Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?

Burns said on his podcast that his sequel to this book, "Feeling Great", is going to be published some time in 2020.

With some risk of 'no-true-scotsman', more I look at soviet/cold-war era, more it seems like Russia was exporting weird meld of cult-of-personality, imperialism and fascism?

To me, if reading about Gulag destroys left-wing for you, is like if realizing world was not created in 6 days destroyed your faith. Like what was your belief in the first place? But I had simmilar moments as well :)

I did hear that SSSR does still have fans in some western countries, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn has really good antidodes against that, I myself am a fan of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"

I read a lot of fanfiction in the last years. On the downside the writing is less polished. On the upside it is free and non-mainstream.

I was influenced by Eliezer Yudkowsky and his take on rationality. His fanfiction "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" serves as a nice introduction. http://www.hpmor.com/

Worm by John McCrae is an epic superhero/villain story. Consider it Game of Thrones in the superhero genre. With 16 million words it is a really long story. For comparison, the Harry Potter series is 10 million words.

The Metropolition Man by Alexander Wales is also in the superhero genre, but turns it on its head. Lex Luthor is the hero standing up against Superman.

The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Yeskov does the same to Lord of the Rings. It effectively becomes a fantasy spy thriller.

These three are great stories that show how good and evil are a point of view. An important lesson to learn in a time when US and China are increasingly hostile. Since HN is american, China might be compared to Mordor and Xi Jinping to Lux Luthor. Fiction stories may help you to at least imagine that they consider themselves as the good guys.

Accelerando by Charles Stross turns the concept of technological singularity into a well-written story. As the story spans a looong timespan and shows how humanity antiquates itself, it makes you feel small in a good sense.

That's interesting. I was raised Catholic and am still now a sort of very detached Catholic and I read the New Testament earlier this year and it had kind of the opposite effect on me --- not so much in any fundamental way regarding what I believe spiritually, but in my attitude towards the church itself. I spent 12 years having priests and nuns drill the basic story in all its details into my head, and what's in the actual book is very different.

Tom Bissell --- who is sort of a lighter, breezier version of the kind of essayist David Foster Wallace was, and who has done a lot of serious writing about and in video games, which is not my thing at all but maybe HN's --- has a sort of travel/essay book about the apostles, where he visits each of their purported burial sites and uses that as a starting point for an essay about some aspect of the region, the particular apostle, or some broader aspect of christian faith, which you might find interesting.

* Red Rising (series) by Pierce Brown * Stormlight Archive (series) by Brandon Sanderson * The Three-Body Problem (series) by Cixin Liu * Malazan Book of the Fallen (series) by Steven Erikson

Why all fiction? No matter how much I read about the human mind or current affairs or computer science or quantum physics or ..., there is no deeper, more lasting feeling in my soul than finishing an epic tale that has grabbed every ounce of my attention. So much fun, so many characters and plot twists and emotions and gains and losses. I loved every second reading these books and they have restored my faith in modern writing. Well done.