Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023

I read Kurt Vonnegut's _Player_Piano_ and really enjoyed it. It's a story about a heavily computerized society, but the computers are vacuum tube based. "We ran the calculation, replaced all the tubes and ran it again, so we're confident in the result" sort of thing.

I also really enjoyed Andy Weir's _Project_Hail_Mary_, and _The_Martian_.

2022 was a great year for my reading (in order of my favorites):

The Great Demographic Reversal by Charles Goodhart - this book changed my life, but now that inflation and the retirements are in full swing it might be harder to make early moves on the knowledge. The graphs are also beginning to become outdated since the book was written in the end of 2019/early 2020? Either way, it inspired my decision to move closer to family.

The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan - this book is well worth the read. Peter is a very educated and factual guy, and it's hard to disagree with the normalized vectors of change he is describing. The magnitude of these vectors however are up for much debate. Lots to think on, agree with, and disagree with.

American Icon by Bryce G. Hoffman - a book on Ford's handling of the 2008 crisis. It's got some flowery parts that idolize these men too much IMO but a great book on leadership and problem solving.

Lights Out - a book on how GE failed. If hypothetically American Icon was paid for to make Ford look good, Lights Out would have been paid for by disgruntled investors to burn that company's reputation to the ground. By some Wall Street Journal employees, this book is bonkers and a really frigid lesson about how incentives play out and a sober view of work in the real world.

East of Eden was one of like 3 Steinbeck books I havent read. I finally got around to it this summer and it’s probably one of my favorite books now.

* Three Body Problem. I've heard of it many times, but never read it. Picked it up a month or two ago, read the whole thing in a few sessions, one of my favourite sci-fi books ever. Will read the next book in the series.

* Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System that Keeps You Alive. Best pop-sci book I've read in a while. Strikes the right balance between including pertinent information without being overwhelming, explaining things in a digestible way without dumbing down, etc. Inspired me to read a proper immunology primer (How the Immune System Works), which was also very good.

* How Rights Went Wrong. An excellent, level-headed take on the U.S. conception of rights, and how it leads to zero-sum thinking in supreme court cases. The author is so relentlessly reasonable that it's hard not to buy into his argument. Even though this book is about the U.S., it has lots of case studies where it contrasts with various other countries, which helped me understand my country's (Canada's) court system and system of rights better.

Let-downs:

* Seeing Like a State. The first few chapters are interesting, and do a good job of explaining the world-view of the author. Worth buying just for this. However, the last half or two-thirds of the book is a tedious re-hashing of the same ideas through various examples.

* The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Many interesting factoids in here (killer asteroids: solved problem). However, the book's central argument failed to convince me. Many of the analyses and probability estimates were disappointingly shallow and hand-wavy, especially for the #1 risk cited in the book--unaligned AI--which he thinks has a 10% chance of ending civilization this century.

"A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear" is a surprisingly sympathetic recounting of the great New Hampshire takeover of a small town by libertarians from around the country. The best of intentions, passion and idealism - and yet "mistakes were made." The book is well researched and well written, funny yet also poignant.

Published in 2020, someone gave it to me for a Christmas present. I'm surprised how quickly I turned the pages....