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Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023

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Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023

#101

Post by specialist »

themodelplumber wrote: post #3

I realized I can't really recommend books to audiences much anymore, because I don't read those types of audience-books as much as I used to. But still, here are some I probably bought for $0.99 and enjoyed: Lost Restaurants of Seattle This Outcast Generation by Taijun Takeda The Royal Navy Lynx: An Operational History A Doctor's War by Aidan MacCarthy Sniping in France by Hesketh-Prichard The Art of Whittling by Fau…

> Lost Restaurants of Seattle

Nice.

For some more local flavor, you might also enjoy Seattle Justice (eg SPD started as a protection racket) and Woodland for the "stone soup" origins of a local institution.

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/seattle-justice-the-rise-and-f...

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/woodland-the-story-of-the-anim...

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023

#102

Post by Pietertje »

tathagatadg wrote: post #77
Pietertje wrote: post #2

This year I've put myself to the challenge to read at least one book per week which I primarily could complete by reading in the middle of the night while holding our sleeping baby in my arms. It has been an interesting challenge which gave me a lot of fulfilment and has certainly changed my mind on how I view the world. This comment became quite a long read, apologies for that. Books I highly recommend: Churchill by…

Excellent list - Inspired and intrigued - thanks for sharing the list. I hardly get to do sit down and read, and became heavily reliant on airpod+audible after the baby - do you want to share a little more on your reading habit? Like did you get everything on kindle or paperbooks etc. Thanks again ...

I love the feeling of an actual book in my hands. So during the daytime I read paperbooks. During the evenings/nights I read on my ereader as this requires less light so i dont wake up my spouse or the baby. I make sure I have both so I can read whatever I like.

Something which I discovered this year is reading multiple books in parallel. And start reading the book which you feel like reading, not the book which you think you should read. That way I always had the mindset to enjoy a particular book.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023

#103

Post by pivo »

wazoox wrote: post #41

* The End of the World is just the Beginning, by Peter Zeihan How the globalisation is coming to an end, how the US Navy made Chinese power possible, how the 21st Century will be American after all, and many other counter-intuitive things. A must read IMO. * Atlas of AI, by Kate Crawford Politics of AI: power, exploitation, colonialism, global surveillance and control... Fascinating. Another must read.

I'm in the middle of the Zeihan book right now. Even if his prediction about globalization's end turns out to be wrong (not that I don't think it's possible), the history and worldview in this book has been really enlightening for me.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023

#104

Post by quesera »

yawz wrote: post #37
yawz wrote: post #31

My best nonfiction read was The 1619 Project. It's a heavy read, but I highly recommend it. The runner up would be Christian Livermore's We Are Not OK. Best fiction read was Tim Winton's Breath or (there's probably some recency bias at play here) Sebastian de Castel's Traitor's Blade. I also read a few comic books. I love the East of West series (at least the first three books).

Wow! Immediately downvoted, on the topic of books?!? I wonder which one triggered such a negative reaction.

Many people consider The 1619 Project to be politically-biased fiction.

I have no opinion myself (haven't read the book, don't know much beyond the official grade school history curriculum), but some of the criticisms come from superficially reasonable people.

If you take the book content to be meaningful, you should at least survey the criticisms. Of course you'll want to ignore the virulently anti brigade, which is numerous, very loud, and insufferably stupid.

Did not downvote. I think this is what the downvoters meant. As a reader, you deserve an explanation, IMO.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023

#105

Post by cableshaft »

rcarr wrote: post #79
cableshaft wrote: post #71

Last year was a terrible year for me for reading. I think I only completed one book, and that's Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. The book is full of describing some different fictional city (or is it? one passage suggests maybe that's not the case), often with a different theme or flavor of strangeness that might be a metaphor for something in our lives. Every so often it changes it up by having Marco Polo (who is…

I might be wrong but I think I remember reading that the book is meant to be a love letter to the Italian city Venice and that all the “cities” are actually just describing Venice from different perspectives. Edit: Just had a quick look at the Wikipedia page. > In one key exchange in the middle of the book, Kublai prods Polo to tell him of the one city he has never mentioned directly—his hometown. Polo's response: "E…

Yeah, I was trying not to spoil that, but that's what I meant when I said "(or is it? one passage suggests maybe that's not the case)".

That was interesting to think about when I got to that point, but wasn't enough for me.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023

#106

Post by rcarr »

kinghtown wrote: post #57

2666 by Roberto Bolano Yeah, believe the hype. Definitely the most important novel of this century. The story revolves around the deaths of over 500 women and children in a small border town in Mexico. Absolutely devastating read, It feels like most novels are rather silly in comparison (2666 even pokes fun at literature in general for ignoring the atrocities in Mexico.) 5 stars.

> Definitely the most important novel of this century.

There is no such thing as “the most important novel of this century”. “Importance” is subjective based on the values of the beholder.

It’s an especially ludicrous claim if by “this century” we are to assume you mean 2000 - 2100 considering we are not even a quarter of the way through it.

> It feels like most novels are rather silly in comparison (2666 even pokes fun at literature in general for ignoring the atrocities in Mexico.

I for one am glad that J K Rowling chose not to mention the atrocities occurring in Mexico in the Harry Potter series as it has zero relevance to the plot, as it probably does in 99.99% of all novels written.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023

#107

Post by jshaqaw »

Two incredible general interest math books came out this year: The Big Bang of Numbers and The Joy or Abstraction. Both are brilliantly written and convey sophisticated math concepts for general intellectual development versus math specialists. The later book gave me a good foundation for some ideas in category theory I still hadn’t internalized on an intuitive level after reading more conventional academic works.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023

#108

Post by Scubabear68 »

I read Light from Uncommon Stars this week. It was a little uneven in spots, but overall it was very well written and an awesome fusion of many genres and topics (sci-fi, demons, violins, transgender teens) that sounds crazy but works.

The style is a bit of Terry Pratchett, a bit of Douglas Adams, a bit of Christopher Moore, with some very unique items thrown in.

Warning: the transgender portion is brutal on the negative aspects of being a transgender teen in America.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023

#109

Post by syntheweave »

I focused on copying sketches from books, versus reading, as a way of training up drawing skills. The one that occupied most of my drawing year was Morpho: Anatomy for Artists. Later on supplemented by Ken Hultgren: The Art of Animal Drawing. The thing about art books is that when studying off of them you extract quite a bit more than just glancing at the page, so one book lasts a very long while.

Morpho is pretty easy to recommend as a way of getting better at human figures; it has a lot of coverage, and while many of the drawings are a bit on the scribbly side, they're easy to follow and show lots of poses and perspectives. The Hultgren book, OTOH, is definitely a tough one to study from - lots of detailed ink work with hatch lines flung all over, shrunk down to cram them five to a page, and an uneven grabbag of topics(half of the book is horses, which are used to show animation, construction, various phases of sketching, and cartooning - nothing gets a very detailed anatomy treatment or a lot of structure). Working through it was a bit like reverse-engineering, but at the halfway point, I find the exercise worth the effort.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023

#110

Post by MH15 »

hikingsimulator wrote: post #17

One book stuck out to me this year: Blindsight by Peter Watts. What happens when humankind on the verge of post-scarcity suffers its first alien contact -- truly alien contact. A team of engineered humans is sent to meet them. What really stuck out to me is how the content of the book could be applied to a potential AGI -- an alien, intelligent entity that we can't really understand and still have to interact with. I…

Check out this short film some artists made based on Blindsight in collaboration with Watts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkR2hnXR0SM
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