Yes that kind of mental-masturbation excites me too ;)

from reading other posts (comments) I've remembered another good book, sort of on the same flavor as the "biological" parts in GEB:

-"Investigations", by Stuart Kauffman

exciting lecture too

Ender Series - Orson Scott Card

Rama Series - Arthur C Clarke

Firestar Series - Michael Flynn

1984 - George Orwell

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Some guys at MIT (I know it's technical, but couldn't resist, it's just too good)

Anything by Bret Easton Ellis, Greg Bear, Stephen Baxter, and the above mentioned authors.

Unfortunately I can't read fiction too much, I feel like what I read must directly help me with what I do, so I feel a lot better reading either technical stuff or business related (I love business). Since we are excluding technical, most of the following are business related, or helps you in dealing with people and solving problems)

Netscape Time - Jim Clark (very educational for those interested in startups, good piece of Internet history, interesting insights to the culture of the first Internet companies)

How To Win Friends And Influence People - Dale Carnegie (found it through YC recommendations, THANK YOU. one of the best educational books I have ever read, it will teach you how to make friends, be a good leader, get along at home, encourage people, make them follow you and so much more...)

Founders at Work - Jessica Livingston (I found it relevant to what I am doing, good lessons, and interesting insights)

Getting to Yes - Roger Fisher, William L. Ury (teaches you how to negotiate and how to get the best out of each situation for yourself and the other part, will be useful both at work and personal life, a bit dry)

Winning - Jack Welch (great advices on leadership, might be more useful to someone that is running a big company)

Leadership Is an Art - Max Depree (great leadership advices, it will give you the right mindset of how to be a great leader)

-----------

Animal Farm (George Orwell), Alchemist (Paulo Coelho), Interpreting Your Dreams(Freud)

The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence by Josh Waitzkin (the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher was about him): talks about the higher stages of mastery. Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Art-Learning-Journey-Pursuit-Excellenc...

- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP)

- Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (PAIP)

- Godel Escher Bach (GEB)

- All books from Gibson, Asimov, Sterlig, Huxley and Douglas Adams

Why GEB? I read the original Godel paper and I studied on the subject, and I read a lot of related material... so I found GEB to be rather boring when talking about Godel (and pretty repetitive), and when not talking about it, I found it to be almost unscientific: unfocused, always going into unproved conjectures (or shallow theorems), and very little times explaining about stablished and scientific work that has proven to be useful.

So I could never understand this... why all the hype with GEB? What's the big thing with it?

GEB is not a scientific paper ... if you don't realize this, then there is no point in continuing with this answer

I know it's not a paper, but I'm not sure it's a science divulgation book either. Sometimes I read it and I found it fun (as a sophisticated book-game of science), but most of the times it makes me nervous, for the reasons I pointed above, and because I feel it's taken as a book a lot more serious than what at least I feel it is.

Maybe it's a mistake in my appreciation of the book, but I can't help it. What do you think about it?

i think it's a great book, not a "serious" book, whatever that means

as i mention in another comment, I'm willing to call it mental-masturbation, in the sense of exciting one's mind (the nerdy mind anyway), so in a way I'm probably not too far from your vision of the book

i also think this kind of excitement is the basic motivation of the nerdy minded persons, and any text/experience that can get you in that state is something to appreciate.

lastly it exposes the reader to many topics, the reader may get interested in some of those topics and make some further investigations on its own, and at least in that sense it is a science divulgation book (it's more important for science divulgation to get you interested in the topics that to give you some raw facts)

Ok, thank you, next time I'll approach it from that perspective.

The Evolution of Cooperation - Robert Axelrod

Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clark

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

The Informant - Kurt Eichenwald

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte

Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis

Watership Down. It is surprisingly epic and immersing for a book about rabbits traveling through the English countryside.

The animated film is a classic :-)

Oh, no. I should never have read that, now I've got the damn Art Garfunkel theme song stuck in my head (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_Eyes_%28Art_Garfunkel_so...).

Curse be upon you :-)

(I'm going to ignore the prohibition on "programming/technical books".)

- GEB

- SICP

- anything by Paul Auster or Hermann Hesse

- most Haruki Murakami, especially "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle"

- Joan Didion, "Where I Was From"

- Richard P. Gabriel, "Patterns of Software"

- Durbin, Eddy, Krogh, and Mitchison, "Biological Sequence Analysis"

- Italo Calvino, "if on a winter's night a traveller"

Godel, Escher, Bach (An Eternal Golden Braid) by Douglas Hofstadter. Also, The Mind's I (more philosophical) edited by the same guy.

I'm analytical to a fault, but Neil Gaiman's novels genuinely make me believe in magic at some level. I love that.

The Bible,

Wild at Heart,

How to Win Friends and Influence People,

Songs for Martha <-- I have an autographed copy,

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,

Rainbow Six (and most other Clancy books)

V. by Thomas Pynchon

The Life of Pi by Yann Martel

the McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (Not a book per se, but very enjoyable)

Shakespeare (Everything, I'm surprised he's only been mentioned once so far)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

Shogun by James Clavell

Then, of course, the regular hodgepodge of Card, Asimov, Adams, Gaiman, Pratchet, Stephenson, Feynman, and that LOTR guy, Tolkey or sommat. (In all seriousness, though, all of these authors are phenomenal, if well-known for being such)

Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Material which kicks off with the Golden Compass is a great read.

Sherlock Holmes stories are fun.

The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick is also a good read.

Pierre

No Contest / Punished by Rewards (Alfie Kohn)

The Underground History of American Education (John Taylor Gatto)

It is hard to say what my favorite book is. But the book that impacted my life most was Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Read it.

My favorite authors and playwrights are (in no meaningful order) Michael Lewis, Carl Sagan, Siddhartha Gautama, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, Ayn Rand, Patrick Marber, Arthur Miller, and Shakespeare.

A few sort of random selections from my bookshelf (in no particular order):

 * GEB:EGB - Hofstader
 * The Pragmatic Programmer - Hunt / Thomas
 * Peopleware - DeMarco / Lister
 * The Mythical Man Month - Brooks
 * Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming - Norvig
 * Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind - Miyazaki

Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep

http://books.google.com/books?id=UGAKB3r0sZQC&dq=Vernor+...

I'm sure his other books are good, too, but this is the only one I've read. I've never seen anyone else able to extrapolate the consequences of entire races advancing past the Singularity and how mortals manage to get by in such a galaxy (if you're able to accept faster-than-light travel as a premise, but he has a very interesting take on even that). A ton of innovative sci-fi ideas in one novel.

Read his other stuff, it is equally good!

Indeed. I think his best book is A deepness in the sky.

All of William Gibson and all of Neal Stephenson (especially Cryptonomicon and Baroque cycle series)

Same, and with special emphasis on The Diamond Age.

Also Douglas Adams, Vernor Vinge, Richard K. Morgan, and all kinds of other stuff. I like to read almost as much as I like to program.

Best nonfiction I have read in a while: "Leaving Microsoft To Change The World" by John Wood. A Microsoft VP leaves to pursue his dream of changing the world with books, and ends up founding Room to Read (http://www.roomtoread.org/ .) Highly recommended.

Hmmm. Diamond Age didn't do it for me for some reason. I liked it but not nearly as much as Cryptonomicon. But I have had several people tell me the same thing that you did wrt DA, so it just must be me.

Snow Crash (Neil Stephenson)

The Bible (Various chaps)

Which books/chapters? I love Psalms and Philippians, but I really love the beauty of how it all fits together.

(Not trying to belittle, just curious)

John and Genesis.

Genesis is a necessary read for anyone, regardless of religious affiliation.

Many.

In short:

All books written by Witold Gombrowicz (Diary if have to pick one),

All books written by Slavoj Zizek (Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates if have to pick one)

Recently read and significant:

The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper,

Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders, Jack Schwager

Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)

House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

got to love Hitchhikers, I also enjoyed Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by adams too.

House of Leaves is so good! I have yet to come up with a good description of what it's about, but I always try when I tell people about it.

I usually describe it as a story about a guy who finds a manuscript. The manuscript is a collection of essays that detail a documentary that was made about a house that randomly changes rooms.

So at the center of the novel, you have this really creepy story. But there are all the layers above that storyline that you have to read to get there. There's the storyline concerning the people who make the documentary. Then there's the storyline of the guy who wrote the manuscript ABOUT the documentary. Then you have the storyline of the guy who's reading the documentary.

Then there's you. You're reading about a guy who is in turn reading a manuscript about a documentary which was made about a house. It was so well done that at the end, I found myself not really sure what the hell I was reading anymore.

I'm still not sure what the book is, but it's certainly a stroke of genius.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience

William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying & The Sound and the Fury

Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Peter Medawar's The Art of the Soluable

Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols

Bloom County Babylon

Fiction:

- The Time Machine (still holds up very well, and seems strangely eerie and prescient in places)... (H. G. Wells)

- Dune (Frank Herbert)

- The Hobbit (and LotR) (Tolkien)

- Neuromancer (William Gibson)

- Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties (I picked up Idoru first, so I haven't yet read Virtual Light) (also Gibson)

- The Difference Engine (Gibson, Sterling)

- Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)

- Cryptonomicon (" ")

- Circuit of Heaven, End of Days (Dennis Danvers)

- All of the "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" stories and novels. (Fritz Leiber)

- The Earthsea trilogy (Ursula K. LeGuin)

- 'salem's Lot (Stephen King)

- Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)

- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain)

- the Coldfire trilogy (C. S. Friedman)

- various Cory Doctorow short stories

- Kamikaze L'Amour (Richard Kadrey)

- Lightpaths (Howard V. Hendrix)

- A Canticle For Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller, Jr.)

- Moonwar, Venus (Ben Bova)

- the Stainless Steel Rat series (Harry Harrison)

- Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)

- Ringworld (Larry Niven)

- Cthon (Piers Anthony) -- Trippiness level approaching Philip Jose Farmer ;-)

- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (Douglas Adams)

- The Black Company (Glen Cook)

- there's one particularly good post-cyberpunk series that takes place in a world in which Canada emerged as a major world power, but for the life of me I can't rememeber the title.

- the 1632 series (Eric Flint)... see also S. M. Stirling's Nantucket series ("Island in the Sea of Time", et al.), and H. Beam Piper's novel Kalvan of Otherwhen

Non-fiction:

- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume)

- the surviving words and works of Epicurus, and Diogenes the Cynic

- Freakonomics (Levitt, Dubner)

- The Gay Science (Nietzsche)

- The Jefferson Bible (Christ, Jefferson (ed.))

- The Devil's Dictionary (Bierce)

- Brain Droppings (George Carlin)

- anything by P. J. O'Rourke

- anything by Dave Barry

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect -- Read it free online! http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html

1984

The Silmarillion

The Hero With A Thousand Faces

Dune

Walden (about half the chapters anyway)

The Bible

Autobiography of Ben Franklin

Mastering the Winds of Change (solid self-improvement book)

For anyone looking for more ideas, there's a related thread here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=56618

- use of weapons (ian m banks)

- surely you are joking mr feynman (rpf)

- origin of order (stuart kauffman)

- slaughter house five (kurt vonnegut)

- goedel escher bach (douglas hofstadter)

- theta-magical memas errr metamagical themas (dogulas hofsta)

For sheer enjoyment (measured in how many times I've re-read them, at least at various times in my life): Heinlein's _The Door into Summer_. Connie Willis' _Bellwether_ (these can be funny, right?). Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_ (more in my youth than today, but I can probably still recite passages by heart).

Non-fiction: Gerry Weinberg's _Secrets of Consulting_. Lynn Truss' _Eats Shoots & Leaves_.

- Brave New World

- Night

- Hitchhiker's Guide series

- Dark Tower series (Mostly just the first 4, though)

- Eats, Shoots & Leaves

- Just about any George Carlin or Patrick F. McManus books

- Wheel of Time Series

- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)

I, Claudius (Robert Graves)

The First Circle (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

LOTR

Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse)

The Odyssey (Homer)

The Dilbert Principle (Scott Adams) -- Alright, not literature! But come on, it's Dilbert :)

You reminded me of a great little book published a long time ago which is still very relevant: "The Ugly American"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_American). A recent really good read was Le Carre's "The Mission Song"

Rebel Without a Crew (Robert Rodriguez), The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho), Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

This Perfect Day by Ira Levin (out of print, yet much more worthwhile in my opinion than other dystopic novels) Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond The Books of the Fey by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer The Deathgate Cycle by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis

1984 (George Orwell)

Fountains of Paradise (Arthur C Clarke, Space Elevator SciFi)

Dune Series (Herbert)

Ender Series (Orson Scott Card)

2001 Series (Arthur C Clarke)

Cradle to cradle, by William McDonough & Michael Braungart

http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm

About environmental design of, well, everything. Might fall into the "technical" category, though.

I enjoyed The Undercover Economist. I especially recommend it if you liked Freakonomics.

The Design of Everyday Things

This is a great book. It delves into the psychology of how we think about and use the built world and explains why some things are simply hard to use as compared to other, better designed things.

Against the Odds (James Dyson)

- What the Dormouse Said, John Markoff

- Alongside Night, J Neil Schulman,

- Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson

- Anything by Doug Rushkoff, Get Back in the Box is a good one for business/entrepreneurship

- The Dubliners, James Joyce

- The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst

The Ego and its Own, by Max Stirner. The Open Society and its Enemies, by Karl Popper. The Illuminatus! trilogy.

Robin Hobb books (with special mention of the farseer trilogy), Neal Stephenson, Alan Moore, Terry Pratchett.

Are your lights on - Jerry Weinberg The blind watchmaker - Richard Dawkins

Some more SF/Fantasy yarns:

- Hyperion by Dan Simmons - 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear and all the other Zamonien books (only know german version) - Pollen by Jeff Noon - Otherland by Tad Williams - Ubik by PK Dick

I'll go with anything written by Vonnegut. Feynman books too.

LOTR

Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)

Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)

Devil in the White City (Erik Larson)

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy

Godel Escher Bach - non fiction

The Tomorrow File - fiction. Written in the 1970s as the author's only foray into science fiction. Seriously, it's that good.

How about... How the mind works (Pinker) Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance (Pirsig) Sophie's World (Gaarder)

Confessions of an Economic Hitman, The Wealth of Nations, The Great Gatsby, See No Evil, Hannibal

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (bit of a beast, but well worth it).

1984 (George Orwell)

The Four Hour Work Week (Tim Ferriss)

Getting Things Done (David Allen)

Deception Point (Dan Brown)

Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)

House Of Leaves (Mark Danielewski)

Sherlock Holmes

Definitely among my favorites, too.

Phenomenology of Spirit - G.W.F. Hegel

The "Captain Underpants" series.

Blink

Reply on news.ycombinator.com