Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 396 posts

Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?

#192

Post by arethuza »

I recently, by accident, read two books that worked really well together:

One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

The Bill Bryson book is, I think, a work of subtle genius - he makes stuff that I would normally have no interest in absolutely fascinating (e.g. baseball).

It was purely accidental that I read these in the order I did and so close together - but the extensive descriptions of the adventures of Lindbergh and other aviators did provide a great background for the Roth novel.

Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?

#196

Post by arethuza »

saryant wrote: post #42

1) Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation by Edward Chancellor Everything from the tulip craze to the dotcom boom. 2) If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look On My Face? by Alan Alda Alan Alda of MASH fame teaches you how to build more empathy and improve your communication skills. 3) Bad Blood by James Carreyou Theranos. Enough said. 4) Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in…

The Steve Coll book is pretty disturbing - e.g. the CIA hints on "How to spot a terrorist" including things like "Keeps insisting on their innocence when tortured", "Keeps asking for to see a lawyer or a doctor" etc.

Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?

#197

Post by arethuza »

mojoe wrote: post #70
pbnjay wrote: post #14

For sci-fi recs: I recently read The Three-body Problem by Cixin Liu (a trilogy) and thought it was really good. Also just started another sci-fi trilogy with A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge which has some really fun and interesting (if hand-wavy) ideas about deep space physics.

Those two are fantastic, and if you like Vernor Vinge check out "A Deepness in the Sky" -- I think it's his best work, and is much more plausible (centered around slower-than-light travel). I have a few more recommendations in that vein here: http://compellingsciencefiction.com/blog/2016-12-18.html

Not sure that "plausible" is the word I would use - they are both set explicitly in the same universe with the same "physics" - Deepness just being a bit more subtle about it as the characters don't know about the Zones of Thought - but the Zones are central to the book and the ending.

Edit: Having said that, the concept of "focus" in Deepness is utterly terrifying - particularly as it seems very plausible and, as is noted in the book, some people might willingly submit to it (relevant to HN!).

Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?

#198

Post by nindalf »

arthurk wrote: post #150

Sapiens/Homo Deus - History of Humankind. Also goes into topics of how money came to be and evolved over time. Homo Deus is the follow up book by the same author which focuses on humanity’s future. Shoe Dog - Nike founder Phil Knight shares the story of the company’s early days. Chasing the Scream - History and impact of drug criminalisation (War on Drugs). The author describes the War on Drugs (mostly in US but also…

I loved Sapiens. It has a couple of ideas that help explain so much of our world - really powerful ideas. Once you know them they seem so obvious and you feel like you should have thought of that yourself. For example, (spoilers for human history ahead), our civilations are based on agriculture and very few hunter gatherers remain. But that doesn't mean that people consciously chose one over the other. It's just that for various reasons, agriculture is a more "viral" idea that spread more efficiently than the alternative. Ditto with monotheistic vs polytheistic religions.

Homo Deus... less so. It rehashes a lot of Sapiens and I found it a bit of a drag. The introduction is worth reading though. He recounts all the progress we've made as a species, which would surprise people who think our world is growing worse by the day.

Chasing the Scream was amazing. Nothing more to be said.

The book I learned the most from was probably The Dictator's Handbook. Again, a very simple idea - how can we predict a politician/leader's behaviour based on a simple assumption - they will try their best to stay employed. The authors manage to explain almost all of how politics works based on this one single idea. If you're one of those people who likes to try-before-they-buy, here's a trailer of the book - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

Re: Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?

#199

Post by elvinyung »

oscarpas wrote: post #112
elvinyung wrote: post #110

Lots of entrepreneurial suggestions here already, so I'm going do something different by suggesting more humanities-focused books/papers that could help round out our understanding of the state of things: * Status Update by Alice Marwick - an ethnography of the SF tech scene in the mid-late 2000s, a very detailed examination of the status structures in Silicon Valley and how we were changed by the rise of social medi…

On the same note I’d recommend Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. Written in research driven prose, it details the relationships between a handfull of landlords and tenants in some of the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee.

Thanks for the recommend! I just read the excerpt in the New Yorker [1]. Geez, this is some heartbreaking stuff, a an even more sobering account of the neoliberalization of urbanism than Solnit's book.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/forced-out

Post reply on HN