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

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

#251

Post by halpert »

legobmw99 wrote: post #76
cushychicken wrote: post #17

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 .

Highly recommend Left Hand of Darkness if you haven’t read it yet

I was very excited to read LHoD after hearing so many glowing reviews, but it didn't resonate with me at all. I kind of regret spending the time to read it. Curious what you took away from it?

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

#252

Post by mrich »

daveed wrote: post #162

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster - by billg From my level of background knowledge, it was really well-written. He talks about how to think about emissions, and breaks down global emissions into its biggest categories (eg. transportation, electricity generation, etc). As well as promising methods for decreasing emissions in each of these classes. I think the style would really suit a HN audience.

Can also recommend. It provides a great overview of the climate change problem and all the components of the solution we have, the economics of them, and what is still missing. This gets you up to speed on what will change in your life in the future. I believe it also provides a nice insight into Bill Gates' investment portfolio, quite a few of the startups working on solutions to the climate crisis are part of it.

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

#254

Post by Rebelgecko »

kgm wrote: post #58

I just finished a re-read of the "Commonweal" series by Graydon Saunders, which begins with The March North : https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=MoIOAwAAQBAJ I've never been sure how to sum up these books. They're thoroughly strange fantasy books, oddly written and frequently chewy reads. They have an interest in politics and metaphysics; but they also have magical railguns, the sorcerous application of F…

Thanks for providing the link. It was surprisingly hard to find places to buy the book

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

#256

Post by wahnfrieden »

_ugfj wrote: post #199
wahnfrieden wrote: post #146

The new Graeber, Dawn of Everything Completely tears apart recent trendy anthro books like Sapiens for ignoring both old and very new research and tries to set a new framework for understanding humanity’s potential

This book is lovely. It made me reflect on our current state of affairs. Covid was and still is a test of the value systems of the so called "Western" or "first world" societies. We have failed this test through and through. On a local level, many people didn't care about their communities enough to mask and vaxx and in turn the communities had no way to pressure them. Many, many people have mental health problems --…

It pairs well with Mark Fisher

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

#257

Post by marttt »

AlexanderTheGr8 wrote: post #250
marttt wrote: post #243

"My Struggle" series by Karl Ove Knausgård [1]. The whole series is 3600 pages in six books, and I read four of them this year. Why on earth am I reading ridiculously detailed reports on some Norwegian guy's personal life, I thought. His divorce, parenting struggles, creative aspirations as a writer, sexual aspirations as an adolescent, in-depth descriptions on how his dad became an alcoholic, etc. Why am I reading t…

Sunk cost fallacy [1]? Or was there something actually interesting in the book? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost

Ha, great parallel, thanks for pointing to this, but I think not. More likely, since I've had literary ambitions myself, I was really curios to find out what exactly keeps me immersed in this book. Technically, how does the author accomplish this? I have some clues: simple, casual language with occasional to-the-point metaphors, lots of dialogues, then stream-of consciousness-sections and philosophical cross-references out of the blue, hundreds and hundres of pages with no chapters, etc. Knausgård sure knows how to keep a strong pace. It's somewhat a mashup of all sorts of things, and so is life, isn't it?

In a way, it's like the Perl programming language, lol: often times impossible to read, and often times impossible to not read. Easy to get immersed in all that mess.

But I'm not entirely satisfied with that answer.

(Though, wow, man, grabbing in Perl -- this sure has to be the best ever metaphor used to describe the style of Knausgård's book.)

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

#258

Post by KerryJones »

gordon_freeman wrote: post #107

Foundation- this book blew my mind. What I found fascinating about it is that it’s a science fiction book but at its core it’s about how to resolve Geopolitical issues using diplomacy. It feels like this should be a primer for anyone who wants to understand and improve modern geopolitics.

Interesting. I read this book and became entirely disenchanted about the series (initially very excited as it was a favorite of my dad's, the TV show came out, Bill Gate, etc.).

A couple of the issues I had: - The story is a bit contradictory in that "Psychohistory can't predict the live of 1 person" and then the story repetitively relies on a single person to pull people through Seldon Crises.

- The entire story is a stereo typical "battle of wits" and you can instantly predict who will win/lose by their emotionality (if they are emotional, they will lose, if they are calm, they will win).

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

#259

Post by Rebelgecko »

OnionBlender wrote: post #136
singlow wrote: post #118

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…

A protip for Snow Crash is that you can just skip ahead 5-10 pages whenever there's an info dump about Babylonian grammar or the history of herpes simplex. You'll miss a bit, but not much. However if the first chapter doesn't get your interest at least a little piqued you probably won't enjoy the rest of the book any more.

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

#260

Post by 100k »

During the pandemic, I got heavily into the "Revolutions" podcast, and I wondered about these "liberal nobles" who were always cropping up trying to push for civil rights. So I wanted to read something about the history of liberalism. The typical story is "John Locke, Adam Smith, America's founding fathers (rah rah), John Stuart Mill, etc."

But Helena Rosenblatt's "The Lost History of Liberalism" makes a really strong argument that this anglo-centric definition of liberalism is counter-historical, and liberalism as a named, coherent political ideology developed in France after the French Revolution.

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