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Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

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Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#91

Post by mike978 »

A couple of my favorites from this year, I read a lot (50 to 100 a year)

Fiction:

- What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

- Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

- A Man with One of Those Faces by Caimh Mcdonnell

- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

- A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

- Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton

- Where the Body Was by Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips

Nonfiction:

- Exiles by Preston Sprinkle

- Jesus and the Powers by N. T. Wright & Michael F. Bird

- With All Its Teeth by Joshua S. Porter

- In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki

- A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz

Copenhagen(play) by Michael Frayn done by BBC Radio, not really a book, but it's great. https://archive.org/details/michael-frayn-copenhagen

Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#92

Post by bemmu »

“Piranesi” by Susanna Clarke.

Refreshing and beautiful because it’s a totally new kind of world for a story to take place in, essentially survival in a world of procedurally generated endless architecture.

Most of the time there is just one or two characters among repetitive environments, which was relaxing as I get easily confused if there are 5+ characters to remember or extensive mental visualization required.

Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#94

Post by teleforce »

mike978 wrote: post #91

A couple of my favorites from this year, I read a lot (50 to 100 a year) Fiction: - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver - Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky - A Man with One of Those Faces by Caimh Mcdonnell - Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine - Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton - Where the Body Was by Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips Nonfiction: - E…

Asking for myself, is there any trick or strategy to achieve reading 100 books per year, are you retired, or part-time employee. Is hard to imagine a full-time employee to read that many books in one single year?

Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#95

Post by teleforce »

Cloudly wrote: post #87

Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity- David Bessis https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/200128457-mathematica?ac... Excellent book on mathematical thinking in the true sense - what needs to happen in the mind's eye to really grapple with abstract mathematics. Definitely a eye (mind?) opener for someone who has some graduate level math education but couldn't gel with the crazier stuff. Came across the…

+1 this book is on my reading list for this year.

Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#96

Post by codazoda »

Here are a few I enjoyed this year...

Walts Way, Andrew Lock Busy Doing Nothing, Hundred Rabbits The Art and Business of Online Writing, Nocolas Cole

If you want to be a writer and publish your own book I've written a short how-to guide. I'm updating it right now, building a site to promote other authors, and I'll release the new version in the coming days. My email address is in my profile if you're interested.

Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#97

Post by edanm »

teleforce wrote: post #94
mike978 wrote: post #91

A couple of my favorites from this year, I read a lot (50 to 100 a year) Fiction: - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver - Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky - A Man with One of Those Faces by Caimh Mcdonnell - Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine - Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton - Where the Body Was by Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips Nonfiction: - E…

Asking for myself, is there any trick or strategy to achieve reading 100 books per year, are you retired, or part-time employee. Is hard to imagine a full-time employee to read that many books in one single year?

Not the parent, but I am a full-time employee (I run a software business but work at it full time). I also read usually 90+ books a year.

The main "trick" is that the majority of books I read are audiobooks, usually at 2x or even 3x speed. And I'm just always reading, or listening to a podcast. There is a lot of slack time in which you can't be doing something else, and I use it for books. E.g. getting up in the morning and arranging food for my kids for school, or doing the dishes, or walking to/from work, or going to the gym, running to buy groceries, etc.

It really doesn't take that much time to read a lot. Say you want to read 52 books a year - that's a book a week. Depending on what you read, the average book is 10-20 hours on Audible, so let's say 15 hrs on average. If you read at 2x speed that's 7.5 hours of listening time per week, or roughly an hour a day. For most people that is easily achievable just with their commute to work.

Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#98

Post by davidanekstein »

bemmu wrote: post #92

“Piranesi” by Susanna Clarke. Refreshing and beautiful because it’s a totally new kind of world for a story to take place in, essentially survival in a world of procedurally generated endless architecture. Most of the time there is just one or two characters among repetitive environments, which was relaxing as I get easily confused if there are 5+ characters to remember or extensive mental visualization required.

To provide another perspective, I read this book and it was unfortunately just not my thing. The whole plot seemed very clear from the beginning and I found myself eager to get to where the climax occurred. The journey there wasn’t all that compelling, partly for that reason.

I do agree with your sentiment about number of characters though, that really helped. I find that my working memory for characters isn’t what it used to be.

Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#99

Post by paulcole »

teleforce wrote: post #94
mike978 wrote: post #91

A couple of my favorites from this year, I read a lot (50 to 100 a year) Fiction: - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver - Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky - A Man with One of Those Faces by Caimh Mcdonnell - Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine - Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton - Where the Body Was by Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips Nonfiction: - E…

Asking for myself, is there any trick or strategy to achieve reading 100 books per year, are you retired, or part-time employee. Is hard to imagine a full-time employee to read that many books in one single year?

I’m 42 with a full-time job and am at 103 books read so far this year.

The tricks are to put a lot of time in it and always have a surplus of interesting books on hand. I spend around $2k a year on Kindle books (if I talk to someone and they mention a book they like, I’ll usually just buy it) and make reading a daily habit.

I read on average an hour a day on weekdays and two or more hours on weekends. Reading is one of the things I enjoy the most and has been for my entire life.

Re: Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

#100

Post by MarcelOlsz »

computerdork wrote: post #67
MarcelOlsz wrote: post #12

Best one was Something Happened by Joseph Heller (Catch 22 guy). Worst one was 1Q84 by Murakami (so far).

Catch 22 is one of the funniest (while still having depth) books ever! Have never looked into his other books, will have to check it out

If you thought Catch 22 was funny this book will split you in half. I had to take it at only a few pages a day and re-read them a few times. I will say though, I might be misremembering how good it was, it's been a few years. I'm going to make a go of it again. I remember feeling at the time that I was reading the diary of a sort of "4chan patient zero".
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