Thinking In Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows

My 17 year old son bought it for me for my birthday. I've been enjoying it a lot. I do in fact like thinking in systems and learning more about it, and reading it in a more generalized fashion than I tend to in the computer science world has provided a refreshing perspective. It's all very approachable, nothing very complex, but gives names and discreet patterns to things I intuitively understood but previously wouldn't articulate easily. Definitely one of my favourite gifts in a long time.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

I read bits of this to my wife at night occasionally. One of the first trips we went on together was camping on a little island, and I had Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami) with me which I suggested I read to her in the evening. She really liked it and I've done it since. I wish I did it more often. Anyway, Stories of Your Life and Others is a wonderful collection. I've read it a few times, not always completely, and I enjoy it. Story of your life is the standout. It's what the movie Arrival is based on, which I consider one of the best scifi movies of all time. It's a beautiful story.

Silo series by Hugh Howey

I've been watching the show and decided the books deserve a shot. If the show is as good as it is, the books must be great, right?

Two of Vernor Vinge's books in particular (science fiction): A Fire Upon The Deep, and A Deepness In The Sky.

They have a special place in my heart. Vinge didn't write much, but what he did write I think is very special indeed.

I've also taken to buying hardbacks of my favourite books from ebay.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/77711.A_Fire_Upon_the...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/226004.A_Deepness_in_the...

Just finished: "Lonesome Dove", by Larry McMurtry. From the name, I'd somehow assumed it was a romance novel. No, it's absolutely not. If it were released today, I think I'd describe it as "horsepunk": instead of cyberpunk's high tech low-lifes, it's basically horseback low-lifes. That's not entirely fair because there's a lot of moral strength in some of the characters, but they're all living on the brutal edges of a society where any random event might bring death, or worse.

Now reading: "null: $cat /dev/null_", by Dienw Neb[0]. I don't know what it's about yet. I heard about it in an ad in the back of "2600 Magazine" and it caught my attention. Initial impressions are that 1) Neb is really good at dialog, and 2) their recreations of IRC chats is so perfect that I know they had to've spend many hours online in the middle of the night. Basically, the author knows how to write things I want to read. I do so hope they stick the landing and that the story turns out as wonderful as the writing.

[0]https://nebulaofbooks.com/books/null-cat-dev-null_/

Oh I've got some recs for you if you want meaty! I've been reading classics this year. It started with East of Eden; if you've got a philosophical leaning and appreciate your characters deeply fleshed out, you owe it to yourself to read this book.

The next one was Lonesome Dove, this was my first time reading a western and I didn't think I'd enjoy it as much as I did. The book is also absolutely hilarious and has one of my favorite characters in a book(shoutout to Gus).

I'm currently reading The Count of Monte Cresto and, boy, it's turning out to be quite the epic tale of revenge(no spoilers please!).

Fiction:

I'm on Book Two of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series.

Non-Fiction:

More than I can count, as far as "I've read at least some, put a bookmark in it, and intend to finish it eventually." But in terms of the books I'm really actively engaging with right now, the top one is:

Neuroscience: Exploring The Brain[1] by Mark F. Bear, Barry W. Connors, and Michael A. Paradiso

And sort of in parallel with that, is

Analog Computing: Development, Programming, Applications, and Future Directions[2] by Bernd Ulmann

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0781760038/

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Analog-Computing-Development-Programm...

Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer [1].

I don't tend to be great at finishing (or starting) books, and this is a big one. I've also never had any interest in Medieval or Renaissance history, for me it's been a black hole between the fall of Rome and the modern age.

But recently I saw some Youtube videos of Ada, and her enthusiasm is totally infectious [2]. She's fun and paints these vivid pictures of Florence and renaissance Europe that are incredible, absurd, and relatable, which makes sense since given she's also an accomplished sci-fi writer. She also reminds me of one of my favourite high school teachers. So I ordered the book right away.

The book is in the same tone as her videos, so it won't be for everyone, but I've really been enjoying it and now I'm fascinated by Renaissance Italy, Machiavelli, merchant republics, etc.

1. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo246135...

2. (My favourite example) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68p3jVQQdFk

20 years ago I read a The Guardian article about the "top geek novels". I immediately read a bunch of those.

Recently I managed to find the list again, and it's been endless pleasure:

- American Gods -- Neil Gaiman

- Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley

- The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett

- Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks

- Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson

- Cloud Atlas -- David Mitchell

- The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson

- The Dispossessed -- Ursula K Le Guin

- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick

- Dune -- Frank Herbert

- Foundation -- Isaac Asimov

- Giles Goat-Boy -- John Barth

- Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon

- The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams

- I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov

- The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

- The Left Hand of Darkness -- Ursula K Le Guin

- The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick

- Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland

- Neuromancer -- William Gibson

- Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell

- Orlando -- Virgina Woolf

- The Shockwave Rider -- John Brunner

- Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson

- Stand on Zanzibar -- John Brunner

- Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein

- Trouble with lichen - John Wyndham

- UBIK -- Philip Dick

- Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

- Woman on the Edge of Time -- Marge Piercy

(I am creatively interpreting "The Colour of Magic" as "all Discworld", "Dune" as "the six Dune books", etc.)

I love reading, here's a few meatier books I've read recently:

* Seeing Like a State - great overview of how states (and corporations) lose visibility into reality due to the abstraction levels they operate at

* Normal Accidents - all about how things like nuclear reactors, ships and large systems naturally have accidents

* Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty - great easy read about how high reliability organizations manage complexity and dangerous, high tempo situations.

"Collapse" - A friend gave me the book in a bag he was going to donate. its been great. Theres obviously a huge undertone of preachy "humans struggle with sustainable resource utilization" but the views into failed societies are just fascinating. Really enjoying it, though I've slowed down and might not finish.

"7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy" - Recommended by @pc in an interview. I'm ~50 pages in and not really blown away. Its a nice accumulation of Alpha creating strategy... but I think its really missing some nuance. I do LOVE that they take an economist approach and actually provide the math/algorithms behind the concepts. Theres some good stuff in here but so far it feels like 30 pages stretched out to make a book.

"Monetizing Innovation" - dropped this book, do not recommend. I was expecting a really nice accumulation of how pricing should work with companies who are innovating... and it came no where near that hopeful concept. The case studies were weak, the hypothesis were weak, the writing was weak.

I opened this thread to post about Dungeon Crawler Carl. I just finished the fantastic Three Body Problem series, and reading something so pulpy in contrast feels like cheating, but it’s making me happy and that’s what I’m looking for anyways.

Some other bits I’ve read recently that I’ve loved: - Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie” is a beautiful short story by the Three Body Problem’s translator - Cryptonomicon feels like a great balance between heady reading (it goes into WWII-era crypto thinking) and pulpy humor. I loved reading it. - “Stoner” by John Williams (not the Stoner you think, and also not the John Williams you think) is kinda in a different direction, but it’s a really well paced and beautifully written book about a farmer’s son who falls in love with literature. It’s one of those books that’s hard to sell in a sentence, but is effortless to read and makes you think a lot in a non-engineering-brained way.

I have been reading "Design of Everyday things" By Don Norman. A friend recommended it to me because I have been trying to learn more about Design thinking and also just get in a habit of not taking things / products around me for granted as they are but noticing the tiny design decisions that someone made, understanding them, questioning them etc..

I'm jumping across several short story collections:

- "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang - "Ficciones" by Borges - "I have no Mouth and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison.

I'm also slowly plowing through "The Big Book of Science Fiction" edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer.

I love short speculative fiction. And the above are among my favorites.

After reading some of the manga Vagabond, I decided to go straight to the source material and read Yoshikawa's Musashi, a historical fiction account of Miyamoto Musashi at the start of the Edo period. Despite it having roots as a serialized novel with a few pages released every day in a Japanese newspaper almost a century ago, the book feels very modern. It's surprising to see how many ideas like recurring comical villains, kidnapping plots, younger boy hero prototypes and love triangles were already established. The spiritual quest of Musashi and his evolving understanding of warfare is probably the most rewarding part of it though. It's worth reading.

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

About halfway through- it’s really good so far. He makes a compelling case for how our culture has changed in many ways, often for the worse, with the introduction of television.

I've been re-reading 1Q84 by Murakami. It left a very light and magical impression on me in high school, but I couldn't remember much at all of it anymore so decided to pick it up again and dust it off.

I'm also trying to transition into software development and have been watching John Ousterhout's talks and just yesterday started reading "A Philosophy of Software Design" - enjoying it so far.

My wife and I have been reading aloud to each other for years. We worked through Anthony Doerr, Dumas, Eco. Eight or so of Louise Penny's Gamache books. Currently on book 5 of Mick Herron's Slow Horses. Since I'm learning French, I'm on my third Jules Verne (in French). Just to prove to myself that I'm not over the hill - I was born in the first half of the previous century.

I finally read my first Stephen King book: "11/22/63". I could not put it down. The mix of historical details and the time travel concept kept me reading until the end. Another first this year for me was "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. Took me some time to get used to his writing style but after that I could not stop reading.

This year I also read "The Brothers Karamazov" after having read "Crime and Punishment", "The Idiot" and "Demons" in previous years. It was not an easy read but it stays with you for a long time (or maybe even forever).

Also did some re-reading this year:

"A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles

"Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius

I stick mostly to fiction these days. Best books I've read this year:

- The Women by Kristin Hannah

- Jurassic Park by Micheal Crichton

- Platform Decay by Martha Wells

- The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

- Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the End of the World by Eric Jay Dolin

- All the Sinners Bleed by S A Cosby

- Project Hail Mary and Artemis by Andy Weir

- Cibola Burn and Nemesis Games by James S A Corey (the Expanse series)

Just got done reading The Wager - historical nonfiction - same author as Killers of the Flower Moon.

It's quite good - not as good as Killers of the Flower Moon. I won't spoil anything you won't learn from the first few pages. The Wager was a British naval ship in the early 1700s that was lost to inclement weather. All were presumed dead. Some time later a boat arrives in England with a small number of survivors. Then a while later, another boat arrives with some more survivors. They each accuse the other of terrible acts.

The book tells the story of what happened after the ship went down.

It's a good read.

Children of Strife (Children of Time #4)

This may be my favorite "Children of Time" book yet (and I really liked the first and second book).

I'd say the biggest reason I enjoy science fiction is being exposed to new ideas. In book one of this series, I enjoyed imagining how a hunter spider species would evolve when imbued with a "brainiac-empathy" gene. In book two, I loved the idea of a central (Id) mind with a 8 distributed actuators (ego).

This one introduces the notion of a punchy, aggressive, status driven mantis shrimp.

I really enjoyed thinking about what it would mean to be an evolved mantis shrimp. Human beings have technically carried around deadly weapons since we developed tools. But a mantis shrimp is an organism that has two deadly weapon everywhere it goes. Imagine how much different human society/evolution/whatever would have been if we were constantly holdings blunderbuss' at each others heads at all times? Where being in range literally meant that either party (whoever fires first) can immediately and almost certainly kill the other. I suppose we have had potentially deadly weapons since we realized we could brain with rocks, but this is a risky (and messy) way to do things compared to the instant death that a mantis shrimp represents. What would that do to trust, to boundaries, to aggression and bluffing?

It is just such a fun humorous world, where 4 (5 with lowercase humans) species are learning to coexist despite their very different ways of looking at the world.

https://stephencagle.dev/posts-output/2026-07-20-children-of...

Finally started reading "A Philosophy of Software Design". It was on my shelf for ages. I have the 1st edition; luckily, you can grab new chapters from the 2nd edition from the author's website.

Just finished a David Foster Wallace kick. I listened to the new 30th anniversary audiobook of Infinite Jest (twice) and then The Pale King (twice). Then I listened to "Of course you end up becoming yourself" which is a long-form interview with Wallace by David Lipsky, traveling with him on the Infinite Jest book tour.

I had to listen to the books twice because there are a lot of details that you won't get the first time through unless you're extremely intentional and detail oriented, but I found it was worth it to listen again. I'll probably listen to Infinite Jest again sometime soon, even though it's 64 hours long. IJ is actually really great sci-fi with some important questions for our time.

'Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States', Alex Wellerstein.

> "Over the course of this book, we have looked at some eighty years of this history. We have seen how the idea of nuclear secrecy was initially born out of a very specific fear—that the world’s worst nation could achieve nation-destroying power—that, over the course of many transformations, morphed into something more generalized. More than totalitarian regimes were the target of this secrecy: allied nations, private industry, democratic institutions, and “the public” more broadly became understood as targets as well, for reasons both justifiable and not. The secrecy problem moved wherever the problem of the bomb went, which was far indeed. The desirability of control over nuclear knowledge became totalizing because the threat of loss of control was tied to the almost unimaginable power of the bomb itself. These two forces—the desire for control, the fear of its loss—became locked in a vicious cycle, each driving the other."

I just finished Ra by qntm. It's available free on his website.

https://qntm.org/ra

I'm guessing that many people here are familiar with this work already since HN was where I found out about qntm in the first place. If you haven't read Ra, though, I greatly enjoyed it and would strongly recommend it.

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Recently passed the bit where Ammianus complained the rich had bought up much of the property in Rome and turned so many into renters and gave stats to show it. Amongst his many other complaints.

Sadly found I could have been reading a better abridgement, which I'll get for the 2nd reading now.

George Orwell's essays. I love his simple, matter-of-fact prose style and I'm trying to absorb as much of it as possible to improve my own writing. Many of them are available online if you don't want a full book. "Politics and the English Language" is a must-read.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

I am working through Paradise Lost right now for something to read studiously.

For reading before bed, I recently finished "The Mountain In the Sea" by Ray Nayler. I found it very good, with primary themes centered around the nature of consciousness, robots, AI, and corporatism. Highly recommended.

Middlemarch, finally!

I'm 50% of the way through and it's good but I don't entirely see the hype. Brontë is more atmospheric, Austen funnier and more incisive, Dickens more immersive. But I've still got a way to go.

I'm reading singer song-writer Lily Allen's 2019 autobiography My Thoughts Exactly. I really liked her last album West End Girl (2025) and I wanted to know more about her and her creative process and inspirations. She tells about lots of different things having happened in her life, her relationship with her parents, how she grew up like. Really enjoyable read so far!

I’ve kept a log of every¹ book I’ve read for the last 31+ years at https://don.dream-in-color.net/books/ The most recent was Careless People. Currently reading Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel and The Stories (so far) of Deborah Eisenberg.

I just finished Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and it had so many “aha” moments for me. Definitely recommended if you have even a passing interest in reading or making graphic novels or comics.

I don't mind long novels. I finished Lonesome Dove earlier this year and it's extremely good. The Count of Monte Cristo was last year and I didn't particularly care for it. In fact, I thought it was one of the most overrated books I've read. My question is about Neal Stephenson. He gets a lot of recommendations here. Some years ago, I read Snow Crash and it was obviously pretty dated by then. My real question is what is the best entry point into Stephenson's longer fiction and any secrets to reading it. That is, he tends to digress a bit. Any recommendations?

You Gotta Have Wa, by Robert Whiting (1989), about baseball in Japan in the 1980s.

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (1818/1831), https://frankendiff.com; and Tales of the Dead, by Mrs. Utterson (1813), https://archive.org/details/talesofdead00utte

Just started Homer's Iliad (Fagles translation) and Christopher Logue's War Music (2015).

Just finished re-reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams (1980). I think it holds up well. Last time I read it, I was much younger than Arthur Dent; now I'm much older. And now that we have computers with Genuine People Personalities, it's hard to remember what it was like in the Before Times.

Recently finished Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908). For better or worse (no spoilers here), it kept me guessing.

Data-Oriented Programming in Java by Chris Kiehl. So far it's one of the best books I've read about taming complexity in software, ensuring integrity of state, and writing correct software. It's applicable to languages other than Java, though Java is a good fit for the text given its object-orientation.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

This is a bit of a departure - I normally read action thrillers where a retired navy SEAL foils a plot to bring down the US Government.

Also listening to the audiobook autobiography of Anthony Hopkins which I recommend.

The Ancillary Justice series. Which I think is the best sci-fi I’ve encountered in years and can’t believe it sat on my radar for so long before I jumped in.

I always have two books going, one ebook and one audible. Currently on a fantasy kick.

The Years of Apocalypse by UraniumPhoenix:

Timeloop fantasy that starts out in a magic university. It's quite a fun read and I'm enjoying how different the MC approaches the timeloop from how I expect I would. She seems quite empathetic which adds an excellent emotional element to the story that I'm enjoying.

Worth the Candle: Through Adversity by Alexander Wales:

I'm a big fan of Alexander Wales. He has an intelligent way of writing plots and characters that I enjoy. This is a meta narrative LitRPG(?) fantasy book. The basic premise is that the MC is sent to a world that has elements of his previous DnD creations. I'm not much of a tabletop RPG person but excited to see where Wales takes this series.

Agatha Christie, for some reason. My mom and I used to watch Mrs. Marple and Poirot on public television so there's perhaps nostalgia involved, but, she was a great writer. A lot of her work is now in the public domain and there are Standard Ebook versions of them, making them an easy pick if you like mysteries or are willing to give mysteries a try:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/agatha-christie

For the near future, I've got some of Emily St. John Mandel's books loaded up (I liked the Station Eleven series a lot), as well as Peter Heller's The River.

"Into thin air" by Jon Krakauer. A really fascinating book about the disaster on Mount Everest in 1996 where 8 people died on a single day due to extreme weather. If you are into that kind of books "No Way Down: Life and Death on K2" by Graham Bowley is also worth a read.

The Wisdom of Insecurity, by Alan Watts. It's a counterintuitive exploration of letting go of things being definite and fixed. It's a Buddhist lens applied in pre-60s life.

https://archive.org/details/wisdomofinsecuri00watt

I had begun the 7th Expanse book, Persepolis Rising, but got distracted by a copy of Joseph Conrad's Victory I found lying around, so I'm half way through that.

I recently finished Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive.

The Expanse have been great, but I think I will be good and ready to say good bye when I'm done with the mainline novels.

I don't really read long form non-fiction, which is probably a character flaw, but for me reading is a form of escapism. I love Sci-Fi very much (both classical and modern) and I try to mix and match so I read about equal amounts sci-fi and non-sci-fi.

Fiction: Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. I love it. Been reading the series out of order for some reason.

Non-fiction: Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Michael Sipser. It's fun. It looks at things like pushdown automata, Turing machines, decidability, ... Not reading it too rigorously, but more exploratively.

Just finished Annie Jacobsen's "Nuclear War" book last week. Well put together, the timeline is interesting as is the idea that North Korea would use 1MT weapons, and that Russian missile detection is so poor that they can't tell the difference between something overflying them to detonate elsewhere and something aimed at them. I hope that's an incorrect US evaluation.

About to start her Biological War.

Deep Learning With Python, Third Edition by Francois Chollet and Matthew Watson

Recently read books by Anthony Doerr (Shell Collector, About Grace, Memory Wall, All the Light We Cannot See) and Simon Singh (Code Book, Fermat's Last Theorem, Trick or Treatment, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets).

I'm reading Sagas of the Icelanders as prep for a trip there, but I can feel it pulling me down into a rabbithole of older Scandinavian medieval writing. I've already got an order placed for a saga that's not in this book, along with the Poetic Edda and Havamal to learn more about Norse mythology.

I've been reading the books by Hannu Rajaniemi. Finished The Quantum Thief a while ago and now reading The Fractal Prince.

It's some of the best sci-fi I've read. Very interesting depiction of technology and I love how the different types of tech and societal structures are not explained, just showcased and talked about like it's obvious until you get it. It reminds me of Philip K. Dick but with a lot more scientifically grounded yet far out technology.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - its about a russian soldier's life in a soviet labor camp and his fight for survival. Great read.

Starting The Trees as that is the first book in the Jeselnik Book Club after it goes out as a podcast. Loved James, so I'm sure I'll at least like it.

Otherwise started on a saga of going straight through The Expanse series. Haven't done a big series straight through since a >1 year re-read of Wheel of Time so I'm excited for that.

The Wheel of Time.

I was very happy to find this. I heard complaints that it's just a Tolkien clone and Jordan doesn't portray women well. But what I found was kind of a relic. It's an excellent fantasy series that probably couldn't be written again. Wish we had more like it.

This is my 13th round to recommend "The Soul of a new Machine" as well as "Showstoppers".

I couldn't remember which Shakespeare plays I had or hadn't read, so I've spent the summer going through them alphabetically. It's been a blast!

I knew many everyday expressions and phrases come from his work but I had no idea it was so many.

I'm currently about halfway through at 3.2k pages.

Just finished rereading Paul Graham's Hacker's and Painters. It's short essays, easy to pick and put down, I've learned or solidified some of my knowledge tremendously i think. i really suggest.

I'm reading Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the latest edition of Eloquent Ruby, and Mastering Emacs.

I'm not sure any are that cognitively challenging, but all of them are certainly lovely.

I just read Replay by Ken Grimwood. Couldn’t put it down and finished in a day. It’s a “character re-lives his life in a time loop” story, which subsequently has been done in many different ways, but this is an early example (was published in 1986 or 87, so e.g. it predates Groundhog Day by several years).

Anyway it was an emotional read. I’m surprised I had never encountered the book before, since “alternate choices affecting how your life turns out” is a concept I’ve always been into. But on the other hand this one would not have been nearly as powerful to me earlier in my life. Me being the same age (or close enough) to the main character at the start is what does it, of course.

So, recommended, especially if you’re in your early-mid 40s.

I'm reading something a bit strange and wonderful: The mountain in the sea by Ray Naylor -- a fictional peek at octopus intelligence.

Question for some of y'all: Those who are listing 3 or more (sometimes way more!) books -- do you read them in parallel? I'm a dyed-in-the-wool serial book monogamist and can't fathom having like 8 or 10 storylines in my head at once.

No judgement, just curious and somewhat awed :)

I’ve been reading about bureaucracy, power, and civic engagement:

The Power Broker by Robert Caro.

Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka.

The Time Tax by Annie Lowrey.

Lots of scifi and fantasy.

The Works of Vermin. Exceptionally well written. Not an ounce of flab anywhere.

The Carryx series, 2 books so far. Best villains ever.

Tainted Cup and sequel. Sherlock Holmes meets Godzilla.

Goblin Emperor

The Prophet (Gibran)

Los Alamos (Kanon)

Hyperion (reread)

Finally, a shout out to the best book I read in 2025: Terra Ignota. Yes, the whole series.

Why Greatness cannot be Planned.

The authors argue that rigid, goal-oriented planning and metric-driven objectives actively prevent true innovation and groundbreaking achievement.

Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter because I have no attention span and wanted to read most Space Operas. It goes through his Xeelee series' history of the universe and beyond in small individual chapters.

In the last stretch of finishing off Malazan Book of the Fallen, currently about a third of the way through Dust of Dreams so hoping to have finished the series by the end of this year.

Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons

Ostrom summarizes her empirical investigations of common pool resources (fisheries, forests, ground water, etc.) and how stakeholders can collectively govern them, a polycentric approach that is neither governmental nor proprietary. She abstracts 8 principles of governance, elements of successful community based resource governance.

Alvin Roth's Who Gets What — and Why: Matchmaking, Mismatch, and Market Design

Roth discusses market failures and how one builds market coordination organizations to perform matchmaking. He focuses on non-monetary markets such as paired kidney exchange, which he pioneered. Another example is medical residency matching.

Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo (Never read it until now, quite like it actually) EDIT: scrolled through the comments and saw a different person also reading this right now. I know that it's a popular book, still a bit fun that two HNers are reading a book from the 19th century at the same time. EDIT#2: okay, a bunch of people seem to be reading this right now, must be even more popular than i thought.

Neal Stevenson - Diamond Age

Rudy Rucker - Ware Tetralogy (old-school cyberpunk / high-scifi. i read Juicy Ghosts by Rucker last year and really dig his extravagant ideas. I had trouble understanding Juicy Ghosts at times, but the concepts that man is able to bundle together and flesh out, while creating an engaging page-turner is amazing. not much fluff.)

I really enjoyed The Science of Hitting, by Ted Williams. It is a testament to his obsession with all aspects of one particular compound motion. I wrote more here: https://ctd1.substack.com/p/book-review-science-of-hitting

I'm now reading Brothers Karamazov, because someone else on HN recommended it (well, that was the immediate catalyst, but I've been wanting to read a big Russian novel). There's a lot of jawing about the church which is a little boring, but I'm appreciating the way all the characters are bursting with life and feeling. And also that Dostoevsky never beats around the bush.

A canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller.

It gives very strong Fallout vibes. Having played the original games I think there is an influence.

"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes is a particularly engaging read. Rhodes manages to record history as a character-driven story without sacrificing detailed elements of physical chemistry and - at times - philosophy. His treatment of Szilard and Bohr is outstanding.

I also recently finished "A Cage Went in Search of a Bird", which is an anthology of Kafka-esque short stories. I'd recommend it if only for reading "God's Doorbell" (which imagines swarm-behavior RSI building the Tower of Babel).

Moby Dick. I'm further through then I've ever gotten before thanks to a long airplane ride.

1. I love this question and not just on HN, but the answers are very high quality here. At a house party, at a baseball game, on a hike, whatever ... if anyone asks out loud to a group, "what are you reading?" I get ready to scribble down a new list!

2. Obvious (?) observation: Today's list consists of human-authored books. Will that trend hold? Can you imagine this question being asked in X years with predominantly AI-authored books as the answers? Novels or nonfiction. I get a thrill out of a good book, partly, because it lets me into the head of a lucid or genius or maniacal fellow human.

Value(s): Building a Better World for All by Mark Carney, the current prime minister of Canada. He starts out with his perspective on the history of economics and money - it reads a bit like a textbook.

He has a knack for being critical and optimistic at the same time. Funny too!

On Audible, revisiting a childhood favorite: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

On my Kindle I have two ham radio books I'm reading, one is about grounding antennas, the other a General test prep.

- Grounding and Bonding for the Radio Amateur - Ham Radio General Class License Study Guide

Currently reading InCorruptible by Eric Ries. It is a fascinating read as to how most companies start with good intentions but end up so far away from their principles. It lays out in detail forces at play for last few decades that forces them in this direction. And how Costco, REI and Patagonia to name a few have resisted these forces. For my previous years reads : https://www.sunjain.com

I’m reading The Well of Ascension, the second book of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy

I like how he has the slow, almost clinical way of revealing interesting worlds and systems. It’s not the kind of book that’ll make me cry, but I really like world building with fun enough characters

Dungeon Crawler Carl book 7. Started the series in January. Most books I've read in a year since I read the Expanse series.

Historical books that are great... Empire of the Summer Moon, Undaunted Courage, Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates

> I'm looking for something a little meaty to keep the brain working...

- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks comes to mind. I had no idea how rampant purposeful discrimination was so recently for example, but the point of the book is the HeLa cells - and biology is also not my forté so loads of new information there as well. It was very interesting in expected and unexpected areas for me

- Daniel Suarez' Kill Decision has only gotten more relevant since its release in 2012. Not sure I'd call this meaty though, but his thrillers are always good (near-ish future tech) and the author iirc also said this particular one is meant as food for thought and not only entertainment

I guess I am reading Elric of Melnibone - although I can't say I'm really enjoying it, and looking forward to getting back to something like Earthsea that is more hopeful.

For programming I am reading HTML5 Games: Novice to Ninja, which I quite like so far. And JavaScript for Kids - both with the intent to entice my kids into game programming.

For work I am reading Learn dbatools in a Month of Lunches and outside of lingering questions about whether anything command line oriented matters in the age of AI, it has been really helpful in encapsulating solutions to things that are distinct problems in administering SQL Server.

I DNFed Lin Cixin "The Dark Forest" at 30% ... I really could not get past the shallow characters and boring writing style. Topic was really intriguing and I'm sad not able to grind through it to know what happens, but at the same time.. I was hoping that after same issues on book 1, I could get used to it, but it was just grind...

So I started to reread Brandon Sanderson "Wax and Wayne" series again and was immediately relieved how easy it is to read.

Iain M Banks' Culture series. It's hilarious (not really) how badly these books are mis-read by wannabe tech dictators.

I read multiple books together.

- My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok

Upbringing of a painter and the beginning of his journey in 1950s New York in a Hasidic Jewish family. Existentialism, art, passion.

- The Art of Doing Science and Engineerig, by Hamming

Surprisingly fresh and piercing, even today.

- Miracle of Love, Ram Dass

Stories about Neeb Karori Baba, as mentioned in Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs.

- The Name of The Rose, Umberto Ecori

Murder mystery in a famous library-monastery in medieval Europe. Amazing portrayal of that time.

I have a books site: https://ritoghosh.com/books

It's a few months outdated.

After my father died last year I’ve started going through his collection of popular-science paperbacks.

Done: QED, Richard Feynman. Lectures on explaining quantum electrodynamics but with no more math than geometry.

Currently: One Good Turn: A natural history of the screwdriver and the screw, Witold Rybczynski. The discourse goes into his references in depth. It has yielded an excellent list of museums to visit.

On deck: Impossibility: The limits science and the science of limits, John Barrow. A re-read for me. Barrow discusses what we can never know in a way that’s like P vs NP but for the physical world.*

Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life And Others. Just finished the short story behind Arrival, the way it frames free is something the film doesn't capture. Other stories in the book have been brilliant too.

Well in theory I'm reading "Blind Corner" by Dornford Yates, but it's so terrible I may not finish it. I adore Dorothy Sayers and have a sort of forlorn hope that another of the golden age crime writers will have something approaching her flair. In practice this is a third rate John Buchan-ish boys-own bit of tatt. So far. I suppose it might improve.

Instead I'm sneaking off to reread a Pratchett novel (he had very few duds until the Alzheimers really got its teeth into him).

After that/those I'm dithering between SS/GB by Deighton and some other re-read.

The most recent book I read that I really loved was A Gentleman in Moscow: https://recleague.com/james/r/144458-a-gentleman-in-moscow. It got me on a Russia kick, which has been fun and enlightening.

I keep track of all my favorite books here: https://recleague.com/james/collections/books

(Full disclosure: I'm a cofounder of Rec League)

I just read

(1) Roadside Picnic (the book which "Stalker" game is based from).

This was a page-turner! Fascinated by the science artifacts & effects (like gravitational glitches, frozen black sparks, etc)

(2) "Childhood's End" by Arthur C Clarke (who wrote 2001 Space Odyssey)

The sheer time scale of the story is impressive, and the technology is so interesting - especially for 1950s! There are some interesting time effects too (like an unborn child telepathically channeling information to a conversation in the past!)

First, thanks to all of you who share recommendations in this kind of topics. I found great books here.

I'm gonna recommend an author I never saw over here and that I found interesting.

Peter Kingsley. He's an academic who studied classical Greek philosophers and what he calls "the origins of western civilization" and he's also a mystic.

While reading him sometimes I think he may be mad, and at other times I think that his explanations make a lot of sense. His central idea (or what I got from him) is that at the origin of western civilization and its fundamentals there were mystics, not intellectuals. He includes among these mystics Parmenides and Empedocles. Then intellectuals gained popularity and took control of the discourse and diminished and ridiculed the real role of Parmenides and Empedocles and their teachings.

As a starting point, his shortest book "In the dark places of wisdom" is a very good introduction of his ideas and would allow a reader to know if he wants to read more or not. As a second book I think that "Reality" is a good choice.

The Outsider (L'Étranger) will give you something to think about. Camus' idea with this novel was to see what would happen to a character who went through life only telling the truth.

Just finished Undo Redo by Scalini and Maponi, and I started Separazioni by Simone Amorino.

Both in Italian, both masterpieces of contemporary sci-fi. Separazioni might need another pass of editing, but it's strikingly good nonetheless.

I am reading "The Last Contract of Isako" by Fonda Lee. Finished reading her Green Bone Saga earlier. She does phenomenal world building.

Also, "Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto"

Some pretty cool recommendations here!

I've personally neglected national (Portuguese) authors for about a decade now, so I've started focusing on that; I'm currently reading "Livro do Desassossego" by Fernando Pessoa.

For the few months before that, I'd focused on some classics:

- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

- 1984 by George Orwell

- The Village by Ivan Bunin

- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

- Siddharta by Hermann Hesse

I read quite a bit and love it; if only I could be paid to do it at my own pace and rhythm!

Recently finished: - Tau Zero by Poul Anderson (Hard Sci-Fi) - Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (blew my mind)

Reading now: - Hyperion by Dan Simmons (getting harder than two above, but enjoying it so far)

Working through Craig Schaeffer's urban fantasy series, started with the Daniel Faust series and now at the point where it alternates with the Harmony Black releases. It's been cool so far; Faust is a con-man/actual magician and most of the books have a heist quality, whereas Black is an FBI witch, whose books so far have tended to be a bit more action-packed. It's interesting in terms of how one protagonist will do something and it affects characters in the other series -- I don't think you need to read both, but it's definitely adding a lot of extra texture.

I've also picked up his Revanche series which is apparently in the same greater universe though perhaps not literally the same world, involving a fantasy version of papal intrigue, I'm only two chapters into the first book. Apparently all the series do cross over at some point, so we'll see how well he sticks the landing.

Working my way through Elle Cordova's sci-fi book club[1]. Currently on Hyperion, but have read "The Man In The High Castle," "Sea of Tranquility," "Exhalation," "Neuromancer," "The Power," "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," "Parable of the Sower," and "I, Robot."

[1] https://bookshop.org/lists/elle-s-sci-fi-book-club

What, you're all reading the books? I thought the point was to just buy them excitedly, and then let them accumulate around you and when your partner complains about them quote that thing Umberto Eco said about needing a personal library or something... :)

Recent completions:

- The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick. I found it well written, but ultimately lacking in something - I kind of wanted the other boot to drop at the end.

- Poor Charlie's Almanack. Stripe Press published this collection of Charlie Munger's speeches and I've found I broadly agree with him on a ton of stuff and am slightly excited by some of his ideas that are new to me.

I'm about to have some time off recovering from a planned medical procedure and expect to have a mix of sci-fi, good quality non-fiction and at least one heavy "literary" book. I'm a big fan of Borges, so I might reread some of that work, or maybe pick up some adjacent/similar authors like Calvino too.

1632 by Eric Flint is an interesting exercise in alternative history. He extensively studied the real town of Mannington, West Virginia and used it as the basis of Grantville, a town that is transported from 2000 back in time to late 1631 in Thuringa, Germany during the 30 years war.

It was quite an engaging read, and lead to a series. You'll learn lots about the infrastructure of civilization along the way.

I recently finished "Warbreaker" by Brandon Sanderson, now plan to go back to reading "Designing data-intensive applications" since it's been a long time (for me) since I read anything educational. Warbreaker was amazing, I still think about it, a week after finishing, about the characters and how much fun I had while reading it. It's one of those books that you smile when you read it because of how pleasant it is and how enjoyable the characters are.

"The Memory Police", by Yoko Ogawa [1]. An island where things get disappeared by the Memory Police - physically from the world and from people's minds. A few people are immune to forgetting, so the Memory Police is on the case.

[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37004370-the-memory-p...

1929 by Andrew Sorkin

It’s about the stock market crash of 1929, and done in way that leaves no stone unturned. the book could be thought of as an obsessive pursuit of financial journalism in order to truly understand every domino that fell and lead to the crash - and not just the high level story.

I’m only about a quarter of the way through, but it’s a great read!

Currently going through Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. It's... challenging for the non-native english speaker I am, but still very untertaining. I've been getting out of my comfort zone lately, as a lifelong Sci-Fi aficionado, with every other book on my "to read" pile being non-fiction or experimental like Pale Fire.

Recently I have begun reading more than one book at a time, which I have never done before.

I'm not stellar at this yet, trying to juggle three turns into progressing two fairly quickly with the third much slower...

Clive Barker, Books of Blood - Currently in volume three. I've always found horror to require, like fantasy, a concentrated effort on my part as a reader to sustain suspension of disbelief. But these are great fun even if that's difficult sometimes.

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We - With sci-fi for whatever reason I do not suffer from the suspension-of-disbelief problem, the worldbuilding is much easier to immerse myself in. (Before this I was reading Roadside Picnic which was extremely good)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago - The slow one, still very interesting, nonfiction is uncommon for me

I'm reading the second Harry Potter book in Norwegian. It's decent practice since translations are a bit easier to read and I already know what's going on.

I'm also reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, though I'm on a bit of a break after the third book. I'd like to continue soon.

If I'm in the mood for neither of those, I read the Mushoku Tensei light novels.

So for my unofficial book club with a good friend, we're in the final act of A Passage to India by E.M. Forster, after having finished A Room with a View a few weeks before. I enjoy 19th and early 20th century literature for the prose quality quite a lot, and Forster does not disappoint on that score. It's also fascinating getting an inside view on Anglo-Indian relations during British rule. It's thematically similar To Kill a Mockingbird, in that both feature prominent "White Knight" type characters.

I'm also reading some less highbrow, yet highly entertaining novels that I'm obsessed with. I'm currently on book 16 in in Lindsey Davis' Falco series[0], which are murder mysteries set in Ancient Rome. I've been enjoying them non-stop ever since HN user "vintagedave" recommended[1] them around 4 months ago.

[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/series/42173-marcus-didius-falco

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48323766

Radiant Star (the new Ann Leckie book, in the “Ancillary Justice” series). Not as good as her earlier books in the series, but very worthwhile if you enjoyed them.

I really enjoyed The Witch Roads, by Kate Elliott. The depth of the worldbuilding is a delight, and the vibes are exquisite -- it feels amazingly real, full of history and old traditions and cultures. It's a little slow for a modern novel (which I don't mind); it reminded me of an older book, in terms of quality (The Fortress in the Eye of Time by C. J. Cherryh) that I also loved. It's the first book in a duology, so I really need to get my hands on the second book.

As to the story: to protect herself and her nephew from a local lord with an ugly grudge, a courier gets sucked into helping an obnoxious prince take a dangerous route to bypass an avalanche and deal with an urgent, secret mission. The mission gets complicated when said prince ends up possessed by a haunt from ancient ruins; and of course, the courier has her own secret to keep...

Stiff, the life of human cadavers, by Mary Roach

Fantastic book and look into Death and what comes after, well, at least for your corpse.

My reading list is ahead of Halloween, so trying to plow through all of these

https://robheffern.palaich.net/booklists/halloween/

Let me know what you think and if you have recommendations or criticisms!

I'm reading the neuromancer triology. It makes me think that book ended up predicting (or maybe shaping) many things that really are happening right now.

About two thirds of the way through "Flaw of Averages". Thankfully the chapters are short but it's written for business students and is aggressively anti-jargon, which can be annoying at times.

It started off promising, with some hints about monte carlo methods implemented in spreadsheets, but kind of detours into statistics basics, layman summaries of the author's prior scholarly work, and various business consulting anecdotes. I did not, for example, expect to read a chapter on the FASB-II's flaws regarding options pricing. And a few are downright concerning a decade later. I would not, for example, brag about advising Wells Fargo executives on their employee incentive programs after the cross-selling scandal came to light.

The final chapters, which I have not yet gotten to, supposedly cover the solution to the flaw of averages. Given the book is 15 years old, I'm expecting it to be pretty dated implementation wise, but I might be able to apply it to Prometheus histograms or t-digests. And I've learned a few things, like Jensen's inequality, and found a few sheets demoing a sampling approach.

I am currently listening to VC An American History by Tom Nicholas, Audible 2019. I am reading Predictable Winners, A Handbook for Developing, Forecasting, and Launching New Products and Services, Stanford Business Books, 2025. I have cracked open, but not gotten very far in reading, The Rise And Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2026. The Jill Lepore book is very interesting.

“Player Piano” by Vonnegut, his first novel which was sci-fi and explores the consequences of total and complete automation on society. Quite prescient for the current era.

https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/player...

I just finished the tome that is "The House of Government" - a look at the founding, arrangement, and domestic habits of/in the Soviet House of Government across from the Kremlin. It's a really fascinating look into Bolshevik psychology/culture at the highest level and shows how it really was practically an atheistic religion at that level. So much of the framing is centered around what books people are reading, how they are living (and indulging in the petty comforts of "bourgeois domesticity"), and so on. It has some sections that are a bit of a slog, going into boring details of domestic routine, but needless to say it picks up as it progresses into the late 1930s...

Just finished "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy and "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem. Both were pretty satisfying reads. I will start reading "Piranesi" by Susanna Clarke, will also probably have some time for one more book this month. If you got any scifi + horror suggestions tell me.

Currently going through Bobiverse, Dungeon Crawler Carl. Recently finished the Dark Profit Saga (Orconomics). Highly recommend all of them.

The Story of my Experiments with Truth - Mahatma Gandhi.

I recently read another book (Autobiography of a Yogi) that included an excerpt from this book, and it piqued my curiosity into Gandhi’s struggles in India. So far I’ve found it different than other biographies I’ve read because the author is self-critical and reflective which helps in understanding him as a person and his actions.

I (finally) wrote up the list of the best books I've read in the last 18 months! How timely that you asked! :)

https://www.georgesaines.com/blog/2026/9/24/the-best-25-book...

I am on a Trollope binge. Just finished:

He knew he was right 800+ pages

Framley Parsonage 700+

Eustace Diamonds 800+

And currently reading:

The small house at Allington 800+

Now, why did I list the pages? Because I have ADHD and it's very hard for me to read even 100 pages. So that should say sth about the quality of writing Trollope has.

I have reviewed them on my blog (link on HN profile). But I will mention here:

Forget Dickens, and any other 18-to-19th century writer from Britain. Trollope is far more intelligent, his prose elegant like well-written code, his style inimitable yet persistent, his works useful but also entertaining and usually hilarious.

According to WKPD:

"It (The small house at Allington) enjoyed a revival in popularity in the early 1990s when the British prime minister, John Major, declared it his favourite book."

Also of interest:

Wilson, Jennifer Preston (2012). “On Honour and Consequences: The Duel in Trollope’s The Small House at Allington.” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 43: 169–186.

I'm reading A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine, it's the sequel to A Memory Called Empire. I'm enjoying it!

Currently reading: This Inevitable Ruin (DCC Book 7) by Matt Dinniman - Back to DCC after interrupting it for Red Rising, which is another fantastic series judging by the first book.

Deep Work by Cal Newport - Going through this book to help my focus, especially in the super-connected world we find ourselves in.

Every Tool's a Hammer by Adam Savage - Huge fan of Adam Savage and it is fun reading stories about him establishing himself and his views on making.

I'm also planning a reread of "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" by Neal Stephenson as his references to greater and greater resources being used for supplying computer power seems dangerously relevant to our current data center arms race our world is watching.

The Nature of Economies by Jane Jacobs

People complain about how it's written, but it's nevertheless an interesting exploration of the parallels between natural ecosystems and human economies. As someone with no particular interest or background in economics (and who hasn't read anything else by Jane Jacobs), I find it a fascinating and easy read.

"The Dictionary of the Khazars" by Milorad Pavić - maybe the first "hypertext" novel; certainly could be one if it was electronic. You can read the entries in any order really and you wind up putting together everything that happens like a giant jigsaw puzzle. That'll keep your brain strong!

The German Genius is an 850 page marathon (excluding notes) by Peter Watson who's not an academic but an ex NYT/Sunday Times journalist and it shows. It's a brilliantly readable unputdownable (in my view) account of how, in a reviewers words, a ton of Germans from the 17th to the early 20th century 'have done more than anything else to create the modern West'. It also offers a fascinating account of how the later appalling developments in the early 1900s onward came about so disastrously. If you only browse the book in a bookshop, read the three pages of comments from reviewers! Last word to Peter Watson 'The United States and Great Britain may speak English but more than they know, they think German'.

the fionavar tapestry by guy gavriel kay.

nearing the end. i've found it a bit complicated to follow in some spots (there are several 'main' protagonists and it switches between them without much warning or introduction) but overall it's scratched the fantasy itch.

(i suppose it's actually 3 books, but i have the omnibus version)

Currently at the end of "The Plauge" by Albert Camus after recently also reading "The myth of Sisyphus" and "The stranger".

I've found all three very enjoyable and unexpectedly applicable to real life for being philosophical texts.

Glen Cook's Garrett P.I. series[0]. It's a perennial fave (I've read it many times, in the past).

I'm reading Deadly Quicksilver Lies, right now.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/series/49491-garrett-files

Fiction I recently enjoyed: The Ana and Din series by Robert Jackson Bennett. Sherlock Holmes vibes, with Kaiju. Also The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North.

Currently reading and enjoying: Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel.

Next to Read: Hollywood, Ending by John Green.

Currently on the final book of James Clavell’s Asia Saga, it’s been a long road and I’m frankly kind of over it but 90% through the final book and I’m glad I read them. First read Shogun maybe ~10 years ago but read the other four back to back. Gai-Jin wasn’t very good but the others have been pretty solid overall. A bit long winded and sometimes I wish he’d’ve had a more aggressive editor, but happy with em enough to finish them all.

D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Battle for the Normandy Beaches by Stephen Ambrose

As I was reading the account of the assault on Omaha and Utah beaches, a lot of the stories reminded me of the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan. Eventually the similarities got so great that I looked it up and, sure enough, the author of the script of SPR based those scenes on this book.

Every single vignette of horror which you see in that film really happened. If anything I think the film under-exaggerated the events unfortunately. I don't think I can watch that film the same way again.

The Cuckoo's Egg, by Cliff Stoll

I'm reading "Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style". This is a book on how Japan became leading power in western menswear.

Apart from being an interesting book on fashion history, it also draws a lot of interesting connections & facts.

For example, that renowned Japanese magazine Popeye has this weird, almost construction catalog structure because it was inspired by... "The Whole Earth Catalog."

Or how in post-war Japan western formal wear was a punk-like form of protest of teens against elderly.

Just for fun—past examples with > 30 comments:

Ask HN: What Are You Reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283087 - Sept 2025 (42 comments)

Ask HN: What are you reading Feb 2024 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39248780 - Feb 2024 (92 comments)

Ask HN: What are you reading these days? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38237730 - Nov 2023 (281 comments)

Ask HN: What Are You Reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21457827 - Nov 2019 (49 comments)

Ask HN: What books are you currently reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160091 - Jan 2018 (43 comments)

Ask HN: What books are you currently reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14859274 - July 2017 (80 comments)

Ask HN: What books are you reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14608397 - June 2017 (36 comments)

Ask HN: What books are you reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10175465 - Sept 2015 (79 comments)

Ask HN: What are you reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9636361 - June 2015 (37 comments)

Ask HN: What book are you reading right now? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8108932 - July 2014 (86 comments)

Ask HN: What Books Are You Reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7968124 - June 2014 (80 comments)

Ask HN: What books are you reading right now? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4596721 - Oct 2012 (40 comments)

Ask HN: What are you reading? What've you read lately? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3335496 - Dec 2011 (41 comments)

Ask HN: What are you reading right now? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3230965 - Nov 2011 (59 comments)

Ask HN: What books are you reading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2615647 - June 2011 (53 comments)

Ask HN: What are you reading right now? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865350 - Nov 2010 (298 comments)

What are you reading? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797070 - Sept 2009 (214 comments)

I'm reading A scout mindset. It's been an eye opener and really sets out clearly everything I've been noticing in myself and in the world. It's about the lies we tell ourselves

Storm of Steel - Written by a WW1 soldier about his experiences. His Wikipedia page is fascinating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_J%C3%BCnger

Currently reading Eversion by Alastair Reynolds.

Highlights from the past year or two:

Revelator by Daryl Gregory - Appalachian weird fiction with a tinge of cosmic horror.

The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias - Tragic story about the cartel underworld plus magic realism.

The Expanse (all of them) by James S A Corey (pen name for two writers IRL) - Everyone probably knows this one. Books were better than the show in many ways the the prose quality was pleasantly good. Fun read.

Tomato Red by Daniel Woodrell - One of the best openings I have ever read and I’ll leave it at that.

I like to read a wide variety of styles and genres, but the writing has to be good. I’ll drop a book if it’s got flat characters or clunky prose or cringey tropey stuff.

You've Been Pooping All Wrong by Trisha Pasricha MD. Get a bidet, eat more fiber and kiwis.

J.L. Austin: Philosopher & D-Day Intelligence Officer.

Austin worked for British Intelligence during World War II, running the Martians section and helping assess possible invasion sites for D-Day. After the war, as a philosopher of language, he helped bring ideas such as performative utterances and speech acts into the discussion.

A fascinating overlap between intelligence work and philosophy of language.

And because the Brewers are in the playoffs, "Catcher in the Wry" by Bob Uecker. Despite being a Cleveland fan, I have to admit the book is amazingly fun. Uecker was Uecker long before he became everybody's favorite baseball storyteller, and he was the Cleveland announcer in Major League.

I recently enjoyed the Dark Profit Saga by Zachary Pike: https://www.goodreads.com/series/207236-the-dark-profit-saga

It was a mix of fantasy & humor. It is a bit long but it is extremely funny & entertaining. It is the first fantasy book I have read other than the Harry Potter series (not sure if it is considered fantasy) but I loved it.

One of the best non-fiction books I read this year was Doppleganger: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/138505710.

Mother of Learning is pretty good, similar vein, does some interesting things. The Wandering Inn is also pretty good, I'd say more challenging than Dungeon Crawler Carl while still being entertaining.

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. The first volume, Swann's Way, to be exact.

It's not for the faint of heart, it's relatively difficult, but it's very satisfying so far. You know the feeling when it's maybe an autumn evening and some blue light comes throught the window, hits the curtains a certain way and the shadows remind you of something from your childhood that you thought you had forgotten forever? Well, it's like this, on steroids.

I recently finished George Vaillant's book Adaptation to Life and immediately picked up the follow up The Wisdom of the Ego. Vaillant is a psychiatrist and was a director of the Grant Study, which followed about 250 Harvard undergrads from college until they died.

Both books are largely about how the psychological defense mechanisms a person uses play a large role in determining how successfully they adapt to and navigate life.

A few years ago I thought through the concept of time and developed the fragile but persistent belief that time is a human invention and not a fundamental part of the natural world. It was a very unsettling experience, until Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time restored my sense of mental sanity. I’m currently rereading it because it made me an instant fanboy of Rovelli and this is one of his most tender books. The prose gently rocks you while delivering a complete shift in worldview.

The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby

I'm halfway through and is quite interesting and enjoyable. behind the scenes documentary view into his life, academic period, pre-DeepMind, forming DeepMind, raising capital, working on various projects like the Atari games, the AlphaGo period (currently immersed in). Definitely recommend

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/241434373-the-infinit...

I'm about 100 pages into "Dune Messiah" (the 2 movies out are both for the first book, the 3rd movie is going to be this book), 50 pages into "Analysis I" by Terence Tao, 100 pages into "Thinking in bets"

Just finished The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry (who died last month). Such beautiful writing. It's a short book but it took me a while to get through it because I would keep re-reading paragraphs to savor them. The chapter about Jack's marriage to Ruth was so poignant - he says that the marriage failed in the courtship. Jack's desire blinded him to Ruth's ambition to turn him into something that he wasn't and couldn't be. (an age-old story)

Just started On The Equality of All Things by Carlo Rovelli and Holy the firm by Annie Dillard

I'm also reading the first dungeon crawler carl series. You might really like the bobiverse, just got another book as well! Before that I read "a short stay in hell", super good! Or discordia by max barry or road kill by dennis e. taylor. All very entertaining.

"What Happened to Liberal Democracy" by Daron Acemoglu (Nobel laureate).

As someone who fled the desolation of the rust belt this book spoke to me and I found it credible and compelling. My book club spent 4 hours discussing this book.

Like half the people here I'm in the middle of Dungeon Crawler Carl.

Finished Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia yesterday, and also have been reading Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee mysteries - currently on The Haunted Monastery.

In print:

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen. (Much more disjointed than the film, but a quick read.)

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

On audiobook (I know, not technically reading):

Garth Marenghi's horror trilogy (Matthew Holness is one of the best narrators I've heard.)

On Kindle:

Cut Throat: the Vicious World of Rod Maclean by Wayne Thallon (I don't believe the half of it, but I know many of the locations discussed in it. I seem to find true crime my light reading these days)

An Angel at my Table by Janet Frame

The Summer Son by Craig Lancaster

Recently finished:

Sky Above, Great Wind by Kazuaki Tanahashi

Jew(ish) by Matt Greene

The House that Evolves by Pauline Hunter

The Inheritors by William Golding (made much less of an impact than the last time I read it.)

Well, since nobody has mentioned it yet, I recently read The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander and quite enjoyed it. It's an architecture book but the concepts are universal.

The most impactful book I've read recently has been The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, which deals with a man in a reincarnation loop.

Since I was going through a bit of a reincarnation phase I also quite enjoyed Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore, although it's a bit jumpy and all over place.

Right now, "The Lord", by Romano Guardini, a large collection of homilies covering the whole life of Christ. Obviously, this is a Catholic text.

Also, "Heaven on Earh", by Emma Wells, about nine or ten Gothic Cathedrals (mostly the history of their building and preservation). A bit too plain for my taste but includes interesting facts and anecdotes.

Finished recently:

-Flowers for Algernon, which I liked a lot.

-Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, so beautiful and surprising.

-The Great Gatsby, which I had not read yet and which I have loved reading.

Quadrail Series (on book 5 of 5), by Timothy Zahn

https://www.goodreads.com/series/42766-quadrail

Currently reading the Amazon listing for my first book. I've wanted to write since I was a teenager, and it's finally happened.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HK6F7LJ2

Beyond that, I'm steadily working my way through Finders Keepers by Stephen King, and then I have a couple of John Scalzi books queued up.

The Rouse by China Miéville, great read so far.

If you've seen the movie master and commander and liked it, or are interested in a long series with 20 well written books, I'd recommend Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian. It's book one of the Aubrey–Maturin series. It's historical naval fiction, written in the 1970s so the style is a touch more formal than current books but you can sense the "classiness" of the writing.

Somebody somewhere here gave a list that had "consider Phlebas" in it.

That particular book bored me to death, but from the same author / series I recently read "Player of Games" and "Use of Weapons" and I can't recommend (both) enough.

Dungeon Crawler, I started the series recently but got bored mid 3rd book. It is quite more denser than the first 2, and it feels like never ending.

I'm reading Paul Theroux's "True North", on his recent tour of Canada, the country of his birth. Now 84, he claims it will be his last travel book.

Just finished Jill Lepore's "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State" -- a history of the popular fascination (esp. among idealistic tech types) for ending human-based governance and replacing it with computer automation (esp. via AI). I appreciated her coverage of the rise more than her case for the fall.

Currently reading "Beyond Tube-and-Wing: The X-48 Blended Wing-Body and NASA's Quest to Reshape Future Transport Aircraft".

Its a pretty good history of the X-48 program.

Edit: also reading the "The Anduril Thesis" in parallel.

I just started The Gold Standard by Saifedean Ammous. I'm still in the history part of the book, since it starts off with economic history and moves into a fiction about what the 20th century could have looked like if the fiat money experiment had failed and the gold standard was instead refined.

I don't usually do fiction outside of classics (Tolkien, Dostoevsky, Huxley, etc), so I'm hopeful this will be interesting.

Lonesome Dove has been mentioned many times in this thread. Was it recently revealed/brought up on a tech blog or is this some sort of AI-related “what should I read” convergence? Not at all a criticism, but curiosity.

I just finally finished “The Ferryman” (Justin Cronin), and “Vera, or Faith” (Shteyngart). I have “Reverse Centaur” (Doctorow) open and “Rainbow’s End” (Vernor Vinge) on deck.

Fiction: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (English translation by Chapman & Hall).

Non-fiction: Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh.

Previous fiction: Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. Loved Ender's Game when I was younger, but for some reason never picked this up. It's brilliant, even better than Ender's.

Previous non-fiction: Endurance by Alfred Lansing. Well, I couldn't put it down. What a book.

I've been reading more than usual this year, have found it profoundly rewarding, and recommend it as an antidote to social media and news fixation to anyone who will listen to me.

A few of my favorite reads so far this year:

- The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones

- Angel Down, Daniel Kraus

- Piranesi, Susanna Clarke

- Between Two Fires, Christopher Buehlman

- The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow

- The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy

- Nettle & Bone, T. Kingfisher

- The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett

- The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead

About to tackle Princes of the Yen by Richard Werner.

My wife just sent me a video of his: what I didn't know about central banking! TBH I'm shocked. Apparently we'd all be so much better if we had more local banks doing local lending to local businesses.

Explains a lot, actually, so I even mentioned him in an article I just wrote about my freelancing career. Now I know why the market has been increasingly impossible ...

Re-reading C.J. Cherryh's Chanur books and various other Alliance-Union novels from her Humble Bundle.

I'd be re-reading Tolkien's _Old English Exodus_, but proofreading the typos got to be too much.

I'm about halfway through Slouching Towards Utopia by Brad DeLong

Lord of the Rings — second read after ~15 years, excited to revisit!

I just finished "The Emergency". Heard about it on Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz [0]. Is a fictional story about what it might be like if a modern government empire collapses. Im interested in writers that are thinking about the future.

[0]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-emergency-with-geo...

A corner of a foreign Field: the Indian History of a British sport. It goes into the details of how Cricket became popular in the Indian sub-continent.

I'm reading Harry Browne's "How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World" [0]. This book is a good guide and inspiration, even if I don't fully agree with every point.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/82104

just finished The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman. It's a really well-written story looking at the collision of the American Medical System and Hmong culture, specifically one Hmong family who has a young child with epilepsy. I like it a _lot_, because there are no villains in the story, but it is a tragedy, and the writer really gets into why these two groups aren't on the same wavelength.

Actually not very flashy but I'm reading 50 great short stories (selected) by Milton Crane.

Very good way to discover new authors, and the proximity of different styles (I hope) develops my conscious awareness of them.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1005670.50_Great_Shor...

10x Org.

I am fed up of this "you should be fast with AI" and this book explains how your can really improve the global performance.

Not super complex. It is written so even management should understand it. But it makes you think about your organización.

Like the Ferrari paradox: give everybody in the city a Ferrari and the traffic won't improve or even be worse. The same with AI

Ulysses - again .. hopefully I'll make it this time

I'm reading tons of Claude, all I do everyday is read all day

Probabilistic Robotics (https://robots.stanford.edu/probabilistic-robotics/) and Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/52767920-driven)

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, by Roland Allen.

From the title, it sounds very tedious, but I think it’s super cool. It chronicles the history of notebooking/journaling and the impact it’s had throughout time. Notebooks haven’t been been around and accessible for very long (relatively), and it’s interesting to hear about how somebody like Leonardo da Vinci used them to grow ideas. Makes you wonder how we possibly could’ve progressed without them.

C.S.Lewis, Prince Caspian. I'll skip the commentary to avoid spoiling the magic for anyone who hasn't read it yet.

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang.

It's an autobiographical history which recounts the lives of the author, her mother, and her grandmother throughout an extremely transformational century in Chinese history.

I went into this knowing little to no Chinese history, and it has opened my eyes to this fascinating country. I hope to visit China for the first time in 2027. Before I go, I'm doing a deep dive into Chinese history. Open to recommendations on what to read next!

The Boys On The Boat was good, working through Magnifica Humanitas (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume..., but in dead tree form) for my mind stretching.

I saw this video on Ars Technica about the making of Prince of Persia in the original Apple II and decided to get the book: https://youtu.be/sw0VfmXKq54?is=_QUEAlmdYJZuXeGr

The book is called “The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993”.

I just finished the Planet Money book. Pretty nice wide Econ 101 overview of how the economy works from a US point of view.

I'm going to read The Nerd Reich by Gil Duran next because that seems rather pertinent to the modern time. I haven't really looked at reviews and am going in blind.

Just finished: The Castle by Jon Ronson, very funny and enlightening look at the unraveling of some men.

Just started : Catch the Devil by Pamela Colloff, true crime about a con artist in Florida who traded overheard (probably fabricated) jailhouse confessions for a seemingly endless chain of get out of jail free cards.

I just finished book 8 of DCC, and while I wasn't blown away with the series like others, it was entertaining enough to keep me reading.

I just started reading The Blacktongue Thief (hardback) and The Name of the Wind (ebook). I've heard very good things about the latter, and although I'm aware that the series may never complete, I'm trying to not let that dissuade me.

Just finished 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin and am now reading Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King. The King novel is interesting because the whole thing is Dolores giving a statement to the police and its all in first person point of view.

After this, I have The Gales of November by John Bacon and then The Power Broker by Robert Caro.

Darwin's "The voyage of the Beagle" which is basically his edited travel diary. It's a slow read because he just describes his observations on animals and landscape (he was really into geology) and sometimes the interactions with the people there (lots of tensions between the settlers and the "Indians"), but overall an interesting read.

Structural Functions of Harmony by Arnold Schoenberg. I can't even begin to understand it, it's just beautiful to encounter such genius and rigorous thought.

https://archive.org/details/structuralfuncti0000arno/page/n8...

litrpg - I've read lots of these, but can't recommend that many. Even better ones can't hold my interest until the end of the series. Some that weren't that bad: solo leveling (up to book ~6), the wandering inn (~11). I listened to dungeon crawler carl (~8 books) and he who fights with monsters (~8).

scifi - the murderbot diaries, old man's war.

Non fiction: The Dawn of Everything.

Fiction: just finished The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott; about to read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (for the 2nd or 3rd time)

Capital in the Twenty-First Century from a physical book, Science in a Demon Haunted World on my Xteink X4, and Why Nations Fail on my Kobo.

I'm on book 3 of Romlyn Domingue's "Keeper of Tales" trilogy. One unusual touch I liked is that each book is written in a different person - book 1 is a second person autobiography written as the protagonist talking to her past self, book 2 is third person with a different protagonist, and then book 3 is a continuation of book 2 but with the voice switched to first person.

80年代SF傑作選.

Recently, I remembered a short SF story that I read back in high school and tracked it down, "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers".

I find new wave SF to be really playful and enjoyable to read, not to mention that the experimentation with funky themes and formatting adds a lot of novelty. The above Japanese title is a nice collection of late era stories in this genre.

I do a lot more reading now while i wait for AI bots, it's much better than scrolling social media, i get a few minutes at a time all day long and it's been a mental game changer.

* Fun - Vince Fynn's "Mitch Rapp" Series - a bit dated, but if you like Tom Clancy it's got a similar vibe.

* Beautiful/Thought Provoking - Things In Nature Merely Grow, by Yiyun Li

Just finished:

- Selected Stories - Anton Chekhov

- Death in Venice - Thomas Mann

- The Burnout Society - Byung-Chul Han

Currently I am reading an Austrian economics classic - Economics in one lesson by Henry Hazlitt

1. "Shadow of the torturer" + "Claw of the Conciliator" -- The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe 2. "Chronicle of a Death foretold" , Gabriel Garcia Marzquez 3. "Piranesi" , Susanna Clarke 4. "Ananda Math" , Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay

I am reading The dream of enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb.

My goal is to read the history of ideas from Renaissance period till 2000s. Started with The Florentines by Paul Strathern. Then read The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick. Now at the enlightenment era. It has been eye opening to read about the life and times of some of the great minds like Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Locke and more.

Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin. I'm enjoying it so far, there is overlap with Clean Code, it is a great reminder that there is no silver bullet for software architecture.

I'm also reading Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne by David Gaider, the original writer of Dragon Age.

I have been reading 'The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks' by Rebecca Skloot.

It's a fascinating read on how loose the ethics were when experimenting with African Americans back then.

This book also makes me wonder about the current practices, which we do "normally", that the future scientists will consider downright crazy.

Almost finished with A Perfect Spy. Maybe the most emotionally compelling Le Carre I’ve read. Long and I do find him a bit of a slog (The Honorable Schoolboy especially), but there’s something so fun about his brand of tactical, psychological espionage.

On the recommendation of a friend, the spiral wars series (https://spiral-wars-shepherd.fandom.com/wiki/Spiral_history).

It started slow (booting) but I'm enjoying the books (currently on #3), the universe-building and the length (10 books) of it.

The Nature of Tyranny, by El Kawakibi (a Syrian scholar). The book is 100 years old, and originally in Arabic, but there are some very good translations.

Great read on tyranny and it's adverse effects. Very relevant to what's happening in the world day.

I just finished (as in literally like 10 minutes before posting this comment) L.E Modesitt’s Solar Express. It’s a hard sci-fi book about humanity’s first encounter with alien artifacts and the race to be the first to whatever discoveries might be contained within. I REALLY enjoyed it.

Structuring Life to Support Creativity By Sandra Tayler Only a short way into this but it is a really interesting toolbox for finding ways to figure out what's important to you and making space for creativity.

Master Alvin by Orson Scott Card Kinda impressed that he finished the series after 30 years. GRR Martin loses another excuse.

Also reading DCC as a light read, and then reading At Swim-two-birds by Flann O'Brien as something a bit meatier. ASTB worth the read if you're looking for absurd meta fiction. Some parts I've found to be a bit of a slog, but it's short overall so worth the read

Walden, by Henry David Therou. Written by a man who got tired of modern life and decided to live in a hut in the woods. Written in the 1850s.

Full of lovely lines such as “I hear they’re building a telegraph line from Maine to Texas. Have they stopped to ask, does Texas have anything to say to Maine?”

Greg Egan's Orthogonal series, it's fricking wild. Alternate physics leading to a really weird alien species that solves a society ending problem in a weird way that is only possible because of the weird physics.

An Introduction to General Systems Thinking by Gerald Weinberg. I've found his writing style to really land with my brain.

I've mostly been reading short SF stories recently, most of them from Dangerous Visions.

Here's a few of the ones I've read and enjoyed:

“The Jigsaw Man” by Larry Niven

“The Night That All Time Broke Out” by Brian W. Aldiss

“A Toy for Juliette” by Robert Bloch (although I was surprisingly not a fan of Harlan's continuation)

“The Man Who Went to the Moon — Twice” by Howard Rodman

“Flies” by Robert Silverberg

Currently reading: Tracks (re-read) by Erdrich. Just finished: The Bad Beginning by Daniel Handler. Before that, Lolita by Nabokov.

I have a long-ish commute at the moment with some opportunities to read on the train, so I’ve been reading more. Been knocking out some of the books on my shelf.

I just finished Red Notice by Bill Browder - highly recommend it. It's super interesting to get a peak into what business in other parts of the world looked like in the early 80s - 2000s. I don't want to spoil but it's got some heavy/moving stuff in it. Reads like a novel!

The Intellectual Life by AG Sertillanges. Note that it does presuppose a Christian worldview, so ymmv depending on your belief.

I just finished my second read of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It's quite engaging, and also quite helpful to juxtapose against current political events, both to identify the similarities (media control) and divergences.

Rereading the Lies of Locke Lamure. If only the sequel were half as good as it...

I tend to prefer to avoid LitRPGs, they rot the brain and everything becomes a minmax number hacking endeavor.

Try Charles Stross's Accelerando and the Laundry Files series if you need good sci-fi. Foundryside and Empress of Forever are also decent. If you want fantasy, The Name of The Wind and Discworld are classics.

Three books.

These two feel especially relevant:

Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered - E.F. Schumacher

Tools for Conviviality - Ivan Illich

and

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - John Koenig

Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimgar_of_Fantasy_and_Ash

I have grown playing MMORPG's and this one brings the nostalgia vibes without investing the time into grinding for gear.

I started reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, but I found it much drier than I expected. It's been a lot of space politics so far, and less colonising mars. I was hoping for more The Martian. I might just read The Martian again instead

Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.

Currently reading

Katabasis by RF Kuang - magicians from Oxford go to hell on purpose

And, meatier

The language of the night, essays by Ursula Le Guin

I’m reading William Vollmann’s Imperial (a book about the eponymous county in CA) , Richard White’s “The Republic for Which it Stands” (a history of reconstruction and the gilded age), and Paul Starr’s “Social Transformation of American Medicine”.

Making Work visible by Domenica Degrandis. I have switch more into it team management role (have been 17 years individual contributor) and Im trying to find good books, any advice welcome

Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks

(re-reading) Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett

(re-reading) Invitation to Forth by Harry Katzan Jr

(reading to my son) Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl, Der Kleine Peter in der Katzenstadt, An Caisteal fòn Mhuir.

Got quite a lot going on at the moment, really, in terms of books.

At book 2 of Hyperion Cantos and enjoying it.. Gets weird at times but keeps you hooked for sure

Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. Pretty good world building. Haven't got too far into it yet.

Carl was hilarious, can’t wait for the final books

Nettle and Bone I really enjoyed

Some desperate glory also enjoyed

East of Eden very meaty if you want an epic

"Singing to Plants" by Stephan V. Beyer.

The description of the actual world of shamanism leaves me feeling massively disillusioned. McKenna et al. did us a disservice by shaping the western popcultural idea of what indigenous shamanism is.

Peter F. Hamilton started on the Exodus series and now onto the Reality Dysfunction. He has a talent for taking 5-10 different story threads and weaving them together over a 1000 pages. Also because are so many characters you can actually kill a decent number off.

Leviathan, or The Whale by Philip Hoare - As a big fan of whales and Moby Dick, this was amazing.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold - This has been on my to-read list for years. Pretty great so far.

"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac. My first time though this one and it's...well...a trip.

A bleak and appalling nuclear triptych:

- Hiroshima

- The Doomsday Machine

- Command and Control

Highly recommended if you’re feeling too happy and full of faith in humanity.

Gardens of the Moon - Steven Erikson

I really loved Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet! Very succinct. Currently working through The Tale of Genji (slowly) and Play It as It Lays (because I will read anything by Joan Didion).

I've taken a hiatus in my journey through Iain M. Banks' Culture novels to reread 1984.

Not sure whether this will "keep the brain working", but it definitely tied some knots in mine: The Space Trilogy [1], by C.S. Lewis, blends sci-fi with spirituality and classic mythology. The books should probably be read in sequence, as they follow the adventures of the same main character, but Lewis's almost fractal writing style in wildly trippy sections in the first two (which bear hallmarks from the New Testament's Revelations), exhausted me. The last book in the trilogy is worth reading in isolation; it deals with problematic uses of science (eugenics etc), government capture, media manipulation/propaganda, and also human psychology/power relationships etc. It also has its mystic/mythological stuff (Merlin of Arthurian legend is a character in the book), but what gave me cold chills was the creeping dystopian takeover of societal norms that certainly finds echoes in our modern world.

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

For keep the brain working and sci-fi I recommend you "EVO - Padres" by Ignacio Fernandez Moreno, spanish only but easy to read with B2 level or upper. It's a science fiction novel exploring politics based in evolution in a far away planet.

Terry Pratchet's entire corpus

Taxation The Peoples Business by Mellon, Andrew W.

https://archive.org/details/taxationthepeopl033026mbp

It's from 1924 and US centric, old new ideas in there.

Floating Mountains by Joe Rohde - One of Disney's most prominent imagineers reflects on his life, art, creativity and how collaboration is the secret to accomplishing massive projects.

I'm reading the AI technology blog, because I'm looking for a Job, so sad.

"Everything flows" by Vassily Grossman. It's the first time getting into the Soviet era. Not really a history book per se but still a great FPV of the peopler that lived during that era.

Just finished Diaspora by Greg Egan: sort of SF epic.

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon (by Kim Zetter).

An indepth history of Stuxnet. A bit long but recommended. You can not find any other book which goes this much in describing a mallware (no code).

I'm generally reading 3-4 books at a time. Right now that's:

* That All Shall Be Saved by David Bentley Hart

* Almost Transparent Blue by Ryū Murakami

* The Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cormwell

* The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (rereading after his recent passing)

The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh. A book which depicts tale of a family across the East and West Bengal amidst Partition of India. This book is very renowned and well written. Being a programmer, its better to read on different topics(which is rarity these days)

"Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great" by Eric Ries

The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (How to Think About Artificial Intelligence-Before It's Too Late) By Cory Doctorow

Men at Arms from the Discworld series. Second book of the series for me.

Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker

I've got a history of picking up the 2 top books of the airports best sellers. Have been my strategy for a while, right now it's FLESH. Feels like I'm being part of the mainstream, reading something everyone else reading.

Confessions of an Economic Hitman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...

I finished Quantum Radio last week and Im quite far in Rainbows End. I think the former is ok, not great; the latter is a better book (with AR future vibes), but still lacking something that makes u never drop it before u finish it.

Minerva's Matchbook, kinda painful to read, seeing how catastrophically familiar some things feel 20+ years later if you swap "Italy" with just about any other country.

Consultative Selling - by Mack Hanan.

pretty much you've to sell dollars to high up decision makers. and promise ROI. pretty radical.

just have to put what I have been reading in practice.

"Exit Party," Emily St. John Mandel's ["Station Eleven," among others] new novel. It's her best yet which is saying A LOT.

Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance

Fascinating (to me) book, basically setting up the question, is human endurance limiting factor physical or psychological …

One of the books I'm reading now is Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay, by George Ewart Evans. Set in 1957 Suffolk county, England. I often read in a theme and this theme is about cultural and technological transitions.

More Money than God

Tells individual stories of hedge funds and their founders such as Simmon, Tudor-Jones, Soros and more

Great lessons in how each thought about markets, how they lost and made money

Just finished Mansfield Park. Sort of a strange way to end the book, though I enjoyed it overall and was pretty well sucked in from the “play” onward.

Gnomon

Just finished "there is no antimemetics division" an absolutely astounding read

Thinking In Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows

The American by Martin Booth

"Principles and Techniques for Designing Precision Machines"(Layton Carter Hale, Thesis, 1999)

Mostly seeking design tips for a vacuum tolerant micro-positioning stage project. =3

An Immense World. It’s not as jaw-dropping as I’d expected (yes, I know rattlesnakes can “see” heat), but it’s also not an easy/fun read either. So I’ll probably land at around 3/5 rating.

Reading Gödel, Escher, Bach but I've been stuck on the MU puzzle for days

The pillars of the earth. It took me a while to get to it but what a book.

The Score, by C. Thi Nguyen.

It explores why we love metrics in games, but hate them at work.

I’ve recently been reading a book about the Ritz Hotel in Paris during World War II. It hinted that Simone de Beauvoir and Ernest Hemingway might have slept together. Is this true?

Nothing currently, but most recently, the various audiobooks of The Wind in the Willows to fall asleep, and Diana Wynne Jones' (of Howl's Moving Castle fame) Chrestomanci series while awake.

Assorted Crisis Events by Deniz Camp (Graphic Novel) - what if time was buggy?

Playing Off the Rail: A Pool Hustler's Journey by David McCumber (1996) - hustling in the golden era of pool in the usa

Graham Oppy - Atheism: The Basics

I just want it do it right, for my child.

Gene Wolfe, Peace

I will admit, I needed the spoiler afterwards to untangle it.

- Hacker News, mostly comments, and the occasional full article

- Google News and the occasional full article

- Email

- Slack

- ChatGPT/ Codex responses

- Road signs

- Various things in various mobile apps I use

- Websites

- Movie/Show subtitles

Off the top of my head, that accounts for most of the things I read on a weekly basis.

No time for books.

Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane.

Finally got to Dostoevsky's Brother Karamazov. This will take a while.

Reading Psycho-cybernetics to understand teleological goal-oriented mindsets. Reading The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt to remember what America used to stand for.

Just finished the Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb. I loved it!

I just finished the full cast Harry Potter audiobooks and they were fantastic.

Currently reading and recommending - Endurance by Alfred Lansing. Sir Earnest Shackleton’s attempt to cross the Antarctic.

Avatar: The Last Airbender books. Yangchen's series. Nothing you'd use to try to show off your knowledge over coffee, but fun well-written read with great world building.

The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality by Andy Clark

So far read about 20%, seems like a lovely theory tying together a lot about how the mind works.

President Lincoln by William Lee Miller about the magnanimity of Lincoln

God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre by Richard Grant about hiking through cartel-run Mexico alone

On the Origin of Sex - real life examples that seem like science fiction. How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch, I read last year but goes into most recent discoveries in physics.

I just wrapped up the Murderbot Diaries series and am starting in on Dungeon Crawler Carl.

I normally read a lot of nonfiction and history and am trying to make a point to read more fiction this year.

I've never been much fiction reader but I recently picked up The Gunslinger by Stephen King and it has been tough to put down.

if you're into litrpg, have you tried the wandering inn? it's not so meaty but it's above almost all other litrpgs in that department and the storytelling is great

Non-Fiction(on breaks): Indistractable

Fiction(before bed): Quicksilver Neal Stephenson

Audio(during chores): Dungeon Crawler Carl(Up to book 6)

Next up:

Non-Fiction: Ten things I wish I knew about raising boys, Outdoor kids in an indoor world, Intentional(Chris Bailey)

Fiction: The rest of the Baroque Cycle, then moving onto The Laundry Files by Charles Stross, then the rest of Discworld

Audio: The rest of DCC then I'm going to switch to podcasts for a while nothing else planned after this right now.

"Lost Worlds" - by Patrick Wyman, fascinating prehistory about meso and neolithic 'civilizations', their lives, their rises and downfalls. Really amazing stuff

"A man in the Maze" by Robert Silverberg. Don't know why but I felt the urge to re-read it, last time I read it 30 years ago and remembered the plot very well.

Atomic Accidents By James Maheffey. Witty author who worked in the field. Extremely entertaining highly recommended.

Picking away at TCP/IP Illustrated. Internet engineering, packet by packet. Slow going, but I'm into it.

Iain Banks - Excession - 5 stars and the most optimistic series on AI

Dungeon Crawler Card - Not for me but I might give it another chance

Bukowski - Post Office - Worth reading, Gen-Z might get triggered

"The March" by Kuniczak.

absolutely love this. I never could imagine this style of narration. One of the best books "about Stalin era" i read.

These days, a lot of manga. Favorites: Dorohedoro, Dai Dark, Tokyo Kaido, Ikigami, The Drifting Classroom, The Ghost in the Shell.

I recently discovered Charles Soule who started in comic books and ventured into novels. I read The Oracle Year recently and now I'm reading The Endless Vessel.

Boom Town by Sam Anderson. Its an intertwined history of Oklahoma City and its basketball team, the Thunder. I'm about halfway through, and I'm loving it so far.

I'm on book 3 of the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown.

Gouged: The End of a Fair Price—and What That Means for Your Wallet by Lindsay Owens became available today, and I have purchased ebook and will begin reading today.

I read a lot so I'll toss out some fiction titles you might like if you're a DCC fan:

* Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer -- post-apoc dystopian, somewhat cozy, told from a robot's perspective (who is joined by a companion cyborg dog)

* Blacktongue Thief by Chris Buehlman -- witty and snarky fantasy, solid character development and world building; and, if you like it, book 2 in the series (book 3 if you count a prequel) comes out soon

* Mortedant's Peril -- Fantasy mystery in a world where magic allows the "detectives" to touch the dead and sense their final thoughts/words; in that world, someone learns a dark secret from a victim...

* Trade of Blood -- Another fantasy mystery that is exceptionally well told; it's Book 3 in a series so I'd start with Tainted Cup if you haven't read that already

* The Infinite State -- new SciFi by Richard Swan (usually a fantasy author); a universe where ultra wealthy can establish colony planets, someone attempts to start a democracy.

The Dresden Files (Big ol' series)

Currently reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications — on the replication chapter. Dense but worth it. What are you reading?

The first volume of Software Foundations, and the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust. Both very very slowly.

I guess it will take me years to have reason of both.

I just finished Wilfred Sellars “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”

I’m slowly rereading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.

I am perpetually rereading the works of Richard Rorty.

Proofs and refutations by laktos Basic mathematics by lang Mathematics for nonmathematician Hail mary andy weil Just picked up player piano linked here

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer. my 5th+ read

Weaveworld, by Clive Barker. my 2nd read

Surface Detail, by Ian M. Banks

devtest reads of my WIP book on computer performance

Aeneid, it’s been a while since my school years

Energy and Civilization by Vaclav Smil. Bounced off a few Robert Macfarlane titles —just not for me — and also Anne of Green Gables w my kid

Fiction: Between Two Fires

Non-fiction: 21st Century Monetary Policy

Meaty: Quarantine by Greg Egan. Easily my favorite book so far this year. It starts as a detective story, but then spirals into something much bigger. Forced beliefs, quantum super positions, and the existential dread of repeatedly facing your own non-existence. It's second only to Permutation City in my Egan tier list.

That book led me to Quantum Computing for Everyone. It's good so far, but more work than expected to follow along being that I'm dumb.

Since the question is what are you reading (not what have you read): Ant-Kind by Charlie Kaufman. It's too soon to say if it's good or not, but it has made me laugh out loud several times. I'm about 80 pages in, and it's only just now started to open up into Kaufman's recursive, meta story telling that makes his film stuff so cool.

"So you got gutted like a pig. A survival guide for unemployed software engineers." An O'reily classic.

Finally getting around to reading the LOTR trilogy. I've read the Hobbit and the Silmarillion, just never got around to the main story.

Catching up on some classics, Resurrection, Tolstoy Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passo

Just finished “Every Man Dies Alone” by Hans Fallada and now half way through “The Lady and the Monk” by Pico Iyer. Both recommended.

I’m reading the gospel! It’s super interesting and accurate account to my understanding.

I’m specifically talking about the New Testament.

I’m currently reading Hebrews 6.

Rereading Pale, slowly:

https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/

Designing Data Intensive Applications by Martin Klepman. It’s my second time and I felt I understand better this time.

Invisible Women and the Culture series by Iain Banks (Use of Weapons currently). Both really good

The Forest People by Colin Turnbull and If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Book 2 of Hyperion Cantos. Really enjoying it, but am unsure if I want to do books 3 & 4. Anyone read them and recommend either way?

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, the manga adaptations of The Shadow over Innsmouth and The Shadow out of Time, Progress and Poverty.

Just started Dark Tower Series Book 4: Wizard and Glass. I crushed the first 3 books, then took a break to read dungeon crawler carl.

Just started Quantum Break: Zero State

Highly recommend the game for anyone who liked Dark or Primer (or any other fiction that features stable time loops).

Just recently started watching Reacher S1 and it was absolutely amazing so started reading the book and wow - like its absolutely amazing

I'm reading Awakenings by Oliver Sacks in English and Medmänniskor by Stefan Einhorn in Swedish.

London Falling, fascinating story about a piece of London's underbelly. Same guy that wrote Say Nothing, which is also great.

I most recently read http://elan.school

The Undetectables by Courtney Smyth. A ghost and a bunch of magical teenagers solve paranormal mysteries

Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley

I didn't really get this book the first time through.

At home, Atlas Shrugged. It's an interesting story even if you don't care about the allegories, I'm really enjoying it so far. But it will probably take me half a year to finish it at this rate, since I can only read it on weekends.

At work I'm currently trying to read SF light novels from the turn of the millennium. I finished Murasaki no Qualia some time ago, and it's just as amazing as I remember the manga being when I read it as a teen. Right now I'm reading Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu. Sadly very few of these are translated. The Last and First Idol story collection is also a good read if you're interested in this genre.

Slowly reading “Seeing that Frees” by Rob Burbea.

Highly recommended if you want to challenge your view of the world.

Infinite Jest. Enjoying it so far, but the length keeps on killing me. I'm like 5% of the way in after a couple of weeks...

Ready Player One, together with my 9yo boy.

Currently, “Football” by Chuck Klosterman. Basically about the cultural impact of (American) Football. Pretty good.

Dostoevsky, the Brothers Karamazov!

Oh hell, what truly great novel. It’s a long collection of people’s inner monologues, and it’s confusing as hell at first that every Russian has at least three names. But so good.

Before this: The Subtle Art Of Folding Space… biggest pile of shit I’ve read in years. Fuck. So stupid. If you made me pick between reading it again and a Kristin Hannah… I’d just go get my wine glass and basic bitch sweatpants now. It was supposed to be “modern sci fi” it was actually a food snob that seems like they’re in a cult and trying subtly to tell you how everyone else is so fucking stupid except the smart people that choose to be mentally superior to everyone else. Bad bad bad.

I've been finding it difficult to get back into reading books (Hacker News and X are difficult for me to deprioritise)....

...but this year I set myself the goal of reading 10 books. One of the things that has really helped, is giving myself permission to quit a book if I am not enjoying it after the first 50 pages, or if it's too much of a struggle.

Also having 2 books on the go at the same time has been helpful too.

I am currnetly reading:

+ The Eloquence of the Sardine - Bill Francis

+ What about you doing with your life - J. Krishnmurti (recommended by Naval)

I am enjoying the first, learning lots of interesting facts about fish and the ocean but the second is quite slow and difficult and I might give up soon.

Bill Bryson - a short history of nearly everything. And he means EVERYTHING.

Looked over the lists, and there is one that was not mentioned yet:

1. "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny

„Practical Engineering for Inventors“. It’s not really made to be read from beginning to end but I do like to le

Tau Zero, by Poul Anderson. Love it so far——does anyone know how scientifically accurate it might be?

Daedalus; or, Science and the Future by Haldane. To be followed by Icarus by Russell.

Just reread all of Nero Wolfe by Rex Stout. 40+ books. Didn't even breathe.

Currently reading: The Magus by John Fowles

Just finished reading: Middlemarch by George Eliot

In my bag right now I have: The Fox and the Jewel by Karen A. Smeyers and The Spiral Dance by Starhawk.

Samuel Butler's adaptation of Homer.

Arkady Martine right now. Pretty good.

"Middlemarch", "Utopia for Realists", and various graphic novels.

The Overstory is rad fiction. Just started listening to Ordinary Men which is about a Polish police battalion responsible for a great many murders during the Holocaust. The members of that battalion were, I guess, welcomed back into society afterwards? Idk, I just started. I'll tell you one thing, though: it's weird to absorb facts about the Shoah as digestible statistics fun facts (for lack of a better term) but those little snippets are very necessary to get my arms around the scale of things such as it. It's the same as happened when I listened to Late Victorian Holocausts. So now I have stats like

- Most Jewish victims of the Holocaust died by gunshot in the occupied USSR

- In March 1942, 80% of Holocaust victims were still alive and by February 1943 80% were dead.

- Per capita incomes were equal in the first and last years of the British Raj

- Indian grain exports increased in the 1880s and 90s and there were 3(?) different famines at that time

rattling around in my head in the same part that holds on to "Pakistan has never had a PM finish a 5 year term," "The Lions, Falcons, and Bills (non-exhaustive) have never won a Super Bowl," "There are no surviving contemperaneous attestations of Hamilcar and Hannibal Barca" and "the first drummer of the Beatles was called Pete Best and made an album called Best of the Beatles"

Notes from the underground, myth of Sisyphus and Thus spoke Zarathustra. All three in parallel

Back issues of The London Review of Books.

"Correction" from Bernhard. Wow. This is in its own league of weirdness and yet it flows...

I've been meaning to get into classics more and, lately, I have. Otherwise my usual reads are historical fiction and fantasy.

I just finished 'All Quiet on the Western Front' - reading with https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicBookClub/. Really great book, though a bit heavy content - ww1 from a german soldier's pov, gets you to feel the mindnumbing senselessness and horror - highly recommend it if your tastes run that way.

Also reading Iliad, the Fagles translation, through https://catherineproject.org/ about a third of way through right now and we'll also be reading the Emily Wilson translation later this year. It's been fun discussing it with people. This translation has been a easy read, far easier than I expected. And the discussions make it thought-provoking. For meaty, this might work.

Also reading 'When Things Fall Apart' by Pema Chodron. This is slow going, thoughtful. I read a few pages every few days, never more than a chapter at a time. I suppose it's all variants of being fully in the present moment to some extent. And I think I might re-read it after I finish. It did get me thinking again about loving-kindness and tonglen. In this vein, 'Taming the Tiger Within' was also great - short and sweet, simple language but still thought-provoking.

Earlier this year I read 'The Road' which I loved, and highly recommend. Dystopian with language to match. On the fantasy side the 'Ana & Din' novels by Robert Jackson Bennett, think sherlock holmes but in a fantasy setting and magic for science. I liked the earlier ones in the series better or maybe I just read too many of them in a short period. Either works for a good read though I think Ana & Din might be easier.

Other slightly off the beaten path fiction recommendations would be 'Eagle in the Snow' - set in Roman times about an officer holding the line against attacking german forces, starts a bit rocky and I was lost a bit and found it hard to understand initially but totally loved it as it progressed. I came to it from a fivebooks recommendation. Also, CJ Sansom's shardlake series, another fivebooks recommendation I think. This is about a hunchback lawyer investigating something each time. I love how it gets us into the time period and the personalities involved.

Now that I'm done with the book for classicbookclub, I might start 'A Tale of Two Cities'

Finally getting around to reading House of Leaves by Danielewski.

reading the second edition of "Clean Code", it's been a while since i read the first edition.

will be giving my trainee this book too, and hoping we can discuss parts of the book we agree and don't agree with.

Going through "Here comes the sun" by Bill McKibben - slightly disappointed / surprised, as the book is very much a pamphlet / manifesto in favor of a single idea (that I could paraphrase as "solar is good, solar is _now_ cheap, it's so cheap that it's very cheap, and so good that's it's very good, and we should build more cause it's cheap and good, and if you disagree you're a fossil fuel shill astroturfer and all the land and materials problems are not really problems, and oh, did I mentionned it's cheap and good ?") To which I'll say, _fair enough_, but I was hoping for a slightly more nuanced view of the topic.

Also started "Sutskever's list" by Richard Heimann, which goes into the history of the current AI paradigm "one paper at a time". It's written for a curious audience : people who can vaguely understand the concepts, but not go into details. That means that I kinda "get" some chapters because I already read about the topics, and I'm completely stumped by some. But the "insider baseball" history is illuminating sometimes.

The Immortal Great Souls from Phil Tucker. Very enjoyable fantasy with unique world and characters.

Reading a number of books on the Manhattan Project / Cold War / Soviet Nuclear Program

* Dead Hand

* Atomic Accidents

* Hiroshima

* Command and Control

Half way through Dungeon Crawler Carl book 8, really got hooked on the whole universe haha.

Re-read Crime and Punishment - read this as a teenager in high school, and (not suprisingly) think at the time had missed the main point behind it (and warning, if you haven't read it, spoilers ahead!).

When I was young, thought that Raskolnikov was an example of an intelligent, moral person who was struggling with higher concepts which led him to murder. And moreover back then, thought he was a overall a good protagnist who was just in an impossible situation.

Now, realized the novel is more about psychology and how people who are overall good and others who are overall bad make choices, and then they have to mentally deal with these decisions. Yeah, think Dostoevsky is saying Raskolnikov was actually very misguided in the reasoning behind his murders. Eventhough his intentions were in many respects actually good, they were egotistically and overly idealistic. Eventually, Raskonikov realized he had deluded himself and that he was hyperinflating his own merits and value as a person over other people. And also, at a more basically level, he struggled with his conscience on whether to avoid being caught, commit suicide or turn himself in. He himself didn't believe he was an immoral person, and when he realized he had deluded himself, he struggled in the end on what course of action to take.

One downside of the book is by today's standards, it is very long-winded and often take several pages to go through something that would take a single page by many writers today. But think this also makes it more realistic, because most people in actual life don't get to the point that quickly. Really fascinating.

Book 4 of Tad William's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series.

The Immortal Great Souls by Phil Tucker. Very enjoyable fantasy with great world and characters.

I'm reading AI technology blog, because I'm looking for a job, so sad.

Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China's New Social Order

Not sure if this one qualifies as more meaty :)

Binging on Barbara Ehrenreich: Nickeled and Dimed, Dancing in the Streets, Natural Causes

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

- "Foundations of Analysis" by Belding & Mitchell

- "On Writing Well" by Zinsser

If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies

I'm not a doomer, but I'm trying to understand the perspective. Up to chapter 10, I'm still not convinced. There's too much hand-waving around what will happen. It's like: 1. AI smarter than us 2. ??? 3. We're dead. What happens in 2.?

I just got past the "extinction scenario" and I'm wildly unconvinced. I agree that AI can theoretically create a bioweapon. I'm unconvinced that an AI can hide its ability to RSI, find money to run its weights on a random GPU farm, train itself to be smarter _outside_ a lab with no human input, then somehow manipulate people to give it supplies to build a bioweapon which it uses to kill us all. I to believe that Yudkowsky was good at fanfiction; this senario did not demonstrate that. My number 1 question: why do they think an RSI capable model would be first developed OUTSIDE a frontier lab? The labs have more compute, more data, more human brains working on the problem. Also thousands of variations of that same model that escaped. The escaping model somehow acquires the millions of dollars it takes to run training to somehow RSI itself into infinity then decides to kill us all, all before the frontier labs manage to achieve RSI?

Come on.

Anyway. Finishing the book for completeness, but massively underwhelmed.

Abaddon´s Gate, James S.A. Cory. From the Expanse thrilogy. Very very good scy-fi

Just finished: “Animal Liberation Now”. The original animal liberation book was a major contributing factor to me becoming vegetarian, and this new book has convinced me to become vegan instead

Starting today: “In the shadow of man”.

I am currently reading The Cauldron by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Snow Crash. A few decades late, but man am I loving it.

- Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

- From Third World to First

Last finished: Human Use of Human Beings

Finishing up Wolf Hall right now. I quite enjoy it.

Breakneck, China's quest to engineer the future. Dan Wang

I'm reading Lord of The Rings for the first time

“Careless People” by Sarah Wyn-Williams. About Meta.

Maupassant, Appartion et autres comptes d'angoisse (very good)

Becky Chambers, the long way to a small angry planet (very good)

Asimov, Second foundation (just finished, not as good as Foundation but good still)

Maybe Knut Hansun, The last joy (Nazi sympathizer, might just put the book down - and book not blowing my mind)

Edit0: writing this and seeing Hansun was a Nazi collaborator - putting the book down

DCC book 4

The economy of anonymity by Amaya

Artificial Intimacy by Sherry Turkle, just out

I've started reading the Expanse series once again.

I try to read fiction and non fiction in parallel, so my current pairing is How Asia Works by Joe Studwell and Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Enjoying both so far!

Other books I’ve enjoyed recently:

The Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft - I read Endurance by Alfred Lansing last year so it was fun having a real Antarctic adventure in my mind while reading it.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy - I actually started this a couple of years ago and quit part way through deciding I couldn’t put myself through it anymore. I kept thinking about it though, until I finally picked it back up and finished it this summer. Horrifying, but quite a masterpiece.

If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky - I was about a year late to the party on this, but it still holds up. I would recommend it.

The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Malaby - Excellent! Fascinating seeing a glimpse inside of the companies currently eating the world.

Le Comte de MonteChristo, an African history of Africa and Hold me tight

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

Always.

The Last Witnesses by Svetlana Alexievich. A sad book!

Material world and chip wars. Both brilliant. Material world highlights our human ingenuity with an optimism for the future as it outlines our exploitation of the worlds resources over history up to the present time.

Chips wars, for me as a dev without a strong hardware background is a fascinating read into the history of Silicon Valley, from the 50s right up to nvidia and Taiwan semiconductor.

Discourses by Epictetus

I just read Killers of the Flower Moon, which was great.

Naufragios by Alvar Nunez Caveza de Vaca.

200 Years Together by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Hegel, Lacan - embraced the dark side :D

Hyperion, by Dan Simmons

I had just finished the first "Dungeon Crawler Carl" and found it harmless and not worth the money. Frankly I'm a little surprised its a best seller. Do the later books get any better?

Hyperion is a first-time read and as I near the end I know I'll seek out the next one.

wrt DCC, the audiobooks by Soundbooth Theater are really good! A very different experience from traditional audiobooks.

Airframe by Michael Crichton. It's riveting.

Actually, Nevermind: Essays by Taylor Tomlinson

Only tangentially related shameless plug but... For the readers here, could you give www.bertieapp.com a try? Would love feedback!

Just finished Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. One of the best books I've read, ever. It's long and tedious, and if you like getting lost in minute descriptions of mundane objects and daily routines of people who lived in past eras, then you'll love it and feel sad when it's over. I also find books like this to be a great antidote to the pace of current life, where you're pressured to "read n books in 1 year" or you're not deemed a proper reader. Next up is going to be Lonesome Dove, suggested by someone in this very thread!

Does anyone consider audiobooks reading?

My friends have begun saying they are reading books when they listen to them.

It enrages me.

A Fabulous Debt by Robin Wigglesworth

- Fluent Python

- Middlemarch

Something from every food group there.

I just got done with a second read of 2666 by Bolaño.

There was an article on HN a month or two ago about how some books drive people to the kind of madness that would make them do a degree in literature. This is probably the one for me. Excited to read it again in 5 years and see it differently again.

Professional CMake: A Practical Guide

A Secular Age by Charles Taylor.

The way of excellence and The Troubles

here's a page that allows you to browse and search all the books mentioned in this thread.

https://what-are-you-reading-september-2026.aljosa-asanovic....

I just finished Domain-Driven Transformation by Lilienthal & Schwentner. It's the book I've been seeking for years.

I'm currently reading More Fearless Change by Manns & Rising. I've always enjoyed being a change agent, and I would've been more effective if I'd read this book a decade ago.

Next up, I plan to read Facilitating Software Architecture by Harmel-Law.

Oh, and every day or two I read aloud a chapter of Magic and Meaning Expanded by Burger & Neale to my wife. We're both magicians and big fans of Eugene Burger's work.

Wall Street Stories by Edwin Lefèvre

A copy of Resurrection by Tolstoy I found on the street. Really enjoying the way he is able to portray characters in such profound ways.

Also still working through Civilization and Capitalism by Fernand Braudel.

What I finished recently and was really surprised by: Der Geisterbanner by Karl Friedrich Kahlert from 1792.

City of Stairs

The Nerd Reich

The output of LLMs, largely :-/

Why Nothing Works (2025)

Ovid's Metamorphoses

Politics by Aristotle

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff. Can't recommend it enough

I just finished book 7 of Dungeon Crawler Carl, as well as Enshittification, myself! Funny.

I'm now working my way through "I Am Not A Robot: My Year Using AI To Do (Almost) Everything" by Joanna Stern.

https://joannastern.com/

Currently taking a brief break from the History of Middle-earth series (The Lays of Beleriand is astonishingly beautiful) to read a fascinating book called Fascist Yoga, about how the wellness movement has some surprising links with white supremacism.

The Brothers Karamazov

Dungeon Crawler Carl too, but in German. The translations are so slow, but it's worth it I rate. I tried to use LLM's to translate it (due to my impatience) but it's just so shit I can barely make it a chapter. Might just read them in English.

I haven't read books in years. I read an incredible amount of code, does that count?

15,000 miles in a ketch

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. One of the longest English novels, but it has got me hooked. I love how descriptive the prose is. I can almost see the events happen in front of my eyes. There's a bbc adaptation as well, but I was enraged by it so I can't recommend it.

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century by W. David Marx. A fascinating and approachable read.

Eichmann in Jerusalem

Antigone by Sophocles

I'm reading Purge (not to be confused with the film franchise), by a Finnish-Estonian writer about two women with dark pasts during the waning days of the Soviet Occupation of Estonia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purge_(novel)

Psychology of Money

"A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the 21st Century" - really enjoying the modern take on Darwinian natural selection (the first part of the book). In short nature diversifies in good times, to stock resilience for weathering the bad times. Just a few chapters in, waiting for that hope to kick in any minute...

"The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst" - This story is about the first round-the-world solo yacht race, and the one contestant who died at sea. His story is really strange - an anti-hero tragedy with a touch of mental illness. The author does a great job bringing the reader on this descent into madness.

"Protocols" - Andrew Huberman's recent book. Like his podcast, it's full of solid advice backed by published science - but also with some repetitive filler and product name drops. The sections on exercise and diet were not very informative to me, mainly because I've already incorporated most of that into my life already. The sections on light exposure and its relationship to sleep, melatonin and cortisol is the most fascinating new-to-me info. I've started morning/evening walking without my sunglasses to get those sweet sweet photons.

"Escape from Capitalism", by Clara Mattei

Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky

the cold start problem by andrew chen

Helliconia Summer

Is a river alive by Robert McFarlane

A beautifully written travelogue/nature book/eco activist screed that tours the world visiting rivers and the people engaged in living with and protecting them. Fascinating, hopeful, heartbreaking and lyrical. Really enjoying it (evidently)!

Right now I’m reading Biological War. Before this one I finished reading:

- The Left Hand of Darkness

- The Nerd Reich

- What Happened to Liberal Democracy?

Vingt Ans Après

You may enjoy :

- End Times Fascism, And the Fight for the Living World (Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor)

- The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity (Tim Wu)

Currently listening to I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. A fascinating exploration of consciousness written 20 years ago but very relevant in the age of AI.

zero to one by peter thiel

Email Storyselling Playbook by Jim Hamilton

https://a.co/d/08zSx2LD

I too am on DCC; I wonder why I like it, but I do. Strangely, one of the things it reminds me of, is the Malazan-Book-of-the-fallen series, in spite of how different they are. I was/have been on the 'book that wouldnt burn' series; I still have to read the final third book. Ironically, I have not yet finished that series because I dread it; the author is a little too good at writing truly loathable antagonists, and at the same time reading him, you have learned he cares little for plot armor ('if he dies, he dies', sigh.) Other than that, Piranesi by Susanne Clarke; I have also gotten her earlier book, but not gotten far into it yet.

DCC is strangely hypocritical - a massive commercial success where we the readers revel-wallow in the graphic suffering of the fictive protagonists/victims, and author & co are making truckloads of profits, precisely on the kinds of sheenanigans the books on the surface critisize :-). It is also a bit ironic, that the books/Carl critisize fascism, while at the same time, Carl is on a kind of one-man fascist/tyrant purging the existing elite, with summary and graphic executions. Sigh :-)

Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris - a re-read about the history of Silicon Valley, highly recommended.

Way too many John Le Carré novels (and his memoir). Not escapist enough, frankly—it adds up to a very dismal appraisal of geopolitics, with plenty of foreshadowing of what the world has become: the kleptocracy in the ruins of the Soviet state; having fought communism, the need to now fight capitalism; and this one I saved from The Little Drummer Girl: "What are we to become, I wonder? A Jewish homeland, or an ugly little Spartan state?"

Claude tokens

Thanks for this question!

I'm not reading anything at the moment since I'm taking a break and watching season one of Deadwood and also re-watching season one of Boston Legal.

But when I'm done, I plan to re-read "The Cold War A Very Short Introduction" by Robert J. McMahon. I read it about five years ago and it's time to read it again.

Having said that, I can't pass on this opportunity to share the books I've read (some are re-reads) thus far this year that I recommend. I'll just list them while saying that they all come highly recommended by me.

In the famous words of Frank Zappa - So many books, so little time.

1. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris

2. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris

3. Lying by Sam Harris

4. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

5. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

6. Cosmos by Carl Sagan.

7. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

8. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

9. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

10. Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

11. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J. K. Rowling

12. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling

13. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

14. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

15. Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan

16. Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide to Atheism by Richard Dawkins

I've been reading graphical novels, lots of non-fiction and adaptations. Many that I've read as regular novels and many that I would never have read otherwise.

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168840-the-arab-of-the...

- https://www.goodreads.com/series/329945-sapiens-a-graphic-hi...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/769712.Palestine

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/196618871-1177-b-c

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203767306-the-hidden-lif...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/207003952-capital-ideolo...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9844623-feynman

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23167775-the-age-of-self...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38589785-to-kill-a-mocki...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208512484-the-mythmakers

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61783727-the-bomb

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50159458-kent-state

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12959045-my-friend-dahme...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32951507-the-park-bench

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6493321-logicomix

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218569864-insectopolis

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48638303-billionaires

Currently I'm reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/210384823-shroud

OK listen up.

* Iain M. Banks is a bad writer. His books are predictable. You know the goodies (1990s neoliberals with space helmets) are gonna win. There's no moral uncertainty and not even really any jeopardy.

* I'm seeing an alarming amount of Dungeon Crawler Carl. Look, if you don't want to read, just don't read! There's no point reading rubbish. Just play a computer game or pick your nose or something. There's a thousand years of literature out there. Some of it is really good.

* Neil Gaiman. American Gods was so unbearable I couldn't finish it. How can any decent person like this vain, pompous writer?

I am judging typical hn-er tastes, sorry, but it's as if I thought PHP was the best programming language or something. No. It is not.

Genre is fine! There's great SF and fantasy. But bad writing is bad writing. Genre is not an excuse.

I lately I’ve been reading three books at once:

- Fiction: Pure entertainment, with no shame, although I do enjoy working in a mix of slop and more high-brow works. I generally go through one of these every 5-10 days.

- Non-fiction: Big, meaty, interesting book. These take me forever to finish but I really enjoy them. I get through like 100 pages in a good month.

- Children’s: I have been reading to my son, which is entirely for me as he’s only ~5mo old. But I have a stack of lovely children’s classics that I have greatly enjoyed going through.

Here’s what I’m currently reading and some recommendations on previous stuff I’ve read.

Fiction

Right now I’m finishing up The Kremlin’s Candidate. Not great, the series has been going a bit downhill. Some recent hits:

- The Dog Stars (Heller): Awful movie, incredible book. Highly recommended.

- True Grit (Portis): For everyone recommending Lonesome Dove, definitely get a copy of True Grit. A fantastically fun masterpiece. A real achievement.

- The Force (Winslow): The first 80 pages are deep cringe but it picks up into a really compelling and fast crime novel. Pulp for sure but fun.

- All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy): Incredible book. I could read it 100 times.

Nonfiction

- The Politics of Heroin (McCoy): Dense but very very good. First hand reporting of the CIA’s role in the global drug trade and how it has, to a surprising degree, shaped the modern world.

Children’s

- The Last Unicorn (Beagle): Surprisingly nice. Some rough edges but I’m enjoying it. If my son was able to understand more than just that he’s spending time with me and that I’m making comforting noises I think he’s enjoy it.

- The Wind in the Willows (Grahame): Stop everything you’re doing and go read this. Aloud, your kids if you have them but as a treat to yourself if you don’t. What a joy this is.

————

Some things I haven’t read that are on the shelf thaf I really want to dig in to:

- Challenger: History of the tragic NASA accident.

- First Casualty: Inside the CIA’s paramilitary ops and the early days of the Afghanistan war.

- The Great Game: Historic book on the power struggles of the British and Russian empire in Afghanistan.

- Lonesome Dove: I love westerns, I have this whole series on the shelf, and am kind of just waiting and keeping it in my back pocket for a rainy day.

- Power of the Dog series: I just know I’m going to love this. Cartel/DEA saga spanning decades.

- McCloskey’s CIA series: It’s slop, and the tradecraft is dated to the point that what is happening in the field now is completely unrecognizable from the dead drops and SDRs and such of the cold war, but… it’s fun!

I've been mainly reading sci-fi & fantasy series. On the fiction side I can strongly recommend Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga, Seth Dickinson's The Traitor Baru Cormorant & sequels, and Robert Jackon Bennett's The Tainted Cup & sequels (fantasy murder mystery series).

On the non fiction side, I'm slowly chipping away at Joe Studwell's book How Asia Works, about East Asian development. In the first section of the book, the author argues that the foundation for successful development was boosting agricultural output -- instead of spending precious foreign currency on food imports, surplus agricultural output can be exported & intensive farming provides a way to soak up and use labour before other industries develop.

Studwell also argues for the importance of land reform in boosting agricultural output -- appropriating land from wealthy landlords & redistributing it to landless peasants & tenants. This happened in both socialist & capitalist societies. There was a huge demand for land reform from landless peasants. I was completely ignorant of this chunk of history & found it fascinating. Agricultural output increases on a per hectare basis when farmers have the incentive to work hard - unlike if they're day labourers or share croppers paying much of their output as rent. Landlords don't have an incentive to increase output as its easier for them to earn money from renting out their land & lending money. Studwell gives examples of small farmer-owned farms being much more productive than colonial plantation style farming. Developmental success stories (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) were those where governments supported their huge newly created markets of tiny landowner-farmers with subsidised fertiliser inputs, better varieties of crops etc & where peasants & tenants got a seat at the table to influence the land redistribution process. There are also stories of failures where wealthy elites got control of the land reform process & rendered it largely ineffective (the Philippines).

Gogol - Dead Souls

Why read when we can have the hundreds of pages summarized to 5 pages using AI? /s