I'm finishing the Art of War by Sun Tzu and I'm looking for some book suggestions, so I'm curious to know which books are being read by the members of the HN community.
"Metallurgy of Steel for Bladesmiths & Others
who Heat Treat and Forge Steel" by John Verhoeven
http://www.feine-klingen.de/PDFs/verhoeven.pdf
An interesting technical introduction to metallurgy, without being overly tedious. Congratulations to the author, for what sounds like it could be a dry subject. I am pleasantly surprised by how ignorant I was about such a common everyday material, and about the fascinating changes that take place in the crystal structure of steel with mere temperature changes. I've got no plans to forge steel, or make blades, but found this book very good so far (although I have been interested in metalworking in general lately).
"Basic Lathework" by Stan Bray. This is the best of the beginning lathe books that I've been reading recently, covering the parts of the machine and accessories, techniques, and cutting tools. Very minimal pre-requisites.
"Metals in the Service of Man" by Arthur Street and William Alexander. A very light read about industrially useful metals, a little history about them, and their uses.
"How Round is Your Circle" by John Bryant and Chris Sangwin. Just started this, but it sounds interesting, the pictures are intriguing, and it pushes a lot of my "interesting" buttons.
The Metallurgy book sounds very interesting, definitely going to check it out. Along those lines, but I think much more simplistic, is a book I just read called "Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World" -- one chapter each devoted to a common everyday material. You may like that one based on why you liked the Metallurgy book.
"How Round is Your Circle" is awesome. I finished that and immediately lost a huge amount of time investigating all the papers referenced by them, and reading on planimeters and measurement theory. I still have to get a copy of "Measurement" by Lockhart though.
It's a brilliant book written by Sidney Dekker, a "Professor of Human Factors and Flight Safety". The basic point is that the default way of understanding bad outcomes is what he calls "the Old View or the Bad Apple Theory". He instead argues for the New View, where "human error is a symptom of trouble deeper inside a system".
Normally with a book like this, I read the first couple of chapters, say, "Ok, I get the idea," and can ignore the rest. After all, I both agree with and understand the basic thesis. But so far every chapter has been surprisingly useful; I keep discovering that I have Old View notions hidden away. E.g., when I discover a systemic flaw, I'm inclined to blame "bad design". But he points out that's a fancy way of calling the problem human error, just a different human and a different error than normal.
Even the driest parts are helped by his frequent use of examples, often taken from real-world aviation accident reports. There are also fascinating bits like a system for high-resolution markup of dialog transcripts to indicate timing (down to 1/10th second), speech inflection, and emphasis. I'll never use it myself, but I will definitely use the mindset that it requires.
Given how much time software projects spend dealing with bugs, I believe we need a new way to think about them, and for me this book describes a big piece of that.
It probably has nothing to do with it, but as I was reading your post it sounded very similar to the typical Hegelian approach to history and societies.
Huge +1. This is one of the best and most informative books about engineering process I've ever read.
The numerous real-world examples from airplane crash investigation also help put into perspective the relative unimportance of the "critical bugs" and "extreme pressure" most of us building the kinds of products discussed on HN actually experience.
Greg Egan renewed my faith in Science Fiction. I just finished reading Diaspora, and I am now a fan. It's an incredibly well thought out extrapolation of the future of the human race, much less phantasmagorical and much more grounded in science than pretty much every other SF I know of, while still going off into mind-bending tangents.
I think the most common critique of his work might be about the occasional digressions on physics. It's undeniable that they make the book a bit dense, but in fact, he appears to have restrained himself to keep it readable and entertaining, instead publishing the actual hairy details on his website:
Diaspora and Permutation City put totally new questions in my head.
If consciousness is only a series of states in your brain, does it matter what the order of running that sequence is? In Permutation City there is an experiment where brain states are played back backwards or in a random order, but to the person perceiving it, it seems like just business as usual.
I always assumed that after my brain is destroyed there would be just nothingness. But maybe if the "next state" will again exist some time in the future (or past?) from my perspective it will still be a totally continuous experience. Death might seem like just a bad dream.
He plays a lot with this stuff. In Diaspora consciousness is just a piece of software. Since this software can be run at a much higher speed than wetware can, each moment of real time seems much longer to the uploaded. But when they want to, for example when waiting for an interstellar trip to complete, they can "skip forward" and let the brain emulator run them at a much slower pace to make the trips more bareable.
I thought running a consciousness backwards or in random order would be as far as he goes, but in Diaspora they even go a step further, having every state be a completely separate structure in a completely separate universe. The book assumes that to the participants even that would seem like a continuous experience.
It really makes me question what I really am, how malleable is this "me"?
Yeah, if you liked diaspora then permutation city will have you picking your jaw up off the floor in a similar manner. Schild's Ladder is the third in the unofficial trilogy (he denies any connection, but I definitely reckon they form a nice trio) and it's pretty hardcore: lots of quantum mechanics and graph theory actually driving the plot.
A fascinating thing about diaspora: if you read reviews of it, opinion is split between those who see it as a story about nerd-heaven, which to me is how egan wrote it, and those who see it as a dystopia, basically a vision of hell. Apparently to a lot of people, the book reads like pitch-dark satire. I'm guessing there aren't so many of those people here.
EDIT: Bonus scott aaronson quantum conciousness essays! Wooooo! Egan fans will like these:
I really loved Containment, one where the human race woke up one day to find that the stars had disappeared because the solar system had been placed in a huge container.
I loved how humanity reacted to having their horizons limited, but in an unexpected but potentially reversible way.
Greg Egan's stories always ask really great what-if questions. I think about them long after I read them. I'd actually forgotten that permutation cities was where those interesting ideas about consciousness came from.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, and I'm loving it. Some parts are funny, some are dry, and some are truly mind-blowing. As someone who loves wordplay, self-reference, and multiple layers of meaning, this book is like crack. Every chapter surprises me with something new. Its reputation is well-deserved.
It's definitely fantastic, and one of the books that had the greatest influence on my thinking (I read it as a teenager, 20+ years ago).
If you want something less theoretical, more personal, poetic and emotional, his "Le ton beau de Marot" (English, despite the title) is also fabulous. He takes a short poem and translates it a hundred different ways, all the while musing about what "translation" means (literal, conveying the same emotion, using the same metaphors, between cultures...) as well as about thought, language and meaning more generally. And then, while he writes the book, his wife gets a brain tumor and dies, and the book becomes part of his mourning.
I see this book lauded on HN frequently. Would it be interesting/understandable for someone who doesn't have a CS background but has an interest in CS?
I have this weird habit where if I sit and read too much about the same topic, I have trouble retaining all of the information I just read. So, I find I can retain everything better if I read small amounts from multiple books. I sit with a stack of a few books and read chapter out of each. Weird, I know. Here's my current stack:
* The C++ Programming Language, 4th Edition (Bjarne Stroustrup)
* Effective Modern C++: 42 Specific Ways to Improve Your Use of C++11 and C++14 (Scott Meyers)
* Interactive Computer Graphics: A Top-Down Approach with WebGL (7th Edition) (Edward Angel & Dave Schreiner)
* Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (David Kushner)
* Neuromancer (William Gibson)
I most recently finished:
* Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn't Want You to Know---and What to Do About Them (Cynthia Shapiro)
* C++ for dinosaurs (Nick Economidis)
I am highly anticipating the final(?) book of the Ender's Game Series by Orson Scott Card titled Shadows Alive.
Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan. He is most famous for remarking that "the medium is the message."
The media we use influence the way we think, the way we act, the political narrative of our times, etc. by placing limits and incentives on the messages we convey through those media. As an easy example, consider Twitter: you cannot have a coherent and intellectually involved conversation on Twitter. If Twitter were our only method, or main method, of communication, that property would drastically shape public discourse.
As technologists, we are developing the communications media of the future; it is imperative that we take on this task responsibly by first reflecting on the design and effects of media from the past.
Audiobooks I have Read Recently: (Sanderson is Awesome)
* The Reckoners #1/#2
* Stormlight Archive #1/#2
* Mistborn #1/#2/#3
* Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures As the World's Most Wanted Hacker
Digital Books:
* How to Win Friends and Influence People
* Malazon Book #1
* The Forever War
* The Martian
Things on my List:
* Think and Grow Rich
* Watership Down
* Rainbows End
* Snow Crash
* What is Zen
* Wool: Silo
* Founders at Work
* Light Bringer
* Hyperion
* The War of Art
* Atlas Shrugged
* The Demon Haunted World
* Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
* Joe Abercrombie's books
* Rich Dad Poor Dad
* Founders at Work
* Fear the Sky
* Daemon -- EDIT ADDED
Things I recommend:
* All of Brandon Sanderson's Books
* The Kingkiller Chronicles
* How to Win Friends and Influence People
* Issac Asimov's short stories and Foundation series
* The Forever War
* Gentleman Bastards
* Ready Player One
* The Martian
* A Wizard of Earthsea
"Quantum Computing since Democritus" by Scott Aaronson. This book makes me wish I was cool enough to understand everything in it. But still, it does a very good job at connecting the high level bits, and letting you skip over proof sketches if necessary.
He is connecting quantum computing, computability, computational complexity, foundations of mathematics, probability, crypto, philosophy, and a bunch of other things I haven't gotten to yet. All the deep stuff -- but it's not pretentious or tedious at all.
Scott Aaronson is a great writer and lucid thinker. I got hooked from the preface alone.
I am particularly interest in rereading it and paying particular attention to the question of judgement and how poor judgements were formed. World War 1 is notable for its poor judgements. This interest is sparked by my recently listening to [1], which was very enlightening.
The essential question in our field often is not how fast we work, but if we're working on tasks worthy of attention - in other words, we have to judge the systems and features and determine what brings us the best outcomes. I've had some number of technically successful projects that were nulls when released. Avoiding that is part of significant improvement for me going forward.
1984, George Orwell. I'm enjoying it. It's bleak and scary and messes with your mind. The only think I dislike is that the overall mood is "look at how wrong this is". I was expecting a more detached and unemotional description of the setting, where all the "wrongness" would be creeping up in back of the reader's mind.
Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy, Simon Blackburn. Not enjoying it. It is a well written book, and reads easilly, but it's way of explaining the themes is just not good. It's long-winded, goes back and forth between the philosophers and the analogies are not very good. Maybe I'm too used to technical books, but I was expecting something like "Theme X. This is what philosopher A thinks of it. This is what philosopher B thinks of it. This is how these theories clash". Probably gonna drop it.
Programming in Lua, Roberto Ierusalimschy. The first programming language book I bought since college. IMO, Lua is the most well-designed and beautiful language yet (from the one I know). The book is clear, concise, full of examples and it is simply a treat to read.
«Ready Player One», Ernest Cline -- Because all my friends read it and I've to.
«What is to go to war», Karl Marlantes -- After learning about it in a podcast, very interesting.
«Los enemigos del comercio, II», Escohotado -- Slowing progressing through it, full of footnotes and amazing stories about all the attempts of communism and socialism. Nearly clinical dissection of the original texts and sources.
«The windup girl», Paolo Bacigalupi -- Harsh, hot, cruel, realistic and futuristic. I'm enjoying it a lot.
Stories of Your Life and Others is a collection of short stories by Ted Chiang. The stories explore wildly different topics, but every one of them is amazing.
Someone on HN had recommended The Box by Marc Levinson. It's a history of the shipping container. That sounds dreadfully prosaic, but the book is well written and the shipping container's influence on our modern global economy cannot be overstated.
I recently read 'The Lean Startup' and 'The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy'. I would recommend both books.
I think 'The Lean Startup' is not just a good read for startups in the usual sense; it's also a great advise on how to handle personal projects.
With regards to 'The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy' I think the stoic view of life is great and fits well into our western mindset while still being somewhat 'zen' like. I plan to read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations at some point since it's a bit like a diary of a stoic.
I will soon start with 'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage'[0] which was recommended in a previous HN thread.
Can't recommend "Meditations" highly enough, it is a great read. The first part takes a little bit of discipline to get through (at least, for me it did), but stick with it if it puts you off, it gets better. You should check out Seneca and Epictetus as well.
The non technical one, after a few books by Vernor Vinge, is Metro 2033. I'm halfway through it and it's a good read. It's kinda weird, a postapocalyptic novel with some mysticism mixed in.
Also, thanks to everyone who answered the question, my reading list is now long enough to last me a year or two!
Quiet by Susan Cain, great book about introversion and why we have the "Extrovert Ideal".
It's really fascinating to see how introverts have their qualities and how
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance - Robert Pirsig:
Fantastic book that talks about philosophy in a new way and goes deeper into discovering what's "Quality" and what are the main 2 ways of interacting/reading the world around us.
Adam Smith, theory of moral sentiments: Just began the book under ryan holiday advice, but can't really say more about it.
Game of thrones, 1st volume, I suppose this book doesn't need any explanation :)
Likewise! I'm halfway through myself. I'm a huge HP fan, and the concept of a Harry Potter universe with slightly modified initial conditions taken to a logical conclusion ("taken to a logical conclusion" being the operative phrase with this book) was hugely appealing. Loving every page, would highly recommend.
Another fanfic that's well worth reading for the consumate HP fan, although cut from a very different cloth: Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness [https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4315906/1/Dumbledore-s-Army-and...]. If you've ever read Ender's Game, imagine Ender's Shadow for Book 7 of Harry Potter. :)
These threads always make me happy. Old books and new.
Currently I'm reading book three of the "Kefahuchi Tract" trilogy by M. John Harrison. It's like a cross between Donnie Darko and Neuromancer. Just surreal enough to be fun, without losing me completely, and some really amazing writing. [1]
Just finished Nate Silver's "The Signal and The Noise". Interesting collection of prediction case studies, seeing what can and can't be effectively predicted. Good for correcting black-and-white thinking.
Currently reading "Naples 44", diary of an intelligence officer there just after the US landings. The author is classically trained enough to immediately fall in love with the place despite the war, so it's a strange mix of lounging around Paestum and the stark effects of war.
Next in queue: pick one to re-read from Iain M Banks or Pratchett.
(Presumably Clausewitz is in your reading list somewhere as well; his book is unfinished but contains both good quotes to mine and real insight into how few military problems are about actual fighting itself.)
[+] [-] GregBuchholz|11 years ago|reply
"Basic Lathework" by Stan Bray. This is the best of the beginning lathe books that I've been reading recently, covering the parts of the machine and accessories, techniques, and cutting tools. Very minimal pre-requisites.
"Metals in the Service of Man" by Arthur Street and William Alexander. A very light read about industrially useful metals, a little history about them, and their uses.
"Measurement" by Paul Lockhart. I finally got this book after reading his "A Mathematicians Lament" from a while back. https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....
"How Round is Your Circle" by John Bryant and Chris Sangwin. Just started this, but it sounds interesting, the pictures are intriguing, and it pushes a lot of my "interesting" buttons.
[+] [-] joekrill|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grkvlt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffreyrogers|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramidarigaz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aswanson|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpietri|11 years ago|reply
It's a brilliant book written by Sidney Dekker, a "Professor of Human Factors and Flight Safety". The basic point is that the default way of understanding bad outcomes is what he calls "the Old View or the Bad Apple Theory". He instead argues for the New View, where "human error is a symptom of trouble deeper inside a system".
Normally with a book like this, I read the first couple of chapters, say, "Ok, I get the idea," and can ignore the rest. After all, I both agree with and understand the basic thesis. But so far every chapter has been surprisingly useful; I keep discovering that I have Old View notions hidden away. E.g., when I discover a systemic flaw, I'm inclined to blame "bad design". But he points out that's a fancy way of calling the problem human error, just a different human and a different error than normal.
Even the driest parts are helped by his frequent use of examples, often taken from real-world aviation accident reports. There are also fascinating bits like a system for high-resolution markup of dialog transcripts to indicate timing (down to 1/10th second), speech inflection, and emphasis. I'll never use it myself, but I will definitely use the mindset that it requires.
Given how much time software projects spend dealing with bugs, I believe we need a new way to think about them, and for me this book describes a big piece of that.
[+] [-] joshgel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carapat_virulat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcoder|11 years ago|reply
The numerous real-world examples from airplane crash investigation also help put into perspective the relative unimportance of the "critical bugs" and "extreme pressure" most of us building the kinds of products discussed on HN actually experience.
[+] [-] pierrec|11 years ago|reply
I think the most common critique of his work might be about the occasional digressions on physics. It's undeniable that they make the book a bit dense, but in fact, he appears to have restrained himself to keep it readable and entertaining, instead publishing the actual hairy details on his website:
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.h...
PS: I'd like to thank HN for making me discover this author. Now I'm keeping with the tradition!
[+] [-] bemmu|11 years ago|reply
If consciousness is only a series of states in your brain, does it matter what the order of running that sequence is? In Permutation City there is an experiment where brain states are played back backwards or in a random order, but to the person perceiving it, it seems like just business as usual.
I always assumed that after my brain is destroyed there would be just nothingness. But maybe if the "next state" will again exist some time in the future (or past?) from my perspective it will still be a totally continuous experience. Death might seem like just a bad dream.
He plays a lot with this stuff. In Diaspora consciousness is just a piece of software. Since this software can be run at a much higher speed than wetware can, each moment of real time seems much longer to the uploaded. But when they want to, for example when waiting for an interstellar trip to complete, they can "skip forward" and let the brain emulator run them at a much slower pace to make the trips more bareable.
I thought running a consciousness backwards or in random order would be as far as he goes, but in Diaspora they even go a step further, having every state be a completely separate structure in a completely separate universe. The book assumes that to the participants even that would seem like a continuous experience.
It really makes me question what I really am, how malleable is this "me"?
[+] [-] JonnieCache|11 years ago|reply
A fascinating thing about diaspora: if you read reviews of it, opinion is split between those who see it as a story about nerd-heaven, which to me is how egan wrote it, and those who see it as a dystopia, basically a vision of hell. Apparently to a lot of people, the book reads like pitch-dark satire. I'm guessing there aren't so many of those people here.
EDIT: Bonus scott aaronson quantum conciousness essays! Wooooo! Egan fans will like these:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1951
[+] [-] heleph|11 years ago|reply
I loved how humanity reacted to having their horizons limited, but in an unexpected but potentially reversible way.
Greg Egan's stories always ask really great what-if questions. I think about them long after I read them. I'd actually forgotten that permutation cities was where those interesting ideas about consciousness came from.
[+] [-] MichaelGG|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baldfat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nemo1618|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcgaffin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stenl|11 years ago|reply
If you want something less theoretical, more personal, poetic and emotional, his "Le ton beau de Marot" (English, despite the title) is also fabulous. He takes a short poem and translates it a hundred different ways, all the while musing about what "translation" means (literal, conveying the same emotion, using the same metaphors, between cultures...) as well as about thought, language and meaning more generally. And then, while he writes the book, his wife gets a brain tumor and dies, and the book becomes part of his mourning.
[+] [-] hashmymustache|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nicholas_C|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ldonley|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ndesaulniers|11 years ago|reply
* The C++ Programming Language, 4th Edition (Bjarne Stroustrup)
* Effective Modern C++: 42 Specific Ways to Improve Your Use of C++11 and C++14 (Scott Meyers)
* Interactive Computer Graphics: A Top-Down Approach with WebGL (7th Edition) (Edward Angel & Dave Schreiner)
* Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (David Kushner)
* Neuromancer (William Gibson)
I most recently finished:
* Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn't Want You to Know---and What to Do About Them (Cynthia Shapiro)
* C++ for dinosaurs (Nick Economidis)
I am highly anticipating the final(?) book of the Ender's Game Series by Orson Scott Card titled Shadows Alive.
I just learned about and probably will buy:
* The Denial of Death (Ernest Becker)
[+] [-] mjhoy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marpstar|11 years ago|reply
* Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software (Eric Evans)
* F# Deep Dives (Tomas Petricek and Phillip Trelford)
* PostgreSQL: Up and Running AND PostGIS in Action, 2nd Edition (both by Regina O. Obe and Leo S. Hsu)
I'm eyeballing Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasaki (1999) and a few others for after I finished the Postgres books.
[+] [-] AngrySkillzz|11 years ago|reply
The media we use influence the way we think, the way we act, the political narrative of our times, etc. by placing limits and incentives on the messages we convey through those media. As an easy example, consider Twitter: you cannot have a coherent and intellectually involved conversation on Twitter. If Twitter were our only method, or main method, of communication, that property would drastically shape public discourse.
As technologists, we are developing the communications media of the future; it is imperative that we take on this task responsibly by first reflecting on the design and effects of media from the past.
[+] [-] iN7h33nD|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chubot|11 years ago|reply
He is connecting quantum computing, computability, computational complexity, foundations of mathematics, probability, crypto, philosophy, and a bunch of other things I haven't gotten to yet. All the deep stuff -- but it's not pretentious or tedious at all.
Scott Aaronson is a great writer and lucid thinker. I got hooked from the preface alone.
[+] [-] pnathan|11 years ago|reply
I am particularly interest in rereading it and paying particular attention to the question of judgement and how poor judgements were formed. World War 1 is notable for its poor judgements. This interest is sparked by my recently listening to [1], which was very enlightening.
The essential question in our field often is not how fast we work, but if we're working on tasks worthy of attention - in other words, we have to judge the systems and features and determine what brings us the best outcomes. I've had some number of technically successful projects that were nulls when released. Avoiding that is part of significant improvement for me going forward.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFcHX0Menno , "Stranger than Fiction Case Studies in Software Engineering Judgment" Steve McConnell
[+] [-] Vaskivo|11 years ago|reply
Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy, Simon Blackburn. Not enjoying it. It is a well written book, and reads easilly, but it's way of explaining the themes is just not good. It's long-winded, goes back and forth between the philosophers and the analogies are not very good. Maybe I'm too used to technical books, but I was expecting something like "Theme X. This is what philosopher A thinks of it. This is what philosopher B thinks of it. This is how these theories clash". Probably gonna drop it.
Programming in Lua, Roberto Ierusalimschy. The first programming language book I bought since college. IMO, Lua is the most well-designed and beautiful language yet (from the one I know). The book is clear, concise, full of examples and it is simply a treat to read.
[+] [-] amazing_jose|11 years ago|reply
«Ready Player One», Ernest Cline -- Because all my friends read it and I've to.
«What is to go to war», Karl Marlantes -- After learning about it in a podcast, very interesting.
«Los enemigos del comercio, II», Escohotado -- Slowing progressing through it, full of footnotes and amazing stories about all the attempts of communism and socialism. Nearly clinical dissection of the original texts and sources.
«The windup girl», Paolo Bacigalupi -- Harsh, hot, cruel, realistic and futuristic. I'm enjoying it a lot.
[+] [-] loudmax|11 years ago|reply
Someone on HN had recommended The Box by Marc Levinson. It's a history of the shipping container. That sounds dreadfully prosaic, but the book is well written and the shipping container's influence on our modern global economy cannot be overstated.
Not reading per se, but Dan Carlin's WWI podcasts on the Hardcore History blog are well worth listening to. http://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/
[+] [-] twosheep|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wsc981|11 years ago|reply
I think 'The Lean Startup' is not just a good read for startups in the usual sense; it's also a great advise on how to handle personal projects.
With regards to 'The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy' I think the stoic view of life is great and fits well into our western mindset while still being somewhat 'zen' like. I plan to read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations at some point since it's a bit like a diary of a stoic.
I will soon start with 'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage'[0] which was recommended in a previous HN thread.
---
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_Tsukuru_Tazaki_and_Hi...
[+] [-] tbjohnston|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] untothebreach|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draven|11 years ago|reply
The current technical one is Functional Programming in Scala: http://manning.com/bjarnason/ which is awesome.
The non technical one, after a few books by Vernor Vinge, is Metro 2033. I'm halfway through it and it's a good read. It's kinda weird, a postapocalyptic novel with some mysticism mixed in.
Also, thanks to everyone who answered the question, my reading list is now long enough to last me a year or two!
[+] [-] andrea_sdl|11 years ago|reply
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance - Robert Pirsig: Fantastic book that talks about philosophy in a new way and goes deeper into discovering what's "Quality" and what are the main 2 ways of interacting/reading the world around us.
Adam Smith, theory of moral sentiments: Just began the book under ryan holiday advice, but can't really say more about it.
Game of thrones, 1st volume, I suppose this book doesn't need any explanation :)
[+] [-] crossroads091|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FlailFast|11 years ago|reply
Another fanfic that's well worth reading for the consumate HP fan, although cut from a very different cloth: Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness [https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4315906/1/Dumbledore-s-Army-and...]. If you've ever read Ender's Game, imagine Ender's Shadow for Book 7 of Harry Potter. :)
[+] [-] davedx|11 years ago|reply
Currently I'm reading book three of the "Kefahuchi Tract" trilogy by M. John Harrison. It's like a cross between Donnie Darko and Neuromancer. Just surreal enough to be fun, without losing me completely, and some really amazing writing. [1]
[1] http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/10/future-without-nostalgia
[+] [-] Eliezer|11 years ago|reply
There are very few stories that strike me as having been 'natively' written for a reader like me; this is one of them.
I also bought book 1 of the Bartimaeus series, read it, and am now onto book 2.
* http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0786852550/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...
[+] [-] pjc50|11 years ago|reply
Currently reading "Naples 44", diary of an intelligence officer there just after the US landings. The author is classically trained enough to immediately fall in love with the place despite the war, so it's a strange mix of lounging around Paestum and the stark effects of war.
Next in queue: pick one to re-read from Iain M Banks or Pratchett.
(Presumably Clausewitz is in your reading list somewhere as well; his book is unfinished but contains both good quotes to mine and real insight into how few military problems are about actual fighting itself.)