“The Man Who Folded Himself” by David Gerrold. The writing is pretty terrible, but it’s the most fascinating exploration of time travel I’ve seen so far.
Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
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Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dating apps have created a kind of dynamic polygamy in the West, where a minority of 'single' men have many sexual partners per year, women have fewer, and the majority of single men have very few sexual partners.
from the height of my age, I can tell you all that foocking business is grossly overrated.
Perhaps in isolation, but the relationships and family formation which result from it are immensely important for most people's life satisfaction.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#243Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
I'm sure you've heard of it. It's smutty and insane. Oddly reminds me of 1000 Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari with its "rhizomatic" style.
After reading it I find myself in a state of mind that only a couple other works have achieved in me, one of free poetic openness to human experience, particularly when in society. It's a strange experience bordering on solipsism or paranoid schizoprenia but feels very liberating from the demands of stuffy "rational" existence.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#244Finished "When McKinsey Comes to Town" recently. A nice easy read, haunting and funny.
It really goes to town on how the McKinsey consultants working in government and private sector will work both angles to get a favourable outcome to ensure they become indispensable. Also the way McKinsey try to balances a "fair and honest" culture with the real dirty work they do. The section on the UK Public Health Service (NHS) was shocking.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#245Dune! Really enjoying it
There’s a great movie version of it from the 80s by David Lynch. Not so good if you haven’t read the book but I found it oddly, perhaps uniquely, sublime representation of the book after having read Dune. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced art like that where it changed so much after experiencing the source material or some other piece.
It was like a private key/ public key where you need both pieces to match in order to work. (Although I think the book is excellent by itself)
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#246“The Man Who Folded Himself” by David Gerrold. The writing is pretty terrible, but it’s the most fascinating exploration of time travel I’ve seen so far.
I love this. Super old school sci-fi-tech madness. Reminded me of an Outer Limits TV show episode.
It's also very similar to what happens in the movie Predestination.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#247The Wandering Inn [1], Stories of an alternate world somehow connected to a certain innkeeper of the said inn. Features extensive world building, character building, Lots of fleshed out characters, contains humour as well as serious stuff, has dragons, fae, aliens, time travel, hiveminds, automatons, cute pets, cosmic horrors, history lessons, magic, alchemy and steampunk engineering. It's a bit longish and not finis…
This sounds like a great series and one I'd definitely be interested in. Rothfuss (even more than Martin) has me shying away from starting another, currently unfinished, series.
It's a lot more likely that you will get tired of The Wandering Inn before you catch up to present than that you will run out of source material, I think
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#248"The Chip", second edition. Starts with the invention of the vacuum tube, ends with the US-China chip war. In between, you learn that the first semiconductors were hand-make, using a clay mud on bulk substrate to protect areas to be etched. Fair warning, he leaves out as much interesting material as he left in.
In a similar vein, "Chip War" by Chris Miller is a more recent look at this. Not at all as dry as I expected it to be, surprisingly gripping for someone who didn't previously know much about this. It also provides a lot of historical context for the recent news of TSMC setting up factories in the US and Germany.
I thoroughly enjoyed "the chip war". From the history perspective, the technology perspective, the politics and even the human side of it. How people growing up in the misery of ww2 went on build something that ended up shaping the world we live in.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#249"This is how you lose the time war". It's by two authors. Light read. I bought it because it was inexpensive and I the title was a "me-shaped" hook. :) I chuckled after a few pages, after about 1/3rd I couldn't put it down, or read it fast enough. Challenging, as it started to rain during my walk to work (as evidenced by the dozen wrinkly pages towards the end). The next day as I read, I was pacing around my apartmen…
I read that after reading Gladstone's scifi book[1]. I liked the poetic and emotional nature of it, but I thought it tried too hard to be both that and a science fiction story. When I tried to grasp at the scifi aspect, it felt like I was grasping at air.
[1] _Empress of Forever_, while not poetic, I thought had interesting ideas that were more fleshed out. A lack of focus kept it out of top-tier scifi like Simmons' Hyperion for me, but it's worth a read if you like high-concept scifi like that.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#250I just read Outlive by Peter Attia and Bill Gifford [0] and liked it for how it made me think about fitness as part of life into old age and not just a specific thing to do in order to accomplish something (run a race, climb a mountain, etc). So I’ve incorporated some shifts in training to prepare for the “Centenarian Olympics.”
Kind of long and seems like a book just as a focal point but give Attia a break because he has hundreds (thousands?) of hours of podcasts and blog posts as well.
Although it must be nice to do the expensive tests his clients do, the book did give me some affordable tests that I ran to identify additional cholesterol labs beyond what my doc normally runs (Lpa and ApoB) and that was an immediate help. Also while I won’t pay for a proper VO2Max test, I do pay more attention to my watches estimation.