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Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
331–340 of 459 posts
Re: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
#332This year:
DirectX12 documentation. Lots of them.
Harry Potter part 7 (again). Read Part 1 and 2 to kid.
Re: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
#333# Catch-22 (by Joseph Heller) - had been seeing it mentioned on HN (and other sites) for years, I finally read it and it was one the best novels I've ever read. # The Universe and Dr. Einstein (by Lincoln Barnett) - recommended for anyone who is interested about Einstein's thought process that gave birth to two great theories. # What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (by Haruki Murakami) - it's my first book fro…
Catch 22 is just fantastic isn’t it. I might re-read in 2026!
Re: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
#334I read 14 books this year and my favourite was Eversion by Alastair Reynolds, followed closely by Pushing Ice by the same author. I "discovered" Cory Doctorow this year, reading 4 books (and I have another in my queue), being "Attack Surface" the one I liked most. The only technical book I read was Programming in Lua (4th edition), and still didn't work for me. I guess I don't like Lua, and that's OK.
Alastair is on my S tier for sci-fi. Read so much of him. But didn't read Eversion. Adding it! In your reading journey, which other authors/books have similar grand space scale as how Alastair writes? I mean, there are a lot, I know, but some overdo it and others oversimplify it. I find Alastair striking perfect balance of being "hardcore" in a way, but still making sense:)
Give Miles Cameron a go. Artifact Space is a good starting point.
Re: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
#335Been 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…
Curious about your view on The Count of Monte Cristo. It's one of my more disappointing reads of the year. I'm familiar with the story line from various film adaptations, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer amount of repetition and drawn out bullshit. That's when I learned it was originally published in a journal where Dumas was paid by the word over 18 parts. Then all the meandering bullshit and repetition made so m…
Similar to other commenter, after the first third, I felt it devolved into a long, overly drawn out and predictable slog. Glad to have finished it, but it’s probably not on my re-read list.
Re: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
#336How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg Bhagvad Gita by Eknath Easwaran Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke How The World Really Works by Vaclav Smil The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune Chaos by James Gleick Wind and Truth (Stormlight Archive #5) by Brandon Sanderson The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle The Day of th…
> Chaos by James Gleick I read this quite a while ago, and can't remember it at all. What did you think of it? > The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth Loved this when I was a kid.
The Gleick book is a good quick introduction to complexity.
Introduction to the Theory of Complex Systems is an incredible second book on the subject but it wouldn't be fair to compare it to the Gleick book.
I enjoyed How The World Really Works also.
Re: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much do you read weekly? This is an impressive amount of stuff
This comment slightly terrifies me. My reading has dipped this year, but generally this is a small amount of reading for 12 months. I think the norm on reading quantity has shifted. Is social media to blame? TikTok and meta videos are extremely addictive. I have perhaps the strongest willpower of anyone I know, and the only way I can avoid losing hours to them every day is to delete these apps from all devices, and h…
Don’t be terrified, it just sounds like you read a lot. Many of these books are huge, most people definitely wouldn’t finish then all in a year.
Re: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much do you read weekly? This is an impressive amount of stuff
This comment slightly terrifies me. My reading has dipped this year, but generally this is a small amount of reading for 12 months. I think the norm on reading quantity has shifted. Is social media to blame? TikTok and meta videos are extremely addictive. I have perhaps the strongest willpower of anyone I know, and the only way I can avoid losing hours to them every day is to delete these apps from all devices, and h…
I consider myself a fairly slow reader (see other comment) and nothing on this list took very long to read, other than LotR and The Count of Monte Cristo. One of my goals for 2025 was to replace parades of endless distractions (social media, hn, Reddit) with books. I found that if I only read even for just 5min during morning coffee, I was far, far more likely to open a book when waiting while my car got smogged, kid at dentist, school pickups, etc. Those little between moments are so easily stolen from us and monetized, and they add up to a frightful total.
Re: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much do you read weekly? This is an impressive amount of stuff
This comment slightly terrifies me. My reading has dipped this year, but generally this is a small amount of reading for 12 months. I think the norm on reading quantity has shifted. Is social media to blame? TikTok and meta videos are extremely addictive. I have perhaps the strongest willpower of anyone I know, and the only way I can avoid losing hours to them every day is to delete these apps from all devices, and h…
I think it's quite hard to talk about norms for reading quantity, because it varies so much between people. There are a lot of people (more than half the population) who read basically no books in a year, and a tiny slice who read a huge number: so your intuitive take on what's "normal" is going to depend a lot on whether your social circle happens to have voracious readers in it. I suppose you can statistically determine some point in between as the "norm" but I'm not sure that point would reflect many people's experience...
Re: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
#340- 5 hours with Mario by Miguel Delibes.
- The three body problem saga.
- Cloud Atlas.