Noble House
The setting is Hong Kong, 1963. The action spans scarcely more than a week, but these are the days of high from kidnapping and murder to financial double-dealing and natural catastrophes -- fire, flood, and landslide. Yet they are days filled as well with all the mystery and romance of Hong Kong -- the heart of Asia -- rich in every trade... money, flesh, opium, power.
Stats for nerds
11recommend
20mentions
16people
2009–2026years
65% recommend35% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- For the last 30 years I've decided that the best stuff (most engaging books, stories, experiences in life) require investment. It gets worse (you go through some pain while exercising) before it gets better. That's essentially a definition of a good life to me - finding the things worth sacrificing resources and getting the payoff.
So 'first make me care' to me is a manifest of Gen Z - tiktok - brainrot approach. From my perspective you miss most of the really good stuff by cultivating this approach. I.e. my favorite books - Tai Pan, Noble House; tv series - Better Call Saul! - require you to go through so much of initial boredom. It's also the same discussion as 'learn to code vs only do AI Slop' or 'learn math and algos vs only import functions from libs and never check what's inside'.
*Exceptions apply, ofc. There are things that hook you and progressively ad depth, but it's really rare. I.e. Arcane tv show is both easy to access and quite deep.
Edit: ...so I can imagine math teacher that first tell you what are some amazing uses of derivatives and integrals - PIDs, SGD, better estimation, wave functions, generalized description of problems, accessing interesting physics etc. And after that they make you grind. I think it would be quite great. But it is so rare, that you have to make a leap of faith and assume most of the good stuff is boring initially.
- It's designed more for kids, but I found it useful for understanding basic accounting concepts: The Accounting Game: Basic Accounting From the Lemonade Stand.
I also found two of the novels in Clavell's Asian Saga to be quite business-focused: Tai-Pan and Noble House. Not so much for the nuts-and-bolts of business, but just a large business organization being founded and growing over the course of multiple centuries.
- Great book. Noble House (also by Clavell) is also excellent and takes place a century later, also in Hong Kong, and about the same firm established in Tai-Pan.
- How dare you slander The Noble House. I love most of his works, but Straung is peak Clavell.
- I read "The Noble House" and was fascinated by his writing. I'll probably read the rest of the Asian sagas.
- This year involved a career change, so much of my reading was oriented around my shift from flight test engineering to software engineering.
Non-fiction (technical):
* Code Complete, 2nd Edition by Steve McConnell. I can't say enough good things about this. I have kept referring to it in the months since I read it for the first time.
* Computation Structures by Stephen A. Ward. I have read most of this one; it's a good reference for understanding computers at various levels of abstraction.
* Simulation and its Discontents by Sherry Turkle
* Scientific Computation: Python Hacking for Math Junkies by Bruce E. Shapiro. Good for getting back into Python after a few years away.
* Accelerating MATLAB Performance by Yair Altman. Altman has an exhaustive knowledge of MATLAB and this book is a must for anyone doing serious work in MATLAB.
* Doing Data Science: Straight Talk from the Frontline by Cathy O'Neil
History:
* The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, by Peter Heather. Very well researched and written narrative examining how the Empire fared in the 3rd-5th centuries. Has a different perspective than the usual "Barbarian invasions ended the empire".
* One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson. I love everything Bryson writes. This is no exception.
* Rocket Ranch: The Nuts and Bolts of the Apollo Moon Program at Kennedy Space Center by Jonathan H. Ward. Also read Countdown to a Moon Launch: Preparing Apollo for Its Historic Journey by the same author. Ward writes the most amazing technical histories. It's quite obvious that he spent massive amounts of time piecing together exactly how things at Kennedy worked during the Apollo years. It's full of amazing little details like which firing rooms were used for which mission, how the entire Saturn V stack was rap-tested (literally having people lie on their backs on a work-platform and synchronously press against the rocket with their legs to try to get it to resonate), and so much more. If you are an Apollo program enthusiast you must read these two books.
Biography
* Kelly: More than my Share of it All by Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson. The man was a far better engineer than writer. A much better look at Kelly's business life was put together by his protege, Ben Rich (with Leo Janos), in "Skunkworks: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed".
* Fighter Pilot, by Robin Olds. Autobiography of one of the brashest, best aces of World War II and Vietnam.
* American Patriot: The Life and Wars of Colonel Bud Day, by Robert Coram. Not as well-written as Coram's biography of John Boyd. Or maybe Boyd just appeals more to my fighter-jet engineering side.
* Chickenhawk by Robert Mason. Amazing account of what it was like to be a combat rotary-wing pilot in Vietnam.
Other Non-Fiction
* The M1 Garand Owner's Guide by Scott A. Duff. Worth it for Garand owners.
* Atlas Obscura: A Guide To the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer. The print book is beautiful and ever fascinating.
* This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate, by Naomi Klein. Like a lot of popular non-fiction, this could have been an excellent long-form article instead.
Fiction:
* The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 by Lionel Shriver. A book with a high concept story and poor execution.
* The Man In The High Castle by Philip K. Dick. Not my first time reading it, but just as enjoyable on this go-around.
* QB VII by Leon Uris. Fiction, but based on some of Uris's own experiences as the defendant in a libel suit. A solid read.
* Noble House, by James Clavell. The only book in his Asian series I hadn't read. Amazing, as are all the rest.
* The Tao Trilogy by Wesley Chu. Eh. First book was decent, it got tedious after that. Only finished it all because I was on a business trip with poor internet access.
* The Power of the Dog, by Don Winslow. I also read the follow-up, The Cartel. Winslow researched these books for years and they are powerful indictments of the War on Drugs. They're also good fiction, but many of the characters have real-world analogues. I spent quite a bit of time during/after reading these looking up the real-world history of the drug wars since 1975.
