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Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

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Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#171

Post by madhadron »

Balgair wrote: post #146

USMC Commandant's 2020 Reading List. This year I am finishing up the Harvard Classics and am looking for a new view point. https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120612_1 Unfortunately, the military only publish on New Years Day (traditionally as a sort of holiday gift to those under command), so the 2020 list is not out yet. Every title is free via either the base library or the Navy Digital Library. Most ha…

Neat plan! I'll add a tangent, that if the material on Thermopylae intrigues you, there's a really good trilogy of historical novels by Helena Schrader about Leonidas and archaic Sparta that tries to lay out the best of our current knowledge (which is very different from what scholars thought about Sparta even a few decades ago...it's taken a long time to peel back all the appropriation on top of the fact that most of our sources are Athenian).

Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#172

Post by habnds »

madhadron wrote: post #165
habnds wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A book to read immediately after Guns Germs and Steel is Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu. It's also useful to know that Diamond does not have a degree in Geography and many geographers aren't particularly on board with his ideas. I think of him the same way I do Malcom Gladwell, a good story teller but he does this by cherrypicking anecdotes more than by a robust assessment of reality.

I've gotten to the point where I just suggest people skip Guns, Germs, and Steel entirely. Diamond is a really excellent writer, but he cherry picks his material to support a thesis and ignores all the prior art that shows that people already tried his thesis a century ago and discarded it. Jump to 'The Power Broker' instead. Now that's an interesting read.

Nice, thanks. Do you have a go to piece of work that lays out where Diamond goes wrong? I've only ever heard it in off hand comments from people in human geography.

I've read a couple of the LBJ books which are really amazing and plan on getting to power broker eventually.

Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#173

Post by nemo1618 »

jriot wrote: post #167

I've curated my 2020 list over the last few months, eventually splitting it in two; 2021 has been started, but below is my 2020 list. Brave New World Catcher in the Rye (3rd read) Tom Sawyer The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn War and Peace Catch-22 Stranger in a Strange Lan The Hobbit (3rd read) The Illiad The Odessey Walden Leisure, The Basis of Culture The Seven Storey Mountain Confessions The City of God Ways of L…

Once you've finished Walden, don't miss the thrilling sequel, Walden II!

Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#174

Post by lawn »

dgellow wrote: post #31

I want to finish to read Snowden’s autobiography: “Permanent Record”. I started during a long train trip recently and found that I really enjoyed the tone of the first few chapters. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_Record_(autobiogra...

It's great. I was surprised by how well written it was, it was very easy to read and had some good insights.

Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#175

Post by Delfino »

I read about 25 books this year, here are the top 10 I look forward to reading in 2020, many of them informed by my favorites of 2019:

Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari - I read Sapiens this year and really enjoyed it. I just started this today one so I may finish that before the end of the year.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman - I like books that make me think and from what I've heard, this will definitely do the trick. I read Factfulness this year and this was a suggested follow-up.

The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker - I've gotten really into natural languages since I've lived outside my country of origin for the last 2 and a half years and I've heard good things about this book being an entry point into linguistics.

Sword of Destiny by Andrzej Sapkowski - With the new Witcher show coming out on Netflix I finally went back and beat The Witcher 3 then read the first book, The Last Wish. It was enjoyable enough that I want to keep going with the series.

Educated by Tara Westover - Was convinced by Bill Gate's blog this is worthwhile. I'm a teacher so it wasn't hard to convince me.

Robot Builder's Bonanza by Gordon McComb - I've been asked to teach a robotics course next year and this one seems to be The Book everyone recommends to dive into robotics.

Divided by Partition: United by Resilience by Mallika Ahluwalia - I recently visited the Partition Museum in Amritsar, Punjab, India and purchased this book there to learn about more stories about people impacted by this event.

The Elements of Computing Systems by Noam Nisan and Shimon Shocken - I just read Code by Petzold and it was one of my favorite books. Even though I studied Computer Science in University and most of the concepts weren't new to me, it was such a fun experience mentally "building" a computer from relays/transistors to logic gates and up to assemblers, compilers, and interpreters. I want to keep going with this and jump into the Nand2Tetris online course.

The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold - Again, I loved Petzold's Code so I looked up other books he wrote and this one looks great. I've never actually read Turing's work so I'm excited to have some background and explanation to help me not just read the words but grasp their significance.

ZACH-LIKE by Zachtronics - I played through several Zachtronics games this year (TIS-100, Shenzhen I/O and Opus Magnum) so I can't wait to dive into some of the thinking behind creating these and similar games.

Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#176

Post by rdrey »

Loughla wrote: post #92
john-radio wrote: post #90

"And Then There Were None" by Agatha Christie "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula Le Guin "This Is How You Lose The Time War" by Amal El-Mohtar "Priestdaddy" by Patricia Lockwood "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" by Marlon James "Consider Phlebas," and maybe the rest of The Culture series of novels, by Iain Banks

>"Consider Phlebas," and maybe the rest of The Culture series of novels, by Iain Banks Oh man, this will start a shitstorm, because it's so subjective, but Consider Phlebas isn't the best intro to the culture series. I would start with Either Player of Games or Use of Weapons. Now let's hear from everyone who disagrees with me.

Yeah, Player of Games is the most detailed portrayal of the "the Culture" and everyday life in the Culture Series. Also interesting use of soft power to destroy another civilization.

Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#177

Post by Jallal »

lghh wrote: post #126

Leisure Stuff: Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga Of Oklahoma City, It's Chaotic Founding... by Sam Anderson Midnight In Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham Dune by Frank Herbert The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (tried it this year and stopped, want to give it another go) Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang (just finished Exhalation and I think it's great) An Ursula K. Le Guin novel, have not picked one out yet A…

Dune is great. Really great, especially the first part. While many books get a lot of praise/hype, Dune is one of the few that lives up to expectations.

Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#178

Post by misiti3780 »

Writing a Go Interpreter

Writing a Go Compiler

No One Cares about Crazy People

I Heard You Paint Houses

UNIX: A History and a Memoir

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

How Asia Works

The Dream Machine

Black Earth

The Fabric of Reality

Behave (tried twice, maybe third times a charm?)

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Genius: The Life and Science Richard Feynman

Super Thinking

Man's Search for Meaning

The Cooking Gene

The Vital Question: Why is Life The Way it Is (re-read)

The Case Against Sugar

The 15 Decisive Battles of the World

The History of the Peloponnesian War

The Beginning of Infinity

The Book of Why

Re: Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?

#179

Post by madhadron »

keiferski wrote: post #64

I'm planning on going through the entire Harvard Classics. At 51 volumes, it works out pretty nicely to read one volume per week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics

I'm going to suggest some alternate translations for some of these where it really matters.

Virgil's Aeneid, the best I know if is CS Lewis's partial translation. I'm unaware of a complete translation that has any of the magic of the original.

Dante's Divine Comedy, read the Clive James translation. This is the first one that captures some of the luminous quality of the Tuscan.

Beowulf, get Seamus Heaney's translation.

I don't read Spanish and cannot offer any insights on Cervantes, but maybe someone else can chime in. Likewise, do some research on translations of the Buddhist writings in volume 45.

One volume a week of this material is steep. A lot of this has its own pace and forcing your way through it faster loses the reason to bother. Milton's Paradise Lost, for example, is an awesome poem, but it implies a cadence, and it's a much slower cadence than modern readers are used to for nontechnical prose.

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