Ask HN: Books you read in 2016?

Alternatively, visit your local independent book store and ask for recommendations, and resist the temptation of looking up the reviews before you've finished the book yourself.

If getting to the point of actually reading a book is a problem, I find that the easiest way is to read a while in bed before you go to sleep. Reading helps relax, and has the benefit of not keeping your body awake like digital screens do.

How to Read a Book - Mortimer Adler. Really helped me feel more comfortable reading technical books and large books. I've probably worked through more tech/textbooks this year than all other years combined. (It's not a particularly high number this year, it was just low all the other years, haha).

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius, Gregory Hays translation. I highly recommend this translation if Meditations is a book that's interested you. It's written very informally and casually. Like Aurelius writing in a notebook before bed. While other translations are very length and flowery with descriptions and overly formal.

Superintelligence - Nick Bostrom. This one gets talked about a lot on here. I bought it because it's a topic I'm very interested in, but I was expecting more hype than real content. I must say, I was very pleasantly wrong about that. Bostrom makes some really solid arguments about what superintelligence might mean and many ways it could potentially arise.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up - Marie Kondo. I didn't like most of this book. But the tips for tidying up, as well as the surge of motivation you magically get just after reading it made the book worth it.

Test-Driven Development with Python - Harry Percival. Obey the testing goat! Thanks to this book, all my current professional projects are using TDD. I had been making an effort to test code before, but generally after writing the code. The biggest benefits, for me, of writing tests before the rest of the code is that 1) My projects are organized so much better than before. 2) My tests feel much more comprehensive than they ever did previously.

Surprise books. These I wouldn't recommend for everyone here, but they're the most interesting ones I personally found this year:

Obfuscated C and Other Mysteries - Don Libes. Someone on HN recommended it, and I managed to find a used copy for $6. Just incredible if you love C, low level code, and hardcore tricks and optimizations. Some of the chapters explain winning entries to the IOCCC, and some explain strange tricks with C that probably aren't too useful in current day applications and may not even work on modern hardware. Not just insightful, but also very funny.

Computational Fairy Tales - Jeremy Kubica. Recommended to me by someone in IRC. Aimed mostly at kids, it's a fairy tale that involves computing. Princess Ann has to save the kingdom from a prophecy of doom. Along her journey every encounter indirectly describes a comp sci concept, such as showing an ogre how to repeatedly hit metal to make a sword mimics a FOR loop. A magical town where all the people only speak in completely boolean terms ("Is the castle that way?" Ann points. "No, it's that way" the villager points the same direction as Ann, but a fraction of a degree to the side). I think I picked up some good examples for explaining computers to kids without getting into jargon. Very cute, though I didn't finish it because I got tired of the simplicity, would recommend for a child.