The only criteria: the book helped you in some meaningful way—changed your perspective, taught you something valuable, or simply stayed with you long after finishing it.
Culture, gender identity, hive mind, all rolled up into one extremely dense universe with a rich history told through warfare and cutting remarks, humanising potentially inhuman central characters with a vague number of limbs.
It takes ten pages to get used to the dense yet clipped writing style, but once it clicks, you cannot put the book(s) down: the plot moves forward at breakneck speed.
Taleb also wrote a forward to the recent edition of Cipolla's The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, which predates Taleb's books but is "Taleb-adjacent".
Erasure by Percival Everett. A book on racial conformity and expectations. A weird case where the movie (American Fiction) might be better than the book. Pretty easy and quick read however. I don't know what it was but this book has stuck with me ever since I've read it.
The Code Book by Simon Singh. This is the book that got me into cryptography. It's a bit old and outdated now (published in 1999) but it was responsible for forming a lifelong interest in me.
Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door by Christopher Mims. The premise was supposed to be tracking a product from production to consumer, but then the COVID happened. The book turns into an exploration of how just in time production and supply lanes work today.
The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. I had a professor who was friends with BBM, so when we were discussing selectorate theory we actually got to meet him. At it's core this is a cynical book about realpolitik, talking about how leaders get in power, stay in power, get money and foreign aid, and deal with revolutions and war. It is very political focused but the theory can be abstracted out to most big organizations. It fundamentally changed the way I look at interactions between countries. This is 100% a more mass market appeal book than the original paper (and imo a bit dumbed down) but everyone I've recommended it to has come back appreciative about it.
This book has stayed with me for years. It's a quiet, deeply reflective journey about self-discovery, the search for meaning. What resonated most was this idea that true understanding can't be taught—it must be lived and experienced.
It’s a short read, but one that invites you to slow down. Each time I return to it, I take away something new depending on where I am in life.
I suggested Siddhartha. Her friend picked War and Peace.
My credibility went waaaay up:)
(Siddhartha is very thin, like the book)
I stumbled across this completely by accident while doing research for a history of science class I was designing years ago. It took... a while... to stop saying "but why does this matter!" every two seconds while reading it, but eventually I was able to open my mind to metaphysics as a discipline and get it into my head exactly what he was talking about, and why it was useful. After that, it was smooth sailing. I owe a lot to this book.
The point of Thomistic/Aristotelian metaphysics it not that it's useful for building things; it isn't, which is why the early moderns mostly abandoned it. But physics and the quantitative/mechanistic view of the world that it fosters is an abstraction from reality--an extremely useful and productive one, granted, but still an abstraction. It leaves things out that Thomistic metaphysics retains; and while Aristotelian science has been left in the dust, his metaphysics still has important things to say.
Modern philosophy embraced the mechanistic view of the world with Descartes, leading to a number of philosophical problems (the mind-body problem, the problem of other minds, how to account for qualia and consciousness, and so forth) that are amply accounted for in the older philosophy.
I'm not pasting the walltext full quote, but there's also in it mention of Perennis quaedam philosophia. The first one? Don't have the book in digital, for the full quote in Spanish, Google sent me here: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/Vico.2020.i34.03.
[1] New Essays on Human Understanding, 1704
- The Soul of a New Machine
- Showstoppers
- iWoz
- Athens and Jerusalem (Shestov)
I'm devouring many F & SFs (right now reading Arthur Clarke) but so far nothing really sticks. A lot of them are interesting but I'm keeping counting the pages I read. I used to burn candles reading them back in the day, but the magic was lost. I'm going to try out some recommendations I got on HN and see what happens.
The other day someone on here recommended The Philosopher's Toolkit, and I ordered a copy based on that recommendation. I've only started to dip into various parts, but I can already confirm that it is a good introductory compendium of the basics of philosophy, logic, and argumentation. In the same vein is Daniel Dennett's Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.
A personal favorite is Frances Yates's The Art of Memory (think: intersection of rhetoric, mnemonic systems, philosophical systems, and the occult during the Renaissance).
Matthew Butterick's Practical Typography and Typography for Lawyers. Bryan Garner's The Winning Brief.
Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis. Adler's How to Read a Book. Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
I could go on. Book posts are my favorite posts on HN, but they always lighten my wallet and at home I'm surrounded with ever-growing piles of great material.
This is especially important when reading philosophical or technical material, especially material from another era.
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 Christopher Clark The origin of WWI is a story that's been told repeatedly. This version is delightfully depressing. I can't quite describe the book. If you say X happening was the fault of everyone it's easy to imagine that's synonymous with saying it's no one's fault. That's not what's being argued - here it's that it's literally everyone's fault.
Their struggle to comprehend the new world into which they were thrust, coping with war and loss of modern supply chains, and a full blown war... make for interesting reading. There were a lot of details about infrastructure in the book and throughout the series that really made me ponder just how hard it is to keep this all afloat.
And 2 books that sort of go together:
Incredible Victory: The Battle of Midway by Walter Lord, and Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully. Read Incredible Victory first, learn about the luck, good and bad, that led to a much-needed victory in the Pacific. Then read Shattered Sword and get a fuller picture of events, especially from the Japanese side. Learn about how hubris and dogma led to the Japanese Navy's defeat. Then learn about how saving face led to history not being accurately told by the witnesses on the Japanese side.
All 3 are great books that are well worth your time.
Others that I've enjoyed:
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (near future post-apocalyptic sci-fi).
The non-fiction Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson (more WW2 non-fiction, nice details about North Africa through Italy, then France to Germany).
Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham.
Most Secret War by RV Jones (nerdy, funny history of one scientist's world war 2 experience).
The Discworld City Guard books, starting with Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett. Fantasy fiction satire, hilarious and comforting. Highly, highly recommended!!
Peter F Hamilton sci-fi adventure books: Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained are a duo of great space opera stretching across multiple planets and people. Don't spoil yourself by reading any descriptions of Judas Unchained before you read Pandora's Star. Also by the same author, The Night's Dawn Trilogy: The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God. Fantastic big canvas space opera with lots of threads, great world-building, and amazing situations. Both sets of books are highly recommended escapes from reality.
If you haven't read it, Parable of the Talents, the sequel, is also worth a read.
I'd love an update to cover elliptic curves and lattice based cryptography, and to update the at the time speculative section on quantum computing. But the majority of the book covers historical events and is still just as valid as it was then.
https://archive.org/details/soulofnewmachine0000kidd/page/n6...
One of the few books where you look so differently at the world after reading it that you literally feel like a different person.
(Thoughtful comments appreciated with any downvotes. Thanks.)
Instead he chose the path of religious charlatan, and western literature is all the lesser for it.
Instead he chose the path of religious huckster, and western literature is all the lesser for it.
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Its thesis is that everything is built up of smaller things that are all trying to replicate or get replicated.
Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein. I haven't read the book, but reading about the book's argument that language is a type of multiplayer game, along with the aforementioned ideas about things being built out of smaller things that are trying to replicate changed how seriously I take ideas in general. I'm not looking for a universal truth anymore, I'm watching different collections of ideas compete with each other based on how well they replicate and how well they compete once they've entered a brain.
*Novels in Three Lines* - Felix Feneon; like clever sarcastic haiku
*Riddley Walker* - Russell Hoban; It's written in an imagined language making it completely and utterly immersive
*Waiting for Nothing* - Tom Kromer; Great depression era destitution, and travel
*Days of Life and Death and Escape to the Moon* - William Saroyan; In an era of great writers, Saroyan remains wildly under appreciated.
*Really the Blues* - Mezz Mezzrow; Written in 1920s jive slang, it's emblematic of an era
*The KLF* - John Higgs; The book is subtitled "Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds" All those things are true and Higgs brilliantly tells the tale.
Though the best book is far and away Three Little Pigs which my now grown-ass-man child called “the wolf book” when requesting it at bedtime at the age of incredible. I highly recommend it — time spent with your child I mean,
But if you want an HNish book recommendation?…The Art of Computer Programming is well worth trying to read because it will be challenging for as long as you keep at it. Good luck.
Once the message is clear, they become a slog IMO. The author was smart in coming up with something catchy like "deep work" to mean, you get shit done and do some of your best work and learning when you have time set aside being distraction free.
Beside the obvious "deep work", its the ability to be bored, and shut down time.
> I read it, but like most self-help books - I felt like it could've been 1/4 the size. The book could've been 10-20 pages.
Have to agree. It can be summarized.
As a work of literature, with an unparalleled influence on Western culture, it's required reading for anyone interested in literature, philosophy, history, or related disciplines. As a blueprint for how to live your life, however, any reasonably ethical person will find its teachings to be at odds with modern ethics. More often than not, it's morally repugnant, and unapologetic about it, too. You won't hear about how backwards its morality is by going to church, though, and so you need to read it for yourself. Even Jesus, one of the most upright citizens in the book, is revealed to be as full of hate and vengeance as he is a "prince of peace."
Of course, as with everything, it really matters what edition you get. The New Oxford Annotated Bible is a good starting point. The Norton Critical editions (in two volumes, the old and the new testaments) are great, too, and include some of the source materials. (Bet you didn't know that a lot of the Bible was plagiar...ahem... adapted from much earlier texts, and from other religions.) The Skeptic's Annotated Bible is a great edition, too, and annotates everything from a secular perspective.
Second the Incerto series by Nassim Taleb
