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

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141–150 of 651 posts

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

#141
Unsong by Scott Alexander

A delightful, completed serial that tells an alternate story of the world since 1968, when Apollo 8 crashed into the crystal fabric of the sky and fundamentally broke the machinery of the universe. Now science no longer works, the old ways have power and sometimes people go to bed on Monday to wake up on Wednesday.

I loved the way the fiction intertwined with reality.

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

#142
post #24

Children 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.

More of what makes the first one good. Def read if you liked the first. Not as good in terms of how attached you get to the characters. The ending of the first was brilliant IMO, and the ending of the second was a bit of a let down. I think it almost would have been better if he left the Chekhov's gun introduced towards the end up to the reader's imagination, instead of going into it explicitly.

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

#144

The Dispossessed , by Ursula K. Le Guin. It identified so many of the "edges" of society and how I think about and interact with the world, on a daily basis. Without a doubt one of the best books I've ever read. Maybe even the best. The only other book that came close this year was Robert Sapolsky's A Primate's Memoir .

[deleted]

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

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read snowcrash as a teen but Cryptonomicon was my reintroduction to Neal Stevenson as an adult and it got me hooked.

Is it worth the effort? I've picked up snow crash a few times in the past 20 years and found it a hard read. I really want to enjoy it but I find it hard to swallow. I suppose it has been hard because it doesn't take itself seriously. My sci-fi reading history has been: - several William Gibson novels between 1995-2008 - Most of the ender's game series and home coming from 80's to 2008. - Between 2008 and 2018 I read…

the first chapter of snowcrash is one of my favorite chapters in any book i’ve ever read. the rest of the book is great and goes into some really bizarre territory on how to manipulate humans, as well as looking at the effects of a truly decentralized economy + metaverse. it’s really forward looking and prescient for a book that was written in 1988-91.

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

#147
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I hope it continues to live up to the hype you've heard. I had a hard letdown, but I hope that doesn't happen for you.

I tried to read Cryptonomicon as a first introduction to Stephenson. Kept waiting for the good parts, and actually just stopped reading halfway through out of sheer boredom. A few years later and I read Seveneves. Absolutely fall in love, and read Anathem right after. Loved it too. To this day I still don’t understand why the first book felt so boring and the others didn’t. To make it worse, when you go looking for a…

haha! I felt the same way about Seveneves, although I guess that doesn’t have as much hype. The premise for the opening chapter was so cool, and then the exhaustive descriptions of spaceships and orbital mechanics and what not was just too dry. Maybe I’ll give it another attempt in a few years.

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

#148
Atlas Shrugged: the danger of communism/socialism and how close we are to a collapse. It’s easy to see the excess of the right and capitalisms, not so easy to spot when it’s going too far left.

a hunter-gatherer’s guide to the 21st century: How the hyper-novel environment that we build for ourselves is not serving our physical and mental health. Very interesting to see how the downside to our technological progress. With the technology always accelerating, the side effects too are greater and greater.

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read snowcrash as a teen but Cryptonomicon was my reintroduction to Neal Stevenson as an adult and it got me hooked.

Is it worth the effort? I've picked up snow crash a few times in the past 20 years and found it a hard read. I really want to enjoy it but I find it hard to swallow. I suppose it has been hard because it doesn't take itself seriously. My sci-fi reading history has been: - several William Gibson novels between 1995-2008 - Most of the ender's game series and home coming from 80's to 2008. - Between 2008 and 2018 I read…

Give the Three Body Problem series a try, I think you’ll enjoy it immensely.
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