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

Ask HN: What are your favorite books of all time, and why?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 111 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite books of all time, and why?

#51

Post by roryisok »

Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham - everyone goes blind and a bunch of sentient plants start eating people. one of the first science fiction books I ever read, and the one that introduced me to post apocalyptic fiction. Giant plants might sound silly, but its no more silly than walking corpses. And in fact the walking dead and 28 days later owe a lot to this book.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke - beautifully inventive fantasy novel about two magicians bringing magic back to Britain during the Napoleonic wars. Fab read.

Gateway - Frederick Pohl - pulp sf at its best. Humans discover a hollowed out asteroid worth ftl ships preprogrammed with unknown destinations. Prospectors pack as much food as they can and hit 'launch' in the hopes that they'll discover something valuable and not land on a star or starve to death.

The Forever War - Joe Haldeman - more great pulp sci-fi about the first interstellar war. Old man's war by John Scalzi is very similar and almost as good.

Most things by Iain (m) banks. Crow Road, Wasp Factory, The Bridge, Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons, Player of Games etc. Song of stone was awful though, they're not all winners

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite books of all time, and why?

#52

Post by roryisok »

stevenj wrote: post #50

SURELY YOU'RE JOKING MR. FEYNMAN BY RICHARD FEYNMAN -I loved this book for its humor, everyday practicality, how relatable it felt even without having a background in physics or knowledge about the pranks and experiments he conducted. As well as the book being well-written in the sense that it reads as if you're sitting on the couch with him as he's telling you stories about his life, all with a child-like sense of w…

I'm going to have to read "surely you're joking", it comes up so often on these lists

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite books of all time, and why?

#53

Post by sexydefinesher »

Robinson Crusoe, swedish translation by May Bylock is probably the book i have read the most since the beginning of elementary school. Very short, can be read in a day.

Ghost In The Wires by Kevin Mitnick is a very interesting book that i recommend too.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite books of all time, and why?

#54

Post by sho »

cjsuk wrote: post #33
kunimu wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. I'm doing an EE degree at the moment (second year) and AoE isn't that helpful from my view to understand the theoretical side. It'll tell me what an op-amp bandwidth is and the significance of 3dB but it won't tell me why it's that way, or go into why there is a decay at 20dB/decade. It's been more helpful on the practical side of building circuits rather than their analysis, but I don't know if that's…

You’ll find when you get into industry that a big chunk of the theoretical side is discarded and most of the job runs on intuition and knowing the gotchas and gluing bits of data sheets together then writing software. That’s what the book covers. Occasionally you’ll need to dig deep into it and particularly if you do RF stuff but that’s about it. I was disappointed for about six months when I landed my first position…

> Surprisingly mathematical and theoretical knowledge was rarely discussed

Sounds like some direct parallels there with the software industry. I think I have heard CS stuff mentioned precisely once in the last decade, ironically by someone whose code I regarded as overly complicated gobbledygook.

The ratio of people who actually use maths and "hardcore" CS in their programming job to those who literally never do is probably 50 to 1.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite books of all time, and why?

#55

Post by roryisok »

mabub24 wrote: post #25
BatFastard wrote: post #12

Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss I am not a fantasy fan in general, but this is my favorite story of all time. The story within a story within a story, characters, world just about perfect. Daemon - Daniel Suarez So little of the SciFi I read is memorable. This book explores SO many topics in memorable ways that I am blown away.

I liked Name of the Wind because it's a perfect counterpoint to Lord of The Rings, in a way. LOTR reads like a classical history book, sometimes literally. Everything is true, everything is tied together. The narrator disappears for omniscience. Name of the Wind is an obvious post-modern slant with an unreliable narrator. The story Kvothe himself tells obviously makes him seem like a superhero and Rothfuss manages to…

Kvothe being awesome at everything irritated me, it actually went over my head that he might be an unreliable narrator...

I liked Name of the Wind for the most part but some of the characters were flatter than pancakes. That bad guy student (Ambrose?) has no motivation beyond just being a deliberate antagonist

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite books of all time, and why?

#57

Post by sho »

Sone7 wrote: post #5

Benjamin Lee Whorf - Language, Thought, and Reality https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/language-thought-and-reality-... This little collection of essays from the 20s by a chemical engineer is astounding. For anyone interested in cognition, engineering, language, there are mind-blowing insights packed throughout.

He's the guy for whom the Sapir-Whorf hypotheis - that the languages we use can themselves shape what we say and even how we think, an idea I think is 100% true.

Which brings me to one of my favourite scifi epics - the Culture series, the titular people (and machines) of which consciously designed their language Marain to encode desirable aspects of reasonableness and peaceableness according to that very hypothesis. Nice connection!

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite books of all time, and why?

#58

Post by Semaphor »

The "Malazan Book of the Fallen" [0] series. Because of its sheer amount [1] of deep characters, the many years and areas it spans and the differences in power levels, from lowly soldiers to essentially gods.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/series/43493-the-malazan-book-of-t...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Malazan_Book_of_the_Fa...

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite books of all time, and why?

#59

Post by cjsuk »

sho wrote: post #54
cjsuk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ll find when you get into industry that a big chunk of the theoretical side is discarded and most of the job runs on intuition and knowing the gotchas and gluing bits of data sheets together then writing software. That’s what the book covers. Occasionally you’ll need to dig deep into it and particularly if you do RF stuff but that’s about it. I was disappointed for about six months when I landed my first position…

> Surprisingly mathematical and theoretical knowledge was rarely discussed Sounds like some direct parallels there with the software industry. I think I have heard CS stuff mentioned precisely once in the last decade, ironically by someone whose code I regarded as overly complicated gobbledygook. The ratio of people who actually use maths and "hardcore" CS in their programming job to those who literally never do is p…

Yes it’s exactly the same. I tend to get some of the difficult and fun tasks like writing parsers and things and that comes along once every couple of years or so :(

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite books of all time, and why?

#60

Post by cjsuk »

roryisok wrote: post #52
stevenj wrote: post #50

SURELY YOU'RE JOKING MR. FEYNMAN BY RICHARD FEYNMAN -I loved this book for its humor, everyday practicality, how relatable it felt even without having a background in physics or knowledge about the pranks and experiments he conducted. As well as the book being well-written in the sense that it reads as if you're sitting on the couch with him as he's telling you stories about his life, all with a child-like sense of w…

I'm going to have to read "surely you're joking", it comes up so often on these lists

Another reference here. Go for it. It’s a brilliant book.
Post reply on HN