191–200 of 459 posts
I had ChatGPT create a list of the top 100 literary classics of the past century and summarize them for me. While I'm waiting for Claude Code to write code for me I listen to the summaries like an audiobook. I'm planning to read a lot more than 100 books next year!
- My Gita, Devdutt Pattanaik
- The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Atul Gawande
- Moonshot: Inside Pfizer's Nine-Month Race to Make the Impossible Possible, Albert Bourla
- Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Anne Case
- The Vaccine: Inside the Race to Conquer the COVID-19 Pandemic, Joe Miller
- Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, John Green
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne and Gary Gianni (Illustrator)
- El Deafo, Cece Bell
- Acts of God, Kanan Gill
- Marvels of Modern Science, Paul Severing
- Empire of AI, Karen Hao
Been a year of re-reads and some classics I never started b/c of thickness. Standouts for me were “A Tale of Two Cities” and “Norwegian Wood.” “Kafka on The Shore”, “Norwegian Wood” - Haruki Murakami “A Tale of Two Cities” - Dickens “Count of Monte Cristo” - Alexandre Dumas LotR, “Hobbit” - Tolkien “World Atlas of Coffee” - James Hoffmann “Anathem”, “Diamond Age”, “Termination Shock” - Neal Stephenson “A Timeless Way…
I envy your reading abilities
J.R.R. Tolkien's _The Bovadium Fragments: Together with The Origins of Bovadium_ --- probably the last "new" Tolkien book --- quite the hoot, and an interesting commentary on industrialism and the Oxford Don's opinions on same
Donald E. Knuth's _TAoCP: Vol. 4, Fascicle 7, Constraint Satisfaction_ --- working through exercises now in the hope of finding a typo for the sake of getting an account at The Bank of the Island of San Seriffe to go w/ my physical reward check.
Variety of other things, but those were the notable/interesting ones.
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler the whole Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman
I read ~80-100 books a year, mostly SF/F.
Dune: re-read the first time since I was a teenager. Mostly to compare my memory of it against the films. Foundation and Second Foundation: for much the same reason. Both very enjoyable reads, but quite different from the modern interpretations. "How Life Works: a users guide to the new biology" by Phillip Ball. Really extended my understanding of where biology is now.
The Mule is still great, though.
I binged the entirety of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. The cover, & the fact that it was on Kindle Unlimited, made me think it was probably cheap crap, but I was impressed with how well-written it was, and how much I empathized with the characters. (I probably should have read it slower; by the last two books, I was just flowing with the text, not paying as much attention to the overarching plot.)
Heinlein's "Orphans of the Sky" was pretty bad. So much early scifi is considered great because it's groundbreaking, writing about things nobody else has before. The concept of a generation ship was pretty new at the time Heinlein was writing it, and it has some very interesting concepts, but the book has some really bad problems. If you've read it, you know; if you haven't, and decide to, you'll see it for yourself.
I binged a few Brandon Sanderson books. The standalones are great; the Stormlight Archive is a huge slog through some beautiful writing, but I'm not sure I'm willing to spend so much time in beautiful books that move the plot forward so slowly.
Exordia, by Seth Dickinson, started off incredible, kept going, but the ending felt like both a fizzle as well as a cliff-hanger for the next book. I'm glad I read it, but I wish it had a clear conclusion it wanted to reach.
Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Memory" delivers more of the great philosophical questions & answers about the nature of consciousness and personhood that the previous books did, A+. No idea where he could possibly go from there, but if he does, I'm going along for the journey. (Honorable mention: Alien Clay. Dishonorable mention: Service Model.)
Eric Flint's "Fenrir" was a fun BDO near-future space adventure. (As was John Sanford's Saturn Run, but that wasn't a 2025 book I read.)
Here you go! https://3e.org/books/ I read ~80-100 books a year, mostly SF/F.