Great! Bill Gates started to be a tech mogul that recommends books. Now it looks like everyone that want to become a tech mogul must share reading recommendations. I liked this trend.
Pretty sure reading recommendations pre-date Bill Gates...
YC’s Summer Reading
101–110 of 188 posts
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#102I've not read the book version but "How Buildings Learn" is one of my favorite things ever (a great case-study for looking outside of software for lessons that can apply to well...software). Stewart Brand (of Longnow fame) produced a really lovely 6 part series for BBC in the late 90's and they are on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brandst/videos -- highly recommended (Warning: there is a very loud and obnoxio…
Thanks for sharing. I just watched the first couple of episodes and they were pretty great. Reminds me a lot of "Design of everyday things" meets buildings.
And of course the mental transfer to software is fairly obvious (think user centered design, make sure software is adaptable etc.)
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#103Nice, 2 out of 20 authors are women. Nothing like a balanced reading experience.
I feel like your comment would be more useful if you were to raise your concern (which you did) and suggest some books written by women you think warrant inclusion on the list. Otherwise you're just complaining.
Octavia E. Butler was an amazing author, and it never failed for her books to be way-out-there. Sometimes creepily so:
https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Xenogenesis-Trilogy-Book-1-ebook...
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#104I'm really surprised to see Ready Player One on there. It relied way too heavily on the 80's nostalgia, to prop up the shallow story telling. But even that got old, it was like hanging around with someone that talks entirely in movie quotes, while fun at the right times, gets stale fast. You didn't care about the character, because there was nothing for him to really lose.
I'd consider it a decent beach read but wouldn't nominate it for a Hugo [not that I'm likely to be asked for my nomination]. I read it off the public libary new shelf a few years ago. It was two or three evenings' worth of reasonable entertainment and Pokemon Go reminded me of having read it.
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#105Or get a break from work and this world and read some Scottish SciFi !! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series
I read up to Excession and stopped. At the pace I was going, there was going to be a year of Culture, then nothing new from it forever. It's such a shame that Banks died but damn, did he leave a mark.
If anyone is in the same position, I can recommend the Second Apocalypse series[1]. I find it feels like you put Tolkien and Banks in a pot, inverted some tropes, and let simmer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Scott_Bakker#The_Second_Apo...
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#106I read tegmark' about a year ago. Very insightful for a cosmology noob like me (e.g. Lots of stuff on inflation theory, origin of Carbon (i didn't know),etc.). Clearly believes in the 'many worlds' hypothesis which may be hard to take, but is nonetheless an insightful view on how weird reality actually is from one of mit's great scientists.
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#107Nice, 2 out of 20 authors are women. Nothing like a balanced reading experience.
If you can recommend more female authors on par with, say, JK Rowling, Fred Vargas, Neil Gaiman or Patrick Rothfuss, I'd be happy to read them. It's hard enough to find good books, worrying about the author's gender is very pointless. Especially since I am not interested in women's issues, which nobody should be obliged to be.
I would highly recommend Lois McMaster Bujold. She is not hard sci fi though and the sci fi elements mostly act as a setting for the story.
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#108Just curious, what's everybody's pace around here? It took me about a month to casually get through "Ready Player One" (great book BTW), and that was for a book club. It seems like a lot of the people I respect get through about a book a week. Either they're lying or have such good focus to avoid distractions other than books. Maybe I could put down the HN for a bit.
When I read for light entertainment, [that's how I read Ready Player One] it's roughly a replacement for watching movies/TV. It gets chunked into multi-hour sessions over two or three or so nights. If the book doesn't motivate me to read at least 100 or so pages the first and second evening, odds are I won't finish it. I used to worry about not finishing books, now I don't.
On the other hand, recently I have started rereading a few books by some favorite authors and those I have read slowly. Not everything is worth savoring or caring about much beyond the general idea.
Reading is habits and my habits around reading for several hours formed when I was a child. On the other hand, my beloved only really started reading for fun after we were living together and its taken a couple of decades to get to reading several books at once or sometimes finishing books in a few days.
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#109Just curious, what's everybody's pace around here? It took me about a month to casually get through "Ready Player One" (great book BTW), and that was for a book club. It seems like a lot of the people I respect get through about a book a week. Either they're lying or have such good focus to avoid distractions other than books. Maybe I could put down the HN for a bit.
If you set a goal of about 50 pages per night, you'd be surprised how much you can read.
Re: YC’s Summer Reading
#110The Magicians is a lovely book; I actually interviewed Grossman when the first one came out, in 2010: https://jakeseliger.com/2010/10/14/an-interview-with-lev-gro... . If you like it, try Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy too. Leviathan Wakes disappoints: its plot and political economy are interesting but on a sentence-by-sentence level one wishes for more. If you haven't read it yet try Peter Watts, Blinds…
Pullman is another one for the Christians, I suppose. If you are not religious, it seems unlikely to me that you would enjoy it (I didn't).
Pullman wrote His Dark Materials as the atheist counter to C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia IIRC.
You might want to reread them if you came away thinking they were pro-Christian.