Debt: The First 5000 Years by great late David Graeber. It opened up my mind to a whole new reality which was hidden in plain sight.
Audiobook is USD $4.19 on Audible through Sept 23, 2022.
Ask HN: Which books you have read till now that were worth investing time in?
161–170 of 211 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which books you have read till now that were worth investing time in?
#162That would be a long list, given that I read a lot of books and would generally say that most of the books I've read were worth investing time in to some extent. But for what it's worth, here's a subset, cribbed from my previous HN comments:
Something Deeply Hidden - Sean Carroll
The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Math Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets - Graham Farmelo
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth - Paul Hoffman
The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan - Robert Kanigel
Lost in Math - Sabine Hossenfelder
The First Three Minutes - Steven Weinberg
Hyperspace - Michio Kaku
Not Even Wrong - Peter Woit
The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin
About Time - Paul Davies
Time Reborn - Lee Smolin
The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene
The Hidden Reality - Brian Greene
The Fabric of the Cosmos - Brian Greene
Quantum Space: Loop Quantum Gravity and the Search for the Structure of Space, Time, and the Universe - Jim Baggott
The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Math Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets - Graham Farmelo
Three Roads To Quantum Gravity - Lee Smolin
Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos - Seth Lloyd
Higgs - The invention and discovery of the 'God Particle' - Jim Baggott
Analogy Making As Perception - Melanie Mitchell
Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky
Engineering General Intelligence, Part 1 - Ben Goertzel
Engineering General Intelligence, Part 2 - Ben Goertzel
The AGI Revolution - Ben Goertzel
Hackers & Painters by our very own Paul "pg" Graham
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Steven Levy
The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder
Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier - Katie Hafner & John Markoff
Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology - Steven Levy
Ghost In The Wires - Kevin Mitnick
The Art of Deception - Kevin Mitnick
The Art of Intrusion - Kevin Mitnick
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
It's Not About The Bike - Lance Armstrong
Ultramarathon Man - Dean Karnazes
Charles Proteus Steinmetz: The Electrical Wizard of Schenectady - Robert Bly
Report From Engine Co 82 - Dennis Smith
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind - Al Ries, Jack Trout and Philip Kotler
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! - Al Ries and Jack Trout
Re-Positioning: Marketing in an Era of Competition, Change and Crisis by Jack Trout and Steve Rivkin
The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding - Al Ries and Laura Ries
Differentiate or Die: Survival in Our Era of Killer Competition - Jack Trout and Steve Rivkin
Marketing High Technology - William H. Davidow
Marketing Warfare - Al Ries
The Discipline of Market Leaders - Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema
Crossing The Chasm - Geoffrey Moore
How to Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard
Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Re: Ask HN: Which books you have read till now that were worth investing time in?
#163Taleb's Incerto (Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game). Opens your eyes to a wide array of fallacies that govern our daily life (unknown unknowns, "experts" explaining past events as obvious in retrospect, the news, predictions, survivorship bias, confirmation bias, iatrogenics and a lot, lot more) — almost to a fault, i.e. if you take it too far, you'll see these fallacies everywhere and t…
Maybe it's just me, but I feel nearly all of Taleb's books should be blog posts instead of full length books. I first read Black Swan a long while back, and two things popped out at me. 1) The author comes across quite snobby and high-handed in his writing (which has translated over time on his Twitter as well for those who follow him on there) and 2) The essence of the book was distillable into a much smaller novella.
Picked up Antifragile and Fooled By Randomness over time just to see if the hype is worth it, but none of the books honestly bowled me over or presented anything enlightening or explored ideas not explored in a better manner elsewhere. I feel like Taleb falls into the same fallacy he preaches about in his books to a large extent. But then again, given his popularity, maybe it's just my opinion.
Re: Ask HN: Which books you have read till now that were worth investing time in?
#164Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari is an obvious recommendation.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell will ruin fiction for you, from the classic myth up to modern storytelling.
Re: Ask HN: Which books you have read till now that were worth investing time in?
#165Opening the Heart of Compassion is one of only a few (and the best imo) English language expositions on the Buddhist model of human psychology and I found it enormously illuminating and applicable. Many get put off by the first section which has a bunch of stuff about Tibetan Buddhist deities, but the sections on the realms in part two are amazing. It also very briefly touches on a transformative practice called aspirational inquiry about investigating your own motivations. It seems to have been independently discovered by Connierae Andreas and is the subject of her book Core Transformation.
Re: Ask HN: Which books you have read till now that were worth investing time in?
#166a controversial opinion to some, and in no way the ideology I subscribe to fully, but the books on unqualified reservations are quite an interesting read, albeit very long winded
Re: Ask HN: Which books you have read till now that were worth investing time in?
#167Robert Greene’s books, in particular 48 Laws of Power and Art of Seduction.
After reading the 48 Laws of Power, and feeling somewhat inspired, I also started with the Art of Seduction. Some red flags started popping up, and upon doing some research I found he heavily puts his personal touch on historical events, which ultimately brought down both books in my eyes.
Isn't this largely true of anything in the self-help genre? Usually they take historical and personal anecdotes and try to weave some thread. They're certainly not academic treatises.
Re: Ask HN: Which books you have read till now that were worth investing time in?
#168The Tao Te Ching is short and beautiful. It can be read in 30 minutes and reflected on for a lifetime. My favorite translation is by Stephen Mitchell.
+1. Amazing book. Derek Lin has a good translation of this book too.
Re: Ask HN: Which books you have read till now that were worth investing time in?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is something you're meant to read through out your life, not in one sitting. Meant by whom? The original authors of the Torah? The various prophets and Kings? The original authors of the New Testament? The Jewish scholars who compiled the Tanakh? The Christian scholars who combined the Septuagint and the New Testament into a single work? Pope Innocent I who ratified the choice of Gospels?
Why are you replying as if you were a teen cringelord? It's not a question of who decided that, but because it's a complex book. And that is also true to pretty much every other religious book in the world, where believers reach to their respective holy texts on a regular basis to study them and have a deeper understanding of their faith.
But the words 'meant to' suggest that it is designed or intended to be read piecemeal over a lifetime, when in fact the history of what we call 'The Bible' makes it clear that this is not true.
Your final sentence is simply not true. Many religions have central texts which are short, unified in style and content, written over one person's lifetime, and intended to be completely read and understood by followers with limited time and educational resources. For example, the Qu'ran.
Re: Ask HN: Which books you have read till now that were worth investing time in?
#170Taleb's Incerto (Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game). Opens your eyes to a wide array of fallacies that govern our daily life (unknown unknowns, "experts" explaining past events as obvious in retrospect, the news, predictions, survivorship bias, confirmation bias, iatrogenics and a lot, lot more) — almost to a fault, i.e. if you take it too far, you'll see these fallacies everywhere and t…
Maybe it's just me, but I feel nearly all of Taleb's books should be blog posts instead of full length books. I first read Black Swan a long while back, and two things popped out at me. 1) The author comes across quite snobby and high-handed in his writing (which has translated over time on his Twitter as well for those who follow him on there) and 2) The essence of the book was distillable into a much smaller novell…
> Maybe it's just me, but I feel nearly all of Taleb's books should be blog posts instead of full length books.
I have the same feeling. Don't get me wrong, I really respect Taleb and his insights. But I skipped a large part of Black Swan because some parts are more literature than insights.