1. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
2. Dragons of Eden - Carl Sagan
3. Idea Factory - Jon Gertner
4. Why I am an atheist - Bhagat Singh
Ask HN: Best books you read in 2017?
11–15 of 15 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in 2017?
#12Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin.
Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in 2017?
#131) The Stories of Ibis by Hiroshi Yamamoto (my almost-annual re-reading) 2) The Collapsing Empire - John Scalzi 3) The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood I have a feeling the book I am reading now - Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith might have been on this list if I had finished it (and might still be tomorrow).
If you read most of it in 2017 I say it still counts. Nice to see some fiction on here, these lists are almost always non fiction and make me feel uneducated because I read almost exclusively fiction
Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in 2017?
#14The Gray House by Mariam Petrosyan
It was magical for me.
Re: Ask HN: Best books you read in 2017?
#15In 2017, I discovered that books are becoming increasingly obsolete as a medium of sharing knowledge. I've found that more condensed and/or interactive forms are much more useful to me and enable me to learn at an increased pace.
I think this generally applies to self-help style books, where the majority of the book is fluff with very little useful content. Those books can definitely be condensed into short blogs posts. However blogs and random tutorials don't do technical topics justice. If I'm learning how to reverse engineer a piece of malware or how to create a blockchain application, textbooks are the best resource to guide me.
To be fair a vast amount of technical books have the same problems, going over the same things again and again.
A couple of years ago, here o HN, an author shared his experience about collaborating with a publishing house. Apparently the publishers have very specific requirements about the required number of pages and the author has to conform.