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Ask HN: What are some must read books?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some must read books?

#71

Post by mindcrime »

I don't know if I really even believe in the idea of "must read" books, but here are at least a few I highly recommend. In no particular order.

FICTION

The Mysterious Island - Verne

The Time Machine - Wells

Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orwell

Fahrenheit 451 - Bradbury

Brave New World - Huxley

Snow Crash - Stephenson

The Shockwave Rider - Brunner

The Fountainhead - Rand

Cryptonomicon - Stephenson

The Foundation trilogy - Asimov

Something Wicked This Way Comes - Bradbury

Strangers - Koontz

After Dark - Murakami

It - King

The Lord of the Rings - Tolkien

The Hobbit - Tolkien

Perdido Street Station - Miéville

Permutation City - Egan

Glasshouse - Stross

NON-FICTION

Report from Engine Co 82 - Smith

Godel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter

How the Mind Works - Pinker

The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Blank

Charles Proteus Steinmetz: The Electrical Wizard of Schenectady - Bly

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Levy

Artificial Life - Levy

Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier - Haffner & Markoff (Note: this book is not without controvery. There is a lot of debate about the veracity of much of the material on Mitnick. However, it is a wildly entertaining read, and an introduction to a number of interesting characters. But I'd suggest following up by reading other related titles, especially regarding Kevin Mitnick)

Ghost in the Wires - Mitnick (Mitnick's autogiography, basically)

Takedown - Shimomura & Markoff

The Fugitive Game - Littman (of the books written about Mitnick, but not by Mitnick, this one has a reputation for being a little more "pro Kevin" whereas a couple of the others are sort of pointedly "anti Kevin" in their bias. Maybe it all balances out in the end if you read them all).

The Cyberthief & the Samurai - Goodell

The Cuckoo's Egg - Stoll

How To Create A Mind - Kurzweil

On Intelligence - Hawkins

Engineering General Intelligence (volumes 1 & 2) - Goertzel

The Hidden Pattern - Goertzel

Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity - Wallace

Re: Ask HN: What are some must read books?

#72

Post by handrous »

carabiner wrote: post #38
handrous wrote: post #14

People take issue with them, but picking something off Adler's or Harvard's (five-foot-shelf) or Bloom's Great Books lists will almost never lead you wrong. But, here we go anyway (and yeah, some of these are just off those lists): 1) Shakespeare's big four tragedies are, in fact, out-fucking-standing. Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth. IMO Hamlet reads the best of those. Any would be fine to watch, as well, and ma…

For non-Americans, this is basically the US high school required reading list.

I think we read abridgments of certain episodes from The Odyssey a couple different years, but never the whole thing. AFAIK Shakesepeare's Big Four are rarely all covered in high school. Maybe one of them will be. Romeo and Juliet is much more popular, for whatever reason—I think it's considered easier, and maybe curriculum designers think kids will relate better to a story of young love. IIRC the only one of the Big Four we read in my high school was Macbeth, and I took all the extra English classes possible, starting in 7th grade.

I don't think Gilgamesh was covered at all. Yates, Maugham, Farmer, or Forster are certainly not commonly assigned in US high schools. Woolf, maybe, and if so, yeah, it'll probably be To the Lighthouse. Orwell, yes, but mainly for Animal Farm and maybe 1984, not his essays. I guess there might be some schools that assign C.S. Lewis, but I doubt it's common.

Re: Ask HN: What are some must read books?

#73

Post by axegon_ »

melonbar wrote: post #52
axegon_ wrote: post #45

Pfffff you really asked the impossible question here. Best I can do is scan through the books on the shelves next to me: * Beyond good and evil: Nietzsche * The Temple of the Golden Pavilion: Yukio Mishima * Steppenwolf: Hermann Hese * Library of babel: Borges * The Brain: David Eagleman * The Magical Mountain: Thomas Mann * The Dark Tower: Stephen King(actually tons of King books - I am a bit of a fanboy) * Factfuln…

So I’ve read Hitchhiker’s but was always curious about the others he wrote, any thoughts? Thanks!

I tried Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and never really managed to get to the end. I was somewhat disappointed cause I had my expectations up to the Hitchhiker's guide. On the subject of the Hitchhiker's guide, I liked "And Another Thing..." the most(though it was largely written by Eoin Colfer.

Re: Ask HN: What are some must read books?

#75

Post by dilippkumar »

My recent favorite books:

Epic Fantasy: The Malazan series. (Gardens of the Moon, the first book is a challenging read and has a bit of an anticlimatic end. Don't judge the series till finishing the first three books. They get easier to read starting book 2).

History: The making of the atomic bomb by Richard Rhodes. (The title is misleading - it's not about the manhattan project really. The book traces the history of nuclear physics, starting from Rutherford realizing that most of an atom's mass must be concentrated in a nucleus - and step by step, follows all the turns and surprises as a group of people pieced together what an atom must be made of. The book makes an unavoidable turn into the manhattan project and ends with Hiroshima/Nagasaki, so yes the Manhattan project does make a significant part of the book, but it's really not the focus of the book).

Design: The Elements of typographic style by Robert Bringhurst. (A beautiful book about typesetting beautiful books).

Nature: Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. (A fascinating book about fungii. I'll never see trees the same way again).

Autobiography: A man for all markets by Edward O Thorp (Claude Shannon shows up and helps the author try to cheat at Roulette using wearable computers! A lot of fascinating stuff).

More history: The Anarchy by William Dalrymple. (A book on the British East India company went from being a merchant company to eventually becoming the British Raj).

Re: Ask HN: What are some must read books?

#76

Post by handrous »

plants wrote: post #26

Some of my favorite fiction books and short story collections in no particular order: 1) Collected Fictions by Borges 2) The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka 3) The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 4) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison 5) 9 Stories by J.D. Salinger 6) 60 Stories by Donald Barthelme 7) 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 8) The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

> 5) 9 Stories by J.D. Salinger

I'd encourage anyone who was put off by The Catcher in the Rye not to dismiss Salinger's other work, and agree that this is the one to read, if you're only going to read one (other) volume of his.

Re: Ask HN: What are some must read books?

#77

Post by melonbar »

aerovistae wrote: post #59

The Harry Potter series remains the most enjoyable books I've ever read. The Pillars of the Earth comes close though. Terrific sci-fi reads were Ender's Game , Speaker for the Dead , Hyperion , Ringworld , and to a lesser extent A Deepness in the Sky . Also Excession, whose human characters are poorly developed and written but whose world-building and AI characters are amazing. Terrific fantasy reads were The Time-Tr…

Wow, I love this edit, I’m agnostic myself but that seems rather neat. I remember reading about how Warren Buffet, despite not being particularly religious, has read the Bible like 7 times or something. I always found that rather interesting. Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: What are some must read books?

#78

Post by e12e »

Interesting that books like "Bury my heart at wounded knee" by Dee Brown doesn't seem to come up in these threads - but maybe it's in the high school curriculum in the US?

Which reminds I've yet to read Isaac Asimov's books on the history of North America/USA.

https://sursumcorda.salemsattic.com/archives/2018/06/19/isaa...

Re: Ask HN: What are some must read books?

#79

Post by rg111 »

I am looking forward to reading the whole thread, but while people are at it, you can check this out:

https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app/category/0/all-t...

You could also find nice websites and collections if you Google "Hacker News books".

Hacker News has become one of the most impactful places in determining what to read.

I have read at least 10 books as suggested in HN comments by others within 4-5 months after deciding to do so.

I have a list of almost 70 books that I am going to check out, and a shortlist of ~20 books that I am definitely going to read- all from HN comments.

HN is a great place to find out new books- whether it is about tech, fiction, or non-fiction.

The books suggested here amazingly diverese in nature. I highly recommend reading books suggested in HN many times according to your choices to whoever reads this.

Happy reading!

Re: Ask HN: What are some must read books?

#80

Post by itwrangler »

A smattering from my audible listening list which I particularly remember liking (this might actually be a 'less read books' list sorry ;-) ): Michael Palin - Erebus ; Alan Moore - Jerusalem ; Graeme Green - Travel with my Aunt ; Karen Maitland - A Company of Liars ; Louis de Bernieres - Captain Correlli's Mandolin ; Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose ; Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls ; Robert Harris - Imperium trilogy ...

I'd second for Master & Margarita and almost anything by Dostoyevsky

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