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Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

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101–110 of 156 posts

Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#101
post #87

Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity- David Bessis https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/200128457-mathematica?ac... Excellent book on mathematical thinking in the true sense - what needs to happen in the mind's eye to really grapple with abstract mathematics. Definitely a eye (mind?) opener for someone who has some graduate level math education but couldn't gel with the crazier stuff. Came across the…

It's on my list, really looking forward to reading it.

I actually ran into it a few weeks before that article, then again when the article came out.

Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#102
Highlights so far this year are:

- Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesch -- really phenomenal pacing and psychological terror in a sci-fi action novel.

- The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach -- good portrait of different strains of American Judaism in a book structured around a quest

- Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters -- great characters and structured revelation. This was sitting unread on my shelf for years because I thought it would be preachy, but it wasn't.

- The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman -- tales from Camelot in the aftermath of Arthur's defeat at Camlann. Excellent mixing of round table legends from different points in history.

Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking for myself, is there any trick or strategy to achieve reading 100 books per year, are you retired, or part-time employee. Is hard to imagine a full-time employee to read that many books in one single year?

I’m 42 with a full-time job and am at 103 books read so far this year. The tricks are to put a lot of time in it and always have a surplus of interesting books on hand. I spend around $2k a year on Kindle books (if I talk to someone and they mention a book they like, I’ll usually just buy it) and make reading a daily habit. I read on average an hour a day on weekdays and two or more hours on weekends. Reading is one…

Out of curiosity, do you also listen to audiobooks?

And dammit, I thought I read a lot, and here you are beating me.. I'm only at 101 this year... :)

Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#104

Seeing this reminds me of something I'm not proud of. I've done effectively no reading this year. At least not by my normal standards. I generally read between 30-50 books a year (mix of fiction and non-fiction). But this year I knew my focus was going to be more on research, reading papers, writing code, etc. so I set my reading goal lower than normal (I usually set it to like 75, knowing that that's a bit aspiratio…

You know, I misread your opening sentence at first and thought you said you are proud of this.

And I gotta say, I've considered a few times lowering my "target" books read per year, to make more time for studying, reading articles, etc. And I totally thought that's what you were doing since you mentioned reading papers, research etc. And I was super proud on your behalf for doing that.

So anyway, just popping in to say that maybe there's a bright side to lowering your goal.

Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#105
post #91

A couple of my favorites from this year, I read a lot (50 to 100 a year) Fiction: - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver - Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky - A Man with One of Those Faces by Caimh Mcdonnell - Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine - Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton - Where the Body Was by Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips Nonfiction: - E…

I also read A Tale of Love and Darkness this year, it was great.

And A Desolation Called Peace, or really that series, is one of my favorite SF reads of the last 10 years, I've recommended it often.

Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#106
Origin - A genetic history of the Americas by Jennifer Raff. Recent evidence of how humans came to the Americas; it's a significantly different story than our conventional wisdom account.

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches by Marvin Harris. How cultural norms establish collective behavior.

The Extermination of the American Bison. Written in the late 1800s as the tragedy was unfolding. Lots on great detail on how and why we decimated a keystone species in a matter of a few decades.

Plato's Revenge by William Ophuls. A concise manifesto on societal change. Lays out a vision for a new post-growth, post-oil, ecological consciousness that incorporates modern science, religion and philosophy.

Four Thousand Weeks. Far from a self-help time-management book, this is more a philosophy book on human's relationship with time. Delightful read.

Breath by James Nestor. Modern humans are breathing incorrectly due to factors of modern life. An exploration of the science and art of breathing properly.

Bernoulli's Fallacy by Aubrey Clayton. In the statistical wars, this book takes a strong stance: Bayesian is unequivocally better. He exploses the racist/colonial history of frequentist statistics, as well as the fundamental flaws in their math. Posits that mis-applied frequentist methods are to blame for the reproducibility crisis in science.

How the World Really Works by Vaclav Smil. A no-nonsense, factual account of the systems that keep our modern globalized society running.

Elements of Clojure by Zach Tellman. A concise, high-level philosophy about how we build and compose abstractions. One of those books where every sentence is gold. My only wish that the book wasn't tied to Clojure (most of the book is applicable to any language, despite the title).

Tidy First? by Kent Beck. How and when to make structural changes (refactoring, architecture, paying down tech debt) vs behavioral changes (new features, bug fixes). You need both, and you can use economic theory as a guide for when to invest in one or the other. But you need to treat them differently.

Numerical Linear Algebra for Programmers by Dragan Djuric. A code-centric introduction to common linear algrebra routines, Using Clojure and the neaderthal library - a high-level API for fast math optimized for CPU and GPU hardware.

Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#107
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m 42 with a full-time job and am at 103 books read so far this year. The tricks are to put a lot of time in it and always have a surplus of interesting books on hand. I spend around $2k a year on Kindle books (if I talk to someone and they mention a book they like, I’ll usually just buy it) and make reading a daily habit. I read on average an hour a day on weekdays and two or more hours on weekends. Reading is one…

Out of curiosity, do you also listen to audiobooks? And dammit, I thought I read a lot, and here you are beating me.. I'm only at 101 this year... :)

Audiobooks very rarely. Only if I’ve heard the “performance” of it is good. The last couple I remember were Great Gatsby read by Jake Gyllenhaal and Devolution read by Judy Greer. I live in the Pacific Northwest and listened to that one while trail running.

I do really like podcasts though and am at 360 hours listened this year, almost exclusively while running, walking, or doing chores around the apartment.

Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#109
Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) by Umberto Eco. A novel about how easy it is to build meaning around the meaningless.

The Last of the Wine (1956) by Mary Renault. Athens on its way to losing the war with Sparta. You know what’s coming for Athens, but the characters do not. The atrocity at Melos echoes through the whole book.

Strong recommendation for both; they feel very much of the present, age notwithstanding.

Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#110
post #90
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of this book is against trans people being able to exist in this world. No thanks tbh. This isn’t identity politics. It’s just live and let live.

No he isn't, here's a recent tweet of his that explains his position: "This also highlights the huge difference between the "LGB" and the "T''. The gay rights movement just asked society to leave them alone and let them get married. No impositions on my life. The trans movement demands that I adopt their new dialect (or I'm a bigot) and allow males to play in girls sports (or I'm a bigot). Big impositions." https://x…

This is extremely similar what anti LGB people were also saying in how they were contrasting it to the civil rights movement.

Also similar to what the anti-civil rights movement were saying when contrasting it to the end of slavery.

Here, let me show it:

"This also highlights the huge difference between the "Abolitionist Movement" and "Civil Rights". The abolitionist movement just asked society to leave them alone. No impositions on my life. The "civil Rights" movement demands that I accept they can share spaces with me (or I'm a bigot) and allow blacks to have access to the same systems in society (or I'm a bigot)."

The only thing that has changed between these is that once these movements get set in stone, and legislation catches up - reactionary people such as Coleman stop attacking and othering it. This is why history is important. You get to see these patterns and realize its just the same shit happening all over again.

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