Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
2people
2025–2026years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun are both fantastic. The first is exploring the life's of humans that are only bred to be organ donors to the rich and the second the life of a robot after it was deemed unuseful. In the same vein as Klara, a superb book is Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill.
- On A Red Station Drifting - Aliette de Bodard: a wild mixture of a station, run by a failing AI and strict Vietnamese behavioural rules.
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel, plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_Eleven
Nine Fox Gambit: Yoon Ha Lee: disgraced officer of space fleet must capture fortress protected by complex mathematics.
Theatre of the Gods and Hunters and Collectors by Matt Suddain. Both defy a one line plot description, look them up. Theatre was one of the best books I have ever read.
This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal el Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Two opposing generals mess with time to gain a personal meeting.
Sea of Rust - C. Robert Cargill: the story of a scavenger robot
- I tried to read a mix of things, especially "classics I never got around to." I didn't meet my personal target of 30 books (got sidetracked writing my blog), but definitely read things that stuck with me.
Notable and beautiful
- "The Nickel Boys" by Colson Whitehead
- "Blind Sight" by Meg Howrey
- "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. LeGuin
Non-fiction
- "Workflow"
- "Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D"
- "Debugging: The 9 Indispensible Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems"
The rest (all first-time reads)
- "Absolution" by Jeff Vandermeer (I enjoyed it but it was kind of unnecessary)
- "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte (I don't get the fascination with it)
- "Strange Pictures" by Uketsu (odd)
- "Starship Troopers" by Heinlein
- "Rendezvous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke
- "Ubik" by Philip K. Dick
- "Mickey 7" by Edward Ashton
- "Fugitive Telemetry" and "System Collapse" by Martha Wells
- "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson (I was surprisingly into it)
- "Glass Houses" by Madeline Ashby
- "Cover Her Face" by P.D.James
- "The Crystal Shard" by R.A.Salvatore (I needed to see what Drizzt is all about)
- "James" by Percival Everett (maybe my biggest disappointment of the year)
- "Alien Clay" by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- "Some Desperate Glory" by Emily Tesh
- "Sea of Rust" by C. Robert Cargill
