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Ask HN: What are the best books you've ever read?

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41–49 of 49 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are the best books you've ever read?

#41
The Overstory by Richard Powers - an intertwining of lives, as witnessed by the oldest beings on Earth, putting things into a rather different perspective.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi - compassion and redemption, set in a terrifyingly plausible near future where the oil and tech companies have been replaced by gene and agro conglomerates. Calories or joules, it’s just energy.

Weaveworld by Clive Barker - a dark, fantastical yarn of vivid (sometimes grotesque) imagery, spinning a new take on the oldest tale, that of good vs. evil.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best books you've ever read?

#42

Blue Nights by Joan Didion, in which she grieves the death of her forty-something daughter, just a few years after her abusive husband died suddenly from a heart attack. The contrast between her gorgeous but also coldly precise writing, the grieving mother vs the lauded writer, the tension of watching her muse (very delicately, very distantly) on the nature of being an adoptive mother and wondering as a reader: what…

I couldn’t relate to a single line in that book even though I’m a father to two daughters. Very directed towards women.

This is an interesting comment. I think part of the mystique of Joan Didion's persona and her autobiographical writing is the fact that she is a wildly, and fascinatingly, unrelatable person, regardless of the reader's gender.

The point of her writing generally isn't to reflect to reader. And what makes her autobiographical writing so compelling is the the way she dissects her own supremely unrelatable life and emotional landscape.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best books you've ever read?

#43
A few that haven’t been mentioned:

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford is a historical fiction story about the mathematicians and engineers who tried to optimize the Soviet economy.

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende is much deeper and more interesting than any of the theatrical versions. Reminiscent of the Matrix sequels, the Childlike Empress threatens to crash Fantastica with a stack overflow (via infinite recursion) to force Bastian to give her a name.

American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin goes into much more detail than the film (Oppenheimer).

Re: Ask HN: What are the best books you've ever read?

#48
Here are books I recommend to everyone and got me interested in economics and philosophy:

- The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner

- The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes by Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein

- Wittgenstein's Poker by David Edmonds and John Eidinow

- A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

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