191–200 of 231 posts
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering - Fred Brooks. introduced the concept of an essays to me, and that the software wolrd is really as strange as i always felt
of my favorite books, those are probably the two best fitting into HN, since they enlighten in some way :)
Glasshouse by Charles Stross
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -- The Black Swan Sun Tzu -- The Art of War Lao Tzu -- Tao Te Ching
I found the black swan to be unfinishable. It started very (even extremely) well, but then got a lot worse quite rapidly. His attempt to create a structure around anecdotes from his life (and of his acquaintances) does not really work and at times his writing is ego-centric to the point of vulgarity. The main problem however is that it would be much better (for the reader) condensed down as a long essay. Although man…
House of Leaves - What literature should be. Innovative both in design and in prose. It's very long but you can finish it in a maddening evening, it's hilarious, it's terrifying. Along with Steven King's It , one of two books to give me nightmares. Incredibly complex. It's a puzzle I still haven't fully solved. I consider it the first modern-era novel, and expect others will come like it. When I wrote a novel a year…
Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid".
Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies".
Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
I read those when I was 12... then everything I could find by Lem and Huxley too.
All Quiet on the Western Front - Remarque