Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?

* "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress Hardcover," by Steven Pinker -- even if you disagree with him about some things (for example, on principle), the book is really worth a slow, careful read.

* "The Better Angels of Our Nature," also by Steven Pinker -- in many ways, this is a precursor to the above book, and also worth a careful read. In particular, I found it eye-opening to learn how much everyday violence human beings have inflicted on each other throughout history, and how remarkably non-violent most lives are today, by comparison, in more developed economies.

It's about making decisions based on facts rather than feelings and setting a few common misconceptions straight. Such as that the world is going to shit (we've been doing great in reducing worldsuck), violence is increasing (it's not), that most people on the planet don't get vaccinated (globally, 90% of one-year-olds have some vaccination), etc. It provides practical methods to understand better how things work, for example the graph of world population growing exponentially in the past century is something that looks unsustainable, but the truth is that it's slowing down (I think many people know this nowadays, the book is already showing its age two years down the road) and that families are getting smaller when health increases, irrespective of religion or geographical location.

Of course, we have an absolute emergency regarding our CO2 emissions and the ongoing 6th extinction event, that's not what this book is about. The book just shows we've been doing great and how to get a better sense of reality and what's important. I think it's a positive and helpful foundation for putting the current status of humans on this planet into perspective.

In fact I think it would be really good if everyone did read this book. I've made a preview that includes part of the first chapter that you can use to make a decision whether this book is something for you, send me an email if you want to take a look (not sharing publicly because it's in the grey area of fair use). I'm also willing to help with the purchasing price if you can't afford it, somehow non English versions are twice as expensive. Note that I have zero affiliation with the author or anything, I just think everyone should read this material.

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On the fiction side, The Martian is my all time favorite. It's very entertaining, clever, and even educative if you like to learn about space stuff.

If you enjoy that, you'll probably also enjoy The Expanse (last, 9th, book is coming out next winter probably).

A little bit further out but also a similar genre are the books from Daniel Suarez, all of which I can recommend as well, though not all of his books are from the last decade.

Edit: just found another comment about factfulness, it's accurate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21902411

It's a good middle point on the understanding of 'mastery' that Gladwell started in the late oughts and whose meme of '10k hours' kinda infected a lot of pop-psych and MBAs. Epstein argues that there are areas where 10k hours work, but limits very much exist. His thesis is that you have to know your environment and that most environments are too chaotic for just grinding out hours. A larger Range of knowledge/experience is likely a better strategy for many areas of life.

I gave copies of the book out as a thank you note/gift after an interview, as I think the book is really good and that the firm could get something out of reading it; that even if they did not hire me, it would help them.

I know that's a bit looney, but it worked. I got my dream job and a hefty pay raise, great benefits, and a short commute.

Literally, the book changed my life.

[0] https://www.davidepstein.com/the-range/

Management & Leadership : High Output Management, Presence Based Leadership, Leaders Guide to Story Telling & Dare to Lead

The Circle is "preaching to the church" as we say. Anyone who reads that book already is aware of all the concerns it raises. The one thing it doesn't do is answer the question whether it might be a good thing and indeed force us to be better if everything is recorded all the time. It's open ended. There is literally no point to reading this book, and on top of that the first 2/3rds are written like a third grader might write a report of a very dull person's life.

Not sure I've read many other books that I ended up hating. For example, Dan Ariely's Dollars and Sense was as average as his Predictably Irrational was good/entertaining, but I didn't hate it.