The Penguin history of Europe

What Hacker News says

1. a_bonoboFeb 2019
   >* Imagined Communities - the notion of a "nation" is only 300 years old and has no objective basis, only the fact that a group of people agree that it is a thing.

   The Penguin History of Europe series is great for this, especially The Pursuit Of Glory, which details the time when states switched from being based on their king, to states being based on a 'unified set of people', i.e., an imagined community.

   There's also the amazing Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe, which is a bunch of essays, one on a forgotten European kingdom that ceased to exist, and no-one claims it as their heritage. It shows you how easily your identity of a citizen of a state can get lost and forgotten - your great-grandparents may have seen themselves as Etrurians, but that state is gone and now you think of yourself as an Italian, but nothing much changed about your family

   Show morethread
2. a_bonoboDec 2016
   Some of my favorites this year:

   Fiction:

   - Jude The Obscure, Thomas Hardy. The way Hardy 'smuggles' Jude's viewpoint into the narrative is so ridiculously well crafted, a pleasure to read.

   - Legend Of The Galactic Heroes - a big anime from the 80s which was based on Japanese soft SF novels, which are now finally being translated. Worth a read if you're into space operas and large scale politics, I'm happy that the age of ebooks allows for such 'niche' interests to get translated.

   Non-fiction:

   - Secondhand Time: The Last Of The Soviets, Svetlana Alexievitch. It's her 'usual' style, a selection of interviews with a 'chorus' of shorter interviews, this time about the fall of the Soviet Union. Lots of interesting stuff from people whose world was replaced with another world overnight.

   - The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815, Tim Blanning. This is actually an entry in the long row of Penguin History of Europe, but I haven't read the others. It examines certain aspects of change in Europe (starting with how transport networks moved from mud roads to proper streets and culminating in how the nation state was invented)

   - Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe, Norman Davies. As the title says, a collection of essays on small kingdoms and countries which have only existed for a short time, some for which no current country claims 'ancestry'. It's always important to remind yourself what a random patchwork current European borders are.

   - Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe. This is a collection of notes on young Eckermann's conversations with the aging Goethe. Goethe is famous for always challenging himself, always trying to create, make and be involved until his last day, it's absolutely inspirational. Before this book I didn't understand why he's such an icon for Germans (and I read a few biographies), but I get it now, he lived the 'man is his own marble' saying.

   Computer stuff:

   - Introduction to Machine Learning with Python, Mueller and Guido. This is essentially a more detailed version of the scikit-learn documentation with more elaborate exercises (even though some of it overlaps), highly readable. The scikit-learn documentation itself is among the best python package documentation out there and is something you can read 'cover to cover'.

   - Write Great Code - I've only started to read this one, it's very much about the basics of what a computer does when you're running high level code, so you can adjust your coding style. So far it's very useful.

   Stats:

   - Discovering Statistics Using R, Field/Miles/Field. A very opinionated, highly amusing (the constant humor may annoy some), huge waltz through statistics and how to use the methods and interpret their output in R.

   Show morethread
3. n3on_netDec 2016
   Here is my list of 2016:

   - The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

   - The 48 Laws Of Power

   - Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

   - Crossing the Chasm

   - The Richest Man in Babylon

   - Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

   - Europe: A History

   - The Penguin History of Europe

   - The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

   - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

   Every of the books was awesome. The only thing is that I haven't finished Europe: A History from Norman and read The Penguin History of Europe instead because the Norman book was just too long for me. But It has way more details.

   I switch between business-related books and non-business related (it can be everything from philosophy to language history to hardcore science) but I don't read fiction (The Richest Man in Babylon is fictional, but still the focus is on self-development).

   Hope you could see some titles that might interest you.

   Show morethread