Stats for nerds
5recommend
26mentions
25people
2012–2026years
19% recommend77% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Have Space Suit Will Travel (Heinlein)
Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (one story in the book "Different Seasons" by Stephen King)
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury)
Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky)
Frankenstein (Shelley)
Brave New World (Huxley)
Farenheit 451 (Heinlein)
Never Cry Wolf (Mowatt)
A Whale for the Killing (Mowatt)
The Machine Stops (Forster)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Starship Troopers (Heinlein)
The Jungle Book (Kipling)
Lost in the Barrens (Mowatt)
The Republic (Plato)
Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke)
Ringworld (Niven)
The Stainless Steel Rat (Harrison)
The Hobbit (Tolkien)
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson)
The Odyssey (Homer)
The Man who Would be King (Kipling)
The Pearl (Steinbeck)
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick)
A Scanner Darkly (Dick)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
Dracula (Stoker)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)
A Christmas Carol (Dickens)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll)
Watership Down (Adams)
Gulliver's Travels (Swift)
Animal Farm (Orwell)
- I thought this was going to be a typical HN "build things instead" thing, but I actually love their take. Looking at the world around us lately I've been realizing more and more that "it's all in Plato"; his Republic is a book I read once in high school, but it's high time to re-read it.
What are some books you find your self going back to repeatedly (or want to)? My list:
- Domain Driven Design
- Ray Bradbury's short stories and Farenheit 451
- George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier
- Descent into Hell
- LotR, the Hobbit, and Narnia
- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Psalms, Job, James
- The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment
- Wendell Berry's Essays
- Winnie the Pooh
- Augustine
Guess you know what kind of person I am now.
- Farenheit 451. It made me look at the things we have in the world today differently. I personally think it came closer than 1984 at predicting the future. The attitudes of the general society in that world reminded me of the way certain topics, information and discourse have become taboo and society has become the arbiters of what information is deemed allowable. The way everyone is expected to numb themselves with drugs, their giant tv screens and their ear buds and anyone that would rather learn is looked at with suspicion.
I never actually read it until around the time the iPhone came out and everyone was walking around with those white earbuds. I remember sitting on the bus reading and I looked up and stared around at the people on their phones with their white earbuds and all I could think was holy fuck Ray Bradbury was right.
- Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark - great glimpse into the current and potential future of AI
Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Issacson - fascinating look into the real life of Leonardo, demystifying the genius
Excession by Iain M Banks - a bit of a let down
Bluets by Maggie Nelson - lyrical and philosophical and explicit ruminations on the color blue
How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan - a lot of already known and rehashed info on psychedelics
Lost City of the Incas by Hirham Bingham - Yale professor who discovered Machu Pichu. Good history of the Incas and region
Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbuy - Classic!
2041 by Kim Stanley Robinson - NYC underwater in the future. A bit of a let down compared to his Mars series
Shiver by Junji Ito - short stories from the king of Japanese horror manga
Lenin: The man, the dictator, the master of terror by Victor Sebestyen - great bio on Vladimir Lenin. Knew very little about him before reading this. Fantastic!
Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville - definitive text book on Deep Learning
The Curse of Bigness by Tim Wu - interesting read into the history of Antitrust and the Sherman Act and how they relate to modern tech giants like Amazon, Google, Facebook
Connecting the Dots by John Chambers - a bit dry. Lessons Chambers learned while CEO of Cisco
- The more I read, the more I realize that fiction has a way of teaching the same lessons as nonfiction, only in a better, humane way that is not like someone lecturing at you from a podium, but more like a friend sitting down for a heart-to-heart conversation with you.
In this vein, I've started catching up on all the classics I haven't read yet, and there are a lot of them. At first, I was hesitant to dive into classics, because I thought they were hard to read and highbrow. This has mostly not been the case (with the exception of Wuthering Heights, which I found impossible to get through).
To wit, the best books I've read this year include:
A Tale of Two Cities - Impossible to get through the first several chapters, but after that, you're off to the races between France and England in the 18th century. Dickens used historical books as reference, but recreated the mood entirely from imagination. A better primer than anything in the news about Anglo-French relations, learning trust, and sacrifice.
No Country for Old Men - Want to understand the current fear of the Mexican border that has so bolstered Trump's popularity, as well as the ramifications of having a country full of veterans who don't have any medical support or care? Read this book.
Farenheit 451, A Clockwork Orange, Handmaid's Tale - Much better and scarier than any news clipping today about the possible future path for government interference in thought and action. Takes things to their logical conclusions.
And one non-fiction book that I did enjoy, Bringing Up Bebe, which is about the contrasts between child-rearing in France and America, but on a much larger scale, about the different things that seem culturally obvious to us, but are completely different to other cultures. This book made me really re-examine American food culture in a way Michael Pollan's diatribes have not.
- > Almost 100 years ago he foresaw how the cultural offerings of society get commodified and chopped into bite sized chunks for each individual to receive theirs. He did not forsee us taking it this far, nor the addictive nature of the consumption though.
Ray Bradbury did anticipate all of that in Farenheit 451, including the addictive nature of it.
I read Farenheit 451 in 2010, and I was shocked to see that he had anticipated Twitter, but his predictions didn't stop there and he also anticipated that the next step would be what is now Tik Tok.
