Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?

Yearly thread. It can be books published on 2021 or in previous years (but that you read this year.)

"Code" from Charles Petzold as well. Gave me solid, primary intuition on how to understand what a computer is.

I really really enjoyed "The Comanche Empire" https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300151176/comanche-empir...

It took a long time to get through (very dense, academic) but was a sprawling look at a powerful indigenous culture that I knew nothing about.

Plus, it was enlightening and a bit foreboding to learn how an empire could be at the very height of its power and then, through circumstance, climate, demographics, and imperial expansion be exhausted and destroyed in essentially a decade.

Yasha Levine's "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet" (2018). I ended up reading it side-by-side with Ed Snowden's "Permanent Record" (2019) which was useful as they have somewhat different takes on domestic and global mass surveillance.

The one take-away I'm still thinking about is how the Tor Onion Router system works, and if the primary purpose behind Tor was to allow spies in various locations around the planet to communicate with known headquarter locations without leaving any traces. That's what Levine implies, anyway, and Snowden sort of confirms that, as I read things.

Overall, some people believe putting advanced technology in the hands of individuals is a solution to authoritarian control, some people believe political reforms are the solution to authoritarian control. Interesting debate certainly.

Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller

Lulu Miller, a host of the Invisibilia podcast, turns what at first is a simple story about an obsessive taxonomist, David Starr Jordan, into a deeply personal and poignant exploration of the chaos that rules are lives. This part-historical non-fiction, part memoir brilliantly sets itself up for a grand reveal at the end that will stick with you long after you finish. By far my favorite of the 62 books that I read and one of the best books that I have ever read.