Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?

Deep Work by Cal Newport - Could be summed up in a blog post. 3/5 (for the message; lower otherwise - maybe 2-2.5/5)

Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount - Could be summed up in a blog post, but I think he makes a point on cold calling - if you need to do it, suck it up and do it. And that about sums it up. 2.5/5 (message is decent and he does offer some tips)

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke - Liked it, but unsure that I'll continue. 3.5/5.

White Fang by Jack London - Enjoyable and descriptive. Had to power through, though. 3.5/5

Treasure Island by RLS - Absolutely loved it. Now I need to power through the 800ish episodes of One Piece. 4/5

King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table by Roger Lancelyn Green - The story moves pretty fast. 4/5

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford - Khan as a historical figure fascinates me and I enjoyed this book. Don't know if it's just me, but Weatherford does seem to handwave Mongol atrocities. 4/5

Genghis Khan and the Quest for God by Jack Weatherford - Again, enjoyable. 3.5/5

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett - Charming and enjoyable story. 4/5

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell - Pretty sure this is the first book I ever read that's written from an animal's POV. I liked it. 4/5

The Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson (Penguin Classic) - I really liked it. Helped me understand a bit more about Norse mythology. 4.5/5

Rejection Proof by Jia Jiang - I read this earlier in the year; it's about a guy who asked people ridiculous things in an effort to see if they'd say yes or no. I believe the thesis boils down to "Don't be afraid to ask; people say yes more often than you think." Was an enjoyable read. 4/5

My Antonia by Willa Cather (Oxford World Classic) - Really good read and not that long of a book. 4.5/5.

Apollo 8 by Jeffrey Kluger - As the title implies, it's about the Apollo 8 mission. Same guy who wrote the biography on Neil Armstrong. 3/5.

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling - Charming short stories that Kipling told his daughter until she died. 3.5/5

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain - Was assigned this in high school but didn't read it then. Read it now. I missed out; it's a good book, but I think it's relatively boring until Tom starts going out with Huck a bit more. 3.5/5

The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame - Best book I've ever read on friendship and its importance. 4.5/5

Only surprises for me were Apollo 8, which I didn't like as much as I liked the Neil Armstrong biography; Tom Sawyer, in that I liked it; and that Deep Work and Fanatical Prospecting seemed a lot more bloated than they should've been. Besides that, I'm happy I didn't read any books that I didn't like, but I suppose I didn't take many risks either.

Paul Nahin - The Logician and the Engineer. About Boole and Shannon's work; I had already learned the material so i skimmed part of it and returned it to the library.

Ian Mortimer - The time traveler's guide to medieval england. Talks about what daily life was like for different social classes in 14th century England eg towns & cities, food, clothes, housing, employment, travel etc. I got about halfway through and lost interest in the subject matter.

Lucio Russo - The forgotten Revolution. A very readable academic history of the development of science in ptolomaic egypt (eg euclid, archimedes, etc). This was certainly the most surprising book I read all year. This time period has been almost completely deleted from history, which jumps straight from aristotle to the renaissance (with a quick stop in the islamic world if you're being spoiled), and their achievements were incredibly impressive!

Jim al-Khalili - The House of Wisdom. A pop-history book about arabic science that i got from the library. I was wary because it's written by a particle physicist and not a historian, and sure enough it is filled with so much nonsense that I through it down in disgust after a few chapters.

Colin Pask - Magnificent Principia. A brief tour of some of the highlights of Newton's Principia, using both newton's geometric diagrams and modern notation. Following the modern notation of course assumes some basic calculus. Highly recommended - it made me want to learn old fashioned celestial mechanics! Perhaps in 2019...

Randall Munroe - What if. A fun light read about whimsical scenarios.

Sigmund - Exact thinking in demented times. About the vienna circle, the philosophical group associated with logical positivism.

Newman [ed] - The world of mathematics vol 1. A varied Collection of mathematical writings, both contemporary and historical.

Richard J Evans - The Coming of the Third Reich. Evans has recently written a three volume treatment of the third Reich. this is of course the first and starts with the origins of the modern form of antisemitism in the late 19th century. I hope to read the next two in 2019!

Robert Harper - Practical foundations for programming languages. I've mostly just skimmed it so my understanding is quite superficial, maybe in a year or two I'll go through and do all the exercises. I liked that he avoided 'paradigms' and developed the subject more systematically. The book's table of contents is absolutely irresistible!

Tolkien - the Hobbit. I finally got around to reading it... I didn't care for it. I started the lord of the rings but i don't think i'm going to finish it.

Michael Chriton - Jurassic Park. The movie was better.

Agatha Christie - Murder on the Orient Express. I think i just don't like fiction. The few years before this I tried reading more fancy literature and i didn't like that, so this year I tried more popular literature... Recently i heard someone say they thought that history spoiled fiction for them. I think I've suffered the same problem.

Findlay & O'Rourke - Power and Plenty. (in progress) An economic history of the 2nd millennium, absolutely fascinating so far. The discussion of the black death was particularly memorable. It's become something of a meme to point out how the peasant survivors were economically better off than their parents and grandparents. In fact that effect was limited to western europe. In eastern europe the economics were different and feudalism deepened, and in the arab world the reaction was different still: (if i remember my reading correctly) it was certain sects of military men who came out on top. I'm bringing it up because it is a perfect reminder that reality is more complicated than memes.

Robert Harper - Programming in Standard ML. (in progress) Online notes about functional programming.

Henry James - The American. This book is about an American who'd made his fortune in business and goes to the old world looking for a wife, so it goes into differences of capitalist vs. aristocratic worldviews. The main character is a bit of a Mary Sue and the author later repudiated his work as being sentimental, but it was surprisingly engrossing. 5/5

The Red and the Black - Stendhal. This book was superbly entertaining. It is written by Stendhal who is the father of realist literature. It is similar to Dostoevsky, but takes a more light-hearted tone. If you are an introvert like me but curious about what makes people tick, you too will find fascinating the same penetrating passages into human psyche as Dostoevsky, but not as much philosophy. I loved this book. 5/5

The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal. This book is very similar to the previous one, except it's about Italians instead of the French. Read it if you're a Dostoevsky fan or if you enjoyed the previous book. This book is about the adventure of an Italian aristocrat who falls in love with Napoleonic ideals and travels to France only to see the French defeated at Waterloo. Then he spends the rest of life wondering whether he contributed to the French cause. 5/5

E. E. Cummings - The Enormous Room. This book is based on a real story of the author's actual experiences as someone who volunteered for WWI as a medic on the allied side only to be wrongfully arrested by the French police and interned in a giant room with several dozen others for over a year. There are many colourful characters, but I didn't enjoy this one so much. 3.5/5

John Steinbeck - Cannery Row. This book is about a poor community in Monterey, Califor ia during the Great Depression. I didn't like this book as much as Grapes of Wrath, but there are some memorable parts near the end. 4/5

Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains of the Day. This book is about the reminiscences of a butler who in his younger days served a respected aristocrat, and gets clues that his master's reputation has come become suspect. He questions whether his life's work was worth it in the end. This book wasn't very engrossing, but I liked the part about the romance. 4/5

David Kushner - Masters Of Doom: How Two Guys Created An Empire And Transformed Pop Culture. I read this book after someone wrote an excerpt on HN. It was fun to read about how two Johns created a revolution in video games and fun to learn tidbits about a legendary 100x dev like Carmack. 4.5/5

Josef Lhevinne - Basic Principles in Pianoforte Playing. I like how he drew differences between quarter, half and three-quarter staccatos. Learning about distinctions like this can definitely make you a better piano player. 5/5

[1] http://www.openculture.com/2013/05/ernest_hemingways_reading...

Story Themes Cast of characters Topics Praise International Editions Covering a span of sixty years, the graphic novel Logicomix was inspired by the epic story of the quest for the Foundations of Mathematics.

This was a heroic intellectual adventure most of whose protagonists paid the price of knowledge with extreme personal suffering and even insanity. The book tells its tale in an engaging way, at the same time complex and accessible. It grounds the philosophical struggles on the undercurrent of personal emotional turmoil, as well as the momentous historical events and ideological battles which gave rise to them.

The role of narrator is given to the most eloquent and spirited of the story’s protagonists, the great logician, philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell. It is through his eyes that the plights of such great thinkers as Frege, Hilbert, Poincaré, Wittgenstein and Gödel come to life, and through his own passionate involvement in the quest that the various narrative strands come together.