Ask HN: What are some of the best books you have read in 2022?

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton [1]. A haunting and disturbing account powerfully told and rendered. Beaton is well known for Hark! A Vagrant, but this is her best work to date.

The Kalevala [2]. I am familiar with the Eddas, the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, but the Finnish national epos was beautiful and refreshingly different. While I'm sure the English translation pales next to the original, it was nevertheless quite lyrical.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59069071-ducks

[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/elias-lonnrot/the-kalevala...

I went on a kick of reading "competency porn" (think Project Hail Mary/The Martian but not necessarily solving engineering problems). On top of PHM, I read Sixteen Ways to Defend A Walled City (great dark satire despite the shit ending) and The Goblin Emperor (more on the social engineering side of things, so better characterization than something like The Martian)

Anthony Trollope - The Warden. Trollope presents us, realistically and convincingly, a decisive figure of modernity: the sincere idealist who, in the pursuit of illusory abstractions, (un)consciously destroys people, undermines communities with tradition and worsens the situation even for those whom he tries to help.

Of the books I've read this year, the fiction ones that stand out to me would be:

1. The entire Sprawl Trilogy by Gibson, and the entire Bridge Trilogy, also by Gibson. The former I'd read before (multiple times) while the latter I had not read all the way through until now. Neuromancer I've read probably 7 or 8 times total in my life by now. I'm not as crazy about Gibson's later stuff, but the Sprawl and Bridge books are great.

2. The rest of the HHGTTG "trilogy" besides the first book. I'd read the first book a couple of years ago but never got around to reading the rest until this year. Note that when I say "the rest" I'm excluding that one book that was written by another author after Douglas Adams' passing. I may still read it one day, but I'm not in any hurry to do so.

In terms of non-fiction:

Real-World Reasoning: Toward Scalable, Uncertain Spatiotemporal, Contextual and Causal Inference by Ben Goertzel, Nil Geisweiller, and Lucio Coelho is the stand-out of the lot. How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker and How Can the Human Mind Occur in the Physical Universe? by John R Anderson are also worthy of a mention.

Why we are polarized by Ezra Klein