A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. Very thoughtful and short read.
Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
31–40 of 651 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
#32Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (1946). A close runner up might be Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis (1989).
> man’s search for meaning
Loved this book the first time I read it. Couldn’t finish it a second time. I think some of the darker parts were too much during an already difficult year.
Giving it as a gift to my nephew though.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
#33Probably Reaper, by Will Wight. It’s not an insightful nonfiction book or a piece of high literature, but the whole Cradle series is very, very fun.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
#34Children of Time and the sequel Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Best sci-fi I’ve read in a while.
Really liked the first one. How is the second one? Sort of been avoiding it because of how much I liked the first, and not wanting to be disappointed.
Not OP, but I read both of them too. The second is not as good as the first, got a little too weird (already a weird setup as you can assume from the first book). It's enjoyable but filled with a lot of tropes, compared to the first one which was quite original IMO.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really liked the first one. How is the second one? Sort of been avoiding it because of how much I liked the first, and not wanting to be disappointed.
Not OP, but I read both of them too. The second is not as good as the first, got a little too weird (already a weird setup as you can assume from the first book). It's enjoyable but filled with a lot of tropes, compared to the first one which was quite original IMO.
Thanks! Appreciate that. I may skip it then.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
#36The Library at Mount Char came from a Reddit recommendation for weird/bizarre fiction, and it did not disappoint. It's about kids who were abducted by a very powerful person, and that's all I'll say about it. If you like house of leaves or some of the strange chuck palahniuk stuff, you'll like this.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
#37I read the foundation series by Asimov. Its title of the best sci-fi series of all times isn’t a hyperbole.
I read a couple of the series about 15 years back and found the writing style and characterizations so dated, that I really had trouble getting anything enjoyable or insightful out of it. I feel the same amount most Golden age SciFi, with Dune being a notable exception.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
#38"The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow, a radical take on human deep history. Extremely thought-provoking so far, though I'm not finished yet (it's massive)
Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
#39Aristotle's Poetics. Yes, it was published before 2021.
A lot of writers try to set their own rules, but according to the best, you need limitations to be creative. Just like you would play sports with rules. That rulebook is Poetics.
It's the kind of book that's so information dense that you have to read it slowly. Summaries are often as long as the book itself.
There's some aging in there. Notably the concept of hamartia has changed from "mistake" to "sin" over a few hundred years. Good stories were all tragedy back then, where a noble person makes a mistake. And the audience is fearful because if this superior person can make mistakes, what about me?
Since Christianity, the philosophy has been that everyone makes mistakes, but repenting for it saves you from tragedy. And more popular now is a reversal. Some tries to slay a monster, but the monster is too perfect. But eventually the monster suffers from hamartia (missing the mark, making human sins) and the hero exploits that to win.
Besides drama, the book also covers actual poetry and music, both of which have their own limitations, but that part was all Greek to me.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fixed now. Thanks!
Is there not a semi-official (de facto) account that creates these? They always strike me as 'karma farming' since it's just a race to create something formulaic and known to be popular. Maybe it's not a problem.
For some reason, this thread is a lot better than that one. Is it timing? The fact that OP has a few sentences? Maybe it's not a problem.