Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?

Post by gpanders » Sat, Dec 28, 2019, 11:02 PM UTC

surfsvammel wrote: post #61

- Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style - Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think - The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake - Sherlock Holmes: The definitive collection

Post by jaxOLantern » Sat, Dec 28, 2019, 11:03 PM UTC

Rerarom wrote: post #114

jaxOLantern wrote: post #113

Zen mind beginner’s mind: Highly recommended to anyone interested in meditation. Helped me understand the non-goal aspect of the practice. Gravity’s rainbow: Not the easiest read but immensely rewarding. For better or worse some of Pynchon’s vivid descriptions are burned into my soul. Crime and punishment: I’m not into literature but this one is worth it. A great dive into human psychology. Deliverance: intense story…

Also no self help book can tell you what your goals should be. The best of them say this outright.

Post by gpanders » Sat, Dec 28, 2019, 11:09 PM UTC

raamdev wrote: post #64

Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina, because it made me a better father; Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, because it taught me of the importance of something that I’d occasionally dismiss as a nuisance; Pain Free and Pain Free at Your PC by Pete Egoscue, because it completely changed the way I understood posture, pain, and how repetition influences my body; and Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, because it…

Post by qntmfred » Sat, Dec 28, 2019, 11:10 PM UTC

Post by evgen » Sat, Dec 28, 2019, 11:12 PM UTC

Rerarom wrote: post #112

mindcrime wrote: post #110

I'd have to go back through my Goodreads list to see exactly which books that I read which fell into this decade versus another. But of the stuff that I've ready pretty recently, the couple that jump to mind immediately are: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter Thinking: Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman The Education of Millionaires: Everything You Won't Learn in College About How to Be…

I also reread Foundation recently and realized an underlooked aspect of it: beyond the psychohistory and the mentalics, it is perhaps the best look at how the future of nuclear tech was perceived by the sci-fi mainstream before Hiroshima.