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Ask HN: Books you read in 2016?

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Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2016?

#171

Post by chillingeffect »

anonymousDan wrote: post #123
panarky wrote: post #120

"It Can't Happen Here", a novel by Sinclair Lewis. It was written in 1935 during the rise of totalitarian regimes in Italy and Germany, but before WW2. The prevailing wisdom at the time was that the American democracy was immune to the disease of dictatorship. The novel speculates how a populist figure could manipulate people through fear, racism, corporatism, local militias and bald-faced lies. He wins the popular v…

You should check out "I shall bear witness" by Victor Klemperer.

While we're on the category of "just before the shit hit the fan," there's "Defying Hitler." [1] It's the story of the early years in Germany as Hitler was first coming to power, when the war was first beginning. Very insightful.

[1]http://dannyreviews.com/h/Defying_Hitler.html

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2016?

#172

Post by mindcrime »

Books I finished in 2016. There are others that are still "in progress", but I'll skip those for now.

- Towers of Midnight (Wheel of Time, #13) - Robert Jordan

- Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know - Jerry Kaplan

- The Gathering Storm (Wheel of Time, #12) - Robert Jordan

- Ashley Bell - Dean Koontz

- Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything - George Musser

- What Is Relativity?: An Intuitive Introduction to Einstein's Ideas, and Why They Matter - Jeffrey O. Bennett

- Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software - Charles Petzold

- The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom - Stephen M. Stigler

- Deliver Us from Evil (A. Shaw, #2) - David Baldacci

- Total Control - David Baldacci

- Second Foundation (Foundation #3) - Isaac Asimov

- Foundation and Empire (Foundation #2) - Isaac Asimov

- End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #3) - Stephen King

- Foundation (Foundation #1) - Isaac Asimov

- Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity - David Foster Wallace

- The Meaning of Science - Tim Lewens

- Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition - Guy Kawasaki

- The Last Mile (Amos Decker, #2) - David Baldacci

- Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble - Dan Lyons

- Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution: How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Can't Afford to Be Left Behind - Charles Babcock

- It's Not the Big That Eat the Small...It's the Fast That Eat the Slow: How to Use Speed as a Competitive Tool in Business - Jason Jennings

- Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die - Eric Siegel

- Mastering the Complex Sale: How to Compete and Win When the Stakes Are High! - Jeff Thull

- The Bazaar of Bad Dreams - Stephen King

What would I recommend out of this batch? Pretty much all of the fiction titles, and out of the non-fiction, I'd call out these as particularly recommended:

Mastering The Complex Sale, by Jeff Thull

Code, by Charles Petzold

and

It's Not the Big That Eat the Small...It's the Fast That Eat the Slow by Jason Jennings.

The one I'd call out as "not recommended" is

The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom by Stephen M. Stigler. I guess it has it's place, but it didn't turn out to be as enlightening as I'd hoped it would be.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2016?

#174

Post by dapatil »

drelihan wrote: post #152

Here are some of my favorites from the year ( ranked in how much they changed my thinking ): - The Art of Being Unreasonable ( Eli Broad ) - Alibaba ( Clark ) - The Box ( Levinson ) - King Icahn ( Stevens ) - Expert C Programming ( Linden ) - A Passion to Win ( Redstone ) - Chaos Monkeys ( Martinez ) - A Truck Full of Money ( Kidder ) - The Hidden Wealth of Nations ( Zucman ) - Dead Wake ( Larson )

Loved Chaos Monkeys as well - It's a fun read and very educational at the same time.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2016?

#175

Post by andrewtbham »

magnanimous11 wrote: post #164
nicholast wrote: post #154

Here are a few I enjoyed in 2016 by genre: Business - Making Things Work by Yaneer Bar-Yam Investing - Charlie Munger The Complete Investor by Tren Griffin Essays - Michel de Montaigne Complete Essays ($.99 on Kindle!) Physics - At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman Software - An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language Current Events - Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom Fiction - The Orphan Master's Son b…

I absolutely agree with your recommendation of "A Confederacy of Dunces", but it is definitely not an Autobiography.

confederacy of dunces is one of the funniest books i have read. should have been made into a movie by now.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2016?

#176

Post by mindcrime »

gk1 wrote: post #151

I've read 13, which is half my goal of 24, but it's still more than the year prior so I'm satisfied. The three that stand out to me (recency bias in full effect): Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky - I went back to Dostoevsky because I needed a break from business books... Something to distract me from work in the evenings. Dostoevsky's overly descriptive narrative does a great job of transporting my mind to 19th-cen…

I've read 13, which is half my goal of 24, but it's still more than the year prior so I'm satisfied.

I was a little disappointed that I only got through 24 this year. My goal was 75, which would have represented a stretch beyond the 53 I got through last year. But it turns out that I picked a couple of really long books this year, AND I spent a lot more time this year doing stuff like taking Coursera classes and what-not, which cut into my reading time.

All in all, I guess it just shows that a simple number like "titles read" isn't really all that meaningful. :-)

Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky

I really want to read this. Maybe in 2017.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2016?

#177

Post by mindcrime »

arc_of_descent wrote: post #18

I started Jan 2016 jobless, I still am. hence the long reading list! Apart from these I've read lots on AngularJS, React, Redux, Python. * The Short Drop (The Gibson Vaughn Series) - Matthew FitzSimmons * The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins * Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution - Neil deGrasse Tyson * Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future - Ashlee Vance * Death…

Phantoms - Dean Koontz

Good call. Even though he's famous and all, I still sometimes feel like Koontz is very under-rated and doesn't get enough respect.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2016?

#178

Post by mindcrime »

gedrap wrote: post #22

- Introductory Statistics with R by Dalgaard, Peter. A solid introduction to stats, don't be scared by R bit in the title - it contains plenty of maths/theory so that knowledge is widely applicable. Brilliant introductory for everyone who wants to do something stats related. It's amazing how much can be done with no fancy deep learning algorithms, just plain simple stats. - Statistics Done Wrong by Alex Reinhart. Ple…

The Circle by Dave Eggers. This one was scary.

I enjoyed it and would recommend it, but at the same time, I felt a little disappointed in it. I think I expected a bit, more, somehow, given the premise. I dunno, it's hard to explain, but I just felt like there was more that could have been done with the setting and the premise.

Still, worth a read for sure.

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2016?

#179

Post by blabla_blublu »

Currently Reading : Goldfinch!

Best Book I read this year : Deep Work by Cal Newport and One World Education by Sal Khan.

Best fiction : Laughter in the Dark by Nabokov.

## Deep Work by Cal Newport

## The life changing magic of tidying up by Marie Kondo

## So good they can’t ignore you by Cal Newport

## Serious men by Manu Joseph

## Strangers on a train

## One world education by Sal Khan (Highly recommend it)

There are several wonderful takeaways from the book which I will try to list :

- The current model of education is broken. The Prussian system was designed to isolate workers from thinkers and factory laborers from office bearers. In an era where we need lots of original and creative minds to solve problems, it just doesn’t work.

- Conventional education system leads to a lot of gaps in learning, which are not addressed. For example, in spite of scoring 90% in math, you might have missed out on a key concept which will come back to haunt you later on.

- The system of homework is broken. It prioritizes quantity over quality and is meaningless.

- The testing system is just a snapshot of the student’s learning and does not says nothing about a student’s potential to learn a subject.

Sal goes on to propose a futuristic schooling system where students would use Khan Academy or an equivalent medium to progress at their own pace and use their classrooms for pursuing creative activities and enhancing his/her learning. Another interesting idea which he proposes is to dismantle age-wise segregation and group them based on the levels they are at in terms of progress made.

I think Sal Khan is a fantastic role model for kids and adults alike. A former hedge fund analyst turned educator is shaking up the fundamentals of our education system and tackling problems which are deeply rooted and slowly turning political as well. Here’s to a bright Sal-led future for education!

Overall, I would give the book 4.5/5. Visionary. Excellent. Ambitious!

## The Invisible Hand

## Disgraced by Ayad Akthar

## Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

## Laugher in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov

Re: Ask HN: Books you read in 2016?

#180

Post by mayneack »

Recommendations:

Non Fiction: White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

https://smile.amazon.com/White-Trash-400-Year-History-Americ...

It sometimes reads like "A People's History of the United States", but the chapter about Andrew Jackson's election would seem like they were forcing the analogies to the 2016 election if not for the fact that it was published beforehand.

Fiction: American Gods https://smile.amazon.com/American-Gods-Tenth-Anniversary-Nov...

I think lots of people will like this book, but certainly those who are into road trips across America.

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