Ask HN: Which book are you reading these days?

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty

Bayesian Data Analysis by Andrew Gelman et al.

I read all those books! You read the Dune series too?

I read three books at a time, and only pick up/start/buy a new one once I finish one. Helps acquiring a large back log of unread literature around the apartment. :)

  * Labyrinths - Jorge Louis Borges [0]

I believe HN was the reason I picked this up, if I remember correctly. It's a collection of short stories, each of which can be finished in a night, which is satisfying. I really dig his writing style and fantastical nature of the stories. I've done a bit of philosophical reading but a lot of the references he makes go over my head, leaving me to do a bit of research after each story.

  * The Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman [1]

Picked this up after finishing Debbie Millman's How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer [2] (Misleading title, I would 100% recommend this book to anyone). I'm not sure what I expected, but so far this hasn't been satisfying. The first couple of chapters have been laying out a framework and defining terms. Considering swapping this out for Jon Kolko's Well Designed - How to Use Empathy To Create Products People Love [3], which seemed much more actionable after picking it up at Barnes and Noble.

  * Real World OCaml - Yaron Minsky, Anil Madhavapeddy, Jason Hickey [4]

Second time picking this up, originally read up to chapter on Functors over the summer. I started over this time and I'm about finished with the first section, "Language Concepts", now. It's worth noting that the entire text is available online for free on the book's website. [5] I did some Scheme in high school and read through the fist half of SICP and dabble in functional js, but this is my first experience with a semi pure functional language and I'm loving it. I'm going through the functional challenges on Hackerrank in OCaml at the same time to solidify some of the language concepts. Decided to go with OCaml over Haskell or Clojure because I'm super interested in using/contributing to Mirage OS [6]

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Labyrinths-Directions-Paperbook-Jorge-...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465050654

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Think-Like-Great-Graphic-Designer/dp/1...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Well-Designed-Empathy-Create-Products-...

[4] http://www.amazon.com/Real-World-OCaml-Functional-programmin...

[5] https://realworldocaml.org/v1/en/html/index.html

[6] http://openmirage.org/

edit: formatting

These notes may help a little bit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2yys1i/lets_start_...

http://godel-escher-bach.wikia.com/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_...

Neuromancer by William Gibson. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke. A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, both by Vernor Vinge.

Also, the Culture series by Iain M. Banks, but I would recommend not starting with the first published book, Consider Phlebas. YMMV, but I personally found it hard to get in to and almost didn't continue the series. Later I read lots of reviews of the second book, The Player of Games, and decided to give it a chance and have since read most of the remaining books. I have now gone back and re-read Consider Phlebas and love it now that I have a better handle on the setting, universe, and concepts from the series, but I definitely feel that The Player of Games is a much better intro into the series.