Contemporary:
° Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
° Big Swiss by Jen Beagin
Thriller:
° Barbed Wire Heart by Tess Sharpe
Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
461–470 of 532 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#462Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Man's Search for meaning by Viktor Frankl
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#463Attempt to steer the discussion a bit: has anyone read any good fiction novels lately? I like to always be reading one fiction and one non-fiction book. (My brain can't do two fiction books at once). I already have a bottomless list of recommendations of nonfiction books from threads like this.
If you're looking for a complex fantasy series that will occupy you for a long time, I cannot recommend Malazan Book of the Fallen enough!
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#464Ultralearning by Scott H. Young https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/ultralearning/ > Combining stories of dramatic ultralearning feats with the detailed science on how to learn anything effectively, ULTRALEARNING will transform how you work, live and learn. It made me realise that for most of my life, the things I was doing to try and learn new skills, techniques or technologies was actually more akin to entertainment t…
Would this be useful to someone that's not neurotypical?
As someone who has ADHD/Autism and identifies as neurodivergent, I found it specifically helped me unpick some ways that the way my brain works has created bad habits.
Note: I listened to the audiobook! The anecdotes about incredible learners (such as various language experts, the stardew valley dev as well as various other skills) was also really interesting.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#465Ultralearning by Scott H. Young https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/ultralearning/ > Combining stories of dramatic ultralearning feats with the detailed science on how to learn anything effectively, ULTRALEARNING will transform how you work, live and learn. It made me realise that for most of my life, the things I was doing to try and learn new skills, techniques or technologies was actually more akin to entertainment t…
> was actually more akin to entertainment Could you elaborate?
I found that they were a lot of subjects I’d learned a lot about without directly engaging in the thing itself.
Learning about a programming language, vs actually building stuff in it. Learning the grammatical patterns of a language without speaking it etc.
There’s lots of videos, books and apps which first and foremost want you to be engaged moreso than actually teach you how to do the thing. This sort of context can be really useful, but ultimately one claim the book makes is that the best way to learn is to get as close to doing the thing you want to learn how to do as possible.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would this be useful to someone that's not neurotypical?
YMMV, but I did not find the book to be super insightful or particularly helpful for how my brain works. It spells out a framework that (roughly) boils down to: 0) Pick one topic at a time 1) Learning by doing 2) The doing has to be exercises of deliberate practice that push you 3) Create some type of deadline or pressure to make sure you actually stick to the task. My experience with being self-taught is that I tend…
I think one advantage to bouncing around/being self taught (as I have most typically been too) is it lets you draw connections between seemingly unconnected things!
I think this is something lost in the act of being too focussed on learning one thing at a time!
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#467[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#468Just finished my third reading of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. It really ruined most other history books for me by setting the bar so high.
Hmm is it on par with Years Of Lyndon Johnson? Bc for me that’s the benchmark I can’t see any other history book approaching
I haven't read it so I can't compare them. What I love about TMOTAB is that it provides so much context for what historical events were informing the scientists, politicians and military leaders at the time, and it really gets into the details of nuclear chemistry (starting from before the turn of the century!), the course of the war, and all the policy decisions that were made and why. The many influences of the first world war. The efforts of individuals as well as of nations. You see the entire project at multiple scales, and it also gets into the German and Japanese nuclear weapons programs (which I didn't even know existed until I read the book).
It doesn't just describe the debate about dropping the bomb - it details the bombings of Dresden and Tokyo and other cities from the perspective of the survivors, the crews of the bombers as well as the leaders who ordered the bombings. It describes the resistance of the Japanese at Iwo Jima and other battles which cemented the belief that invading the Japanese homeland would be a bloodbath. And the chapter about the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombs as told by contemporary accounts is gutting.
Even this description is completely omitting a huge part of the book. It's a 53 hour audiobook with zero fluff.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#469I've been slowly going through Divine Proportions: Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry , by Norman J. Wildberger. Wildberger is a mathematician, and a finitist. This means that he doesn't believe in infinity in the modern mathematical sense (I'm sure he won't dispute that the integers are unbound, for example). Which means he does not believe that Real numbers are properly defined either, or that limits are r…
I was thinking about this just the other day. If infinity isn't actually a thing in our universe, then maybe we're taking some risks by using math with all these infinite limits and integers. Maybe if we look at theorems without using infinity, we'd stumble upon new or different equations.
You'd probably enjoy looking into negative infinities, which has been vigorously debated throughout history.
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
#470I just read Outlive by Peter Attia and Bill Gifford [0] and liked it for how it made me think about fitness as part of life into old age and not just a specific thing to do in order to accomplish something (run a race, climb a mountain, etc). So I’ve incorporated some shifts in training to prepare for the “Centenarian Olympics.” Kind of long and seems like a book just as a focal point but give Attia a break because h…
He was just on Sam Harris's podcast talking about the book - I learned a lot from him. Good stuff. Now I just need to lose 50 pounds and get back on the wagon with exercise again ...