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Ask HN: Best book you read in 2011

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Re: Ask HN: Best book you read in 2011

#131

Post by davidw »

vm wrote: post #130

* Steve Jobs biography. I couldn't put it down and I'm shocked there aren't more fans on HN For those who liked Malkiel's Random Walk, read: * Ben Graham's Intelligent Investor * Philip Fisher's Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits They counter Malkiel's thesis (yup, he's wrong) and Warren Buffet credits both men for teaching him how to invest. True classics.

I read both Malkiel's book and Grahams' book this year and was much more convinced by the former, especially in the context of just wanting to put some money away and not work at it too much - although to his credit, Graham also says that investors like this should not be all that active.

I think reading both is not a bad idea, but for those of us not in a position to crack open a company's books like someone like Buffet can do, I'm not convinced of the wisdom of trying to beat the market at determining which companies are 'value' companies.

Re: Ask HN: Best book you read in 2011

#132

Post by cafard »

Perhaps best, certainly most depressing (and 20 pages or so to go, but there's time left yet): Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder, http://www.powells.com/s?kw=bloodlands

Very good, long: China Marches West: The Quing Conquest of Central Eurasia by Peter C. Perdue, http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780674057432-0

Odd, interesting, relatively short: Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues by George Berkeley, http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780674057432-0

Techie: Effective Perl Programming by Joseph Hall, http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780321496942-0

Re: Ask HN: Best book you read in 2011

#133

Post by jswinghammer »

For me they were:

"An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought" by Murray Rothbard

This was great because of the history lesson packed into a book that's mostly about economics. I didn't realize how libertarian the economic thought of the east was until I read this book. I also appreciated the focus on economics before Adam Smith since I knew only about Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas's contributions prior to reading the book. Rothbard's take-down of Marx was both thorough and satisfying.

"City of God" by Augustine of Hippo

The history lesson here was helpful as was the perspective on how the church should view the state though I should have invested more money in a better version for Kindle. The version I had was filled with grammatical mistakes due to the poor translation to the Kindle format.

Re: Ask HN: Best book you read in 2011

#134

Post by patrickk »

pplante wrote: post #10

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World A scary tale about the collapse of the various markets across the globe. I constantly had to keep checking to see if the book was from the fiction section. The stories are so far out there it seemed unreal.

Second this. I'm a huge Michael Lewis fan. If you enjoyed this, I would recommend reading (in the following order):

- Liar's Poker. Lewis' account of how the bond market really got huge in the 80's. The book that put him on the map. He was a bond salesman in Solomon Brothers investment bank, a really interesting read with many larger than life characters. An insider account on how companies and financial institutions gorged themselves in debt.

- The Big Short. In a way this is like a "sequel" to Liar's Poker (weird to say for non-fiction I know), as the 20 year "story arc" from the grow of junk bonds, to the massive deleveraging due to the subprime mortgage collapse is examined. He also follows the stories of those canny enough to stack up massive bets in anticipation of the collapse.

Finance is a boring topic generally, but Lewis focuses on the characters and is a superb storyteller. He has a real knack for being able to explain these complex, earth-shattering events in a way that those of us without PhD's in quantitative finance can understand.

Re: Ask HN: Best book you read in 2011

#135

Post by zackzackzack »

Aramgutang wrote: post #85

"The 4-Hour Body", by Tim Ferriss. Because of that book, within 3 months I went from running completely out of breath after 2 minutes of running, to finishing a half-marathon in 2 hours. And during the prior 3 months, I had lost 15 kilos by following the "slow-carb diet" described in the book. Reading it seemed to flip a switch in my brain: before, I would think of my body as something I had little control over, whil…

Tim Ferriss is like Wikipedia to me. It's a good place to start, but you will be mocked and humiliated if you only read that material.

Re: Ask HN: Best book you read in 2011

#137

Post by nyellin »

alinajaf wrote: post #62
jasondrowley wrote: post #36

I'm going to be on the receiving end of a great deal of vitriol for saying The Bible and the Koran, but sitting down and reading those two books—for the first time in my 21-year existence—was a really interesting experience. I'm not going to turn this into a personal essay. I realized—after reading both books with a critical eye—that there are a lot of trumped-up claims made about each books' contents that ultimately…

As someone who's made the transtion from muslim -> atheist, I was disappointed, confused and terrified when I first read a translation of the Koran. I'm genuinely curious as to what you've learned from it that's of any use, apart from perhaps, a deeper understanding of the thought-process and ethos of Islamic fundamentalists.

Your reaction seems very strange. Can you explain why you had never read the koran if you were muslim?

Re: Ask HN: Best book you read in 2011

#140

Post by g3orge »

Aramgutang wrote: post #85

"The 4-Hour Body", by Tim Ferriss. Because of that book, within 3 months I went from running completely out of breath after 2 minutes of running, to finishing a half-marathon in 2 hours. And during the prior 3 months, I had lost 15 kilos by following the "slow-carb diet" described in the book. Reading it seemed to flip a switch in my brain: before, I would think of my body as something I had little control over, whil…

yes. I highly recommend this book. And I can't wait for his new book, "The 4-Hour Chef".
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