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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

#131
post #28

For the past three years, I’ve set the goal to read one more book than the goal I set the prior year. I started with one a month, so this year my goal was 14 books. Some of my favorites, in the order I read them: The Body Electric by Dr. Robert Becker and The Invisible Rainbow by Arthur Firstenberg - these books made me aware of the impact electricity may have on life - including us! Much of these two books would lik…

Graeber, as well as being a horrible human being wasn’t much cop as a scholar. Bullshit jobs was tested empirically and it’s bullshit[1]. If you’re going to read Debt at least do yourself a favour and read some negative reviews first so you can see where he tries to put one over on you. See critical reception on Wikipedia[2] or the seminar on Crooked Timber where the discussants do back flips trying to be kind but ca…

> Graeber, as well as being a horrible human being

Whenever I hear or see such descriptions, I start discounting the opinions of those who made them, because they're often hyperbolic. I'd put someone like Genghis Khan at the level of being a "horrible human being," not some random author, because it indeed is a very high insult to levy against someone. That, or the person is just engaging in semantic drift [0].

Anyway, why was he a "horrible human being?" I couldn't find any controversy regarding his views or actions that would classify him as "horrible," at least in my limited search.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change

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

#132
-Demon Haunted World A Candle In The Dark - Carl Sagan I enjoy his writing in general, but this one talks a lot about being a skeptic and critical thinking which is paraphrasing strongly.

-The Pillars Of The Earth - Ken Follett. Could not stop thinking about it when I wasn't reading it and was pretty bummed when it was over. Its about a cathedral being built in the 1100's. My most favorite book this year and probably ever.

-The Knowledge - Lewis Dartnell If all people were to suddenly disappear leaving the current world infrastructure still in place, how you could go about restarting civilization. Its more a manual than a story, but I enjoyed learning how so many different things work.

-Alas Babylon Pat Frank - A story about a family and some friends and how they survive in Florida after a nuclear attack on the US.

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

#133

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.

I am currently reading The Joy of Abstraction.

This is a fine book.

But what this book needed is a good editor. Most space of most chapters of the book is written like a preface.

This book also suffers from what many technical books suffers from- uneven assumption of background. While some easy, trivial part is explained with more space, more hand-holding, harder parts receive briefer, relatively unfriendlier treatment.

Despite these flaws, the book is great.

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

#134
post #59

2022 was a year full of change for me and I am not looking for change but more of a complement to my life as it is currently. In the process of reading: Parable of a Sower’s Daughter by Octavia Butler Read this year: The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St. John Mandel…

Your 'Read this year' list looks a lot like my 'Want to read next year' list. Any standouts from the lot?

These were all wonderful books to read.

My top three were:

1. Four Thousand Weeks

2. The Book of Form and Emptiness

3. The Three-Body Problem

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

#135
"Tuxedo Park" by Jennet Conant.

The book is the biography of Alfred Lee Loomis, a tycoon that played an important role in World War II and somehow did not received the deserved acknowledgement.

It is an interesting book for a technical audience, mainly for electronics engineers and physicist, because the main character was involved in lots of breakthroughs during his lifetime.

I wrote a full review here:

https://electroagenda.com/en/tuxedo-park-by-jennet-conant/

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

#136

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…

I haven't read the book, just some plot spoilers, so take this with a big grain of salt: it seems to be yet another book that flatters the reader by positing that humans are relatively more sentient than other spacefaring species. Where are the books that posit the opposite (which I'd think is actually much more likely) ?

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

#137

-Demon Haunted World A Candle In The Dark - Carl Sagan I enjoy his writing in general, but this one talks a lot about being a skeptic and critical thinking which is paraphrasing strongly. -The Pillars Of The Earth - Ken Follett. Could not stop thinking about it when I wasn't reading it and was pretty bummed when it was over. Its about a cathedral being built in the 1100's. My most favorite book this year and probably…

> The Pillars Of The Earth - Ken Follett

Same, one of my favourite books ever. The others in the series are not quite as good, but I think you will enjoy them.

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

#139
post #130
post #68

* Three Body Problem. I've heard of it many times, but never read it. Picked it up a month or two ago, read the whole thing in a few sessions, one of my favourite sci-fi books ever. Will read the next book in the series. * Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System that Keeps You Alive. Best pop-sci book I've read in a while. Strikes the right balance between including pertinent information without being overwhelmi…

I loved Three Body Problems as well. What are your other favorite sci-fi novels, and books in general? (Send some general fiction recs on my way if you feel like it.)

If you haven't read Ted Chiang's short stories yet, do so. His first collection (Stories of Your Life and Others) was my favourite, but his more recent one (Exhalation) was also very good (the title story, Exhalation, is gorgeous). Stories of your Life is what the movie Arrival was based on and (as ever) the story was better than the movie.

As far as sci-fi novels, I have pretty generic tastes for this crowd: Dune, The Dispossessed, The Martian. The Crying of Lot 49 is one of my favourite books. Not exactly sci-fi but close.

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

#140

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…

I haven't read the book, just some plot spoilers, so take this with a big grain of salt: it seems to be yet another book that flatters the reader by positing that humans are relatively more sentient than other spacefaring species. Where are the books that posit the opposite (which I'd think is actually much more likely) ?

(Spoilers naturally)

Trying to summarize a half-remembered book, but the big revelation is that the aliens are not sentient at all. They are rather operating on instinct. The point of the book was more to discuss the nature of being human and is consciousness/sentience all that necessary. Lots of philosophical waxing on the nature of thought.

As to your question about other species, I think you are posing a rather challenging problem. How does an author write from the perspective of a being significantly more intelligent than themselves? Their actions and motivations become wholly alien as comprehension is not within our reach. One can justify any alien action as the unknowable motivations of a capacious god.

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