8 ms·
Ask HN: What are the best books you've read that few others have?
- tixocloud 9y agoHuman Revolution http://www.joseitoda.org/religious/hr.html http://www.joseitoda.org/religious/hr.html Romance of the Three Kingdoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms
- Top19 9y agoI believe the video game "Dynasty Warriors" and the 19 sequels or whatever it spawned are based on "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms".
- ai_ia 9y agoYou practice Nicherin Buddhism? If so can you give your experience?
- tixocloud 9y agoSure! What would you like to know?
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- timclark 9y agoAdrift on the Sea of Rains by Ian Sales A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest
- fadolf 9y agoMusashi by Eiji Yoshikawa The Story is breathtaking and the teachings are divine. It currently has the potential to change my life, i even marked some sentences and put tapes to important pages that concern my life.
- thecupisblue 9y agoHagakure and Mishima, at least that's the direct translation of the ex-yu title. The book is amazing, dragging you into a world of proper spiritual and personal behavior worthy of a samurai. Read it as a kid and it had a great influence on shaping me as a person.
- perseusprime11 9y agoPale Blue Dot by Sagan
- thorin 9y agoI always really enjoyed Travels by Michael Crichton. Considering how popular he is I've never spoken to anyone else who's read it. It gave me a lot to think about in my early 20s. I also enjoyed Jonathon Livingston Seagull, which seems to have fallen out of favour recently.
- cm2012 9y agoBeing Direct by Lester Wunderman. Best book on direct marketing in the world IMO. I currently do high level marketing consulting, would not have happened without thia book. Way better than Ogilvy on Advertising.
- le-mark 9y agoNon fiction and IT related: Algorithmics The spirit of computing: this is a really great exploration of 'algorithmic' thinking, accessible to anyone: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2378136.Algorithmics http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2378136.Algorithmics Soul of a new machine: the book won the pulitzer, it's about now defunct Data General and implementing a new machine in the early 80's: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_New_Ma... Fiction: Marooned in Realtime: Vernor Vinge on a group of people who missed the singularity, and try to understand what happened. A damn good detective story too: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167847.Marooned_in_Realtime http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167847.Marooned_in_Realti...
- Gustomaximus 9y ago'In search of stupidity'. Talks about tech companies that boom then flop. Overarching lesson seemed to be don't get arrogant and stop listening to your customers.
- noir_lord 9y agoNoir by KW Jeter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noir_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noir_(novel) My username isn't a co-incidence.
- phlipski 9y agoCradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things Very thought provoking look at recycling and design for eventual recycling.
- gdulli 9y agoOld Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity (by David Galenson) Influential to someone whose practices and path to success in engineering doesn't follow the normal pattern but is still valid. (At least it was influential to me.)
- ChicagoBoy11 9y agoI took his class in college and it is one of the few decisions I completely regret in life. The point he makes in the book is in fact very interesting (essentially, the lifepaths of creative individuals fall into two discernible categories: innovators, whose main contributions are early in the career and slowly fade, and those who slowly master a craft, whose most noteworthy contributions come later in life), and the techniques he marshals to study it in different context noteworthy, but it would have made for a great two week class. Instead, Galenson spent the entire time basically assigning everything he ever wrote -- which made the same point over, and over, and over again -- and constantly berated students who tried to respectfully dialogue with him. Sorry, didn't mean to hijack your post, but every mention I see of him just elicits this visceral reaction in me and I just needed to get it off my chest.
- ciocan42 9y agoNexus trilogy by Ramez Naam - Sapiens / Homo Deus
- Top19 9y ago"Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers". If you've ever read "Code" by Charles Petzold, it's as illuminating as that was. Also a little bit tragic, makes you realize there is a lot of fun and beauty and even social history in math. I didn't realize there is also a lot of complaints in how math is taught, and that the arithmetic we all learn is considered the most boring part.
- schrectacular 9y agoQuantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson Zima Blue by Alastair Reynolds
- ccmonnett 9y agoIt might not be read much only because it was recently released but Homo Deus by Yuval Harari is off the chain. This dude can explain grand ideas encompassing human civilization in (relatively) simple, brief, and entertaining language and I can't get enough of it. I think Homo Deus's forward focus will appeal to the HN crowd more than his more famous Sapiens.
- vbrandl 9y agoI didn't read Homo Deus but it is on my to-read-list. If you liked that one, you might also like "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by him.
- briga 9y agoI felt like Homo Deus was largely a retread of Sapiens. Some of his speculations about the various forms of humanism that have arisen in the 20th century were interesting, but for most of the book it felt like he was treading very familiar ground. It seemed like Harari was in a rush to release another book after the runaway success of Sapiens, and because of that he didn't take his time writing it. Sapiens was very concise and felt like the product of years of careful thought. Homo Deus felt like it was rushed in comparison. Still a good read, don't get me wrong. For a similar type of book I would recommend Howard Bloom's Lucifer Principle and Global Brain. They both take a similarly broad scientific perspective on human history and behavior, and both are fun reads.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoHe Is There And He Is Not Silent, by Francis Schaeffer. A very deep philosophical argument for the existence of God. (By "deep", I don't mean a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. I mean connecting first principles to concrete conclusions in a very direct way.)
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- observation 9y agoThe Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It's hard to describe. Rather, the story is easy to describe: it concerns the travel of a man from a future age. Nothing is what it seems. There was a moment when I realized "Oh shit. This is real." The book may be fiction but almost nothing about it is fake. The Big Questions, in History, in Philosophy, in Politics, in Theology, in Technological Progress, in interpreting reality, it's all there. Most non-fiction work of fiction I've ever read, and the best one, above Tolkien, above the Bible, it towers above all texts I have read. It will take multiple reads to understand what it is saying, different parts will appeal to you each time. In terms of the people you know: imagine that Stewart Brand, Peter Thiel and Christopher Nolan somehow had a lovechild - it would be The Book of the New Sun.
- solipsism 9y ago"Nothing is that it seems" typically makes for a horrible experience, for me at least. Can you explain it any better than that?
- Finnucane 9y agoThe conceit is that the narrator has an eidetic memory, or at least claims to. And at the same time, it is apparent that he is not always a reliable or honest narrator, not does he always fully understand what is going on in front of him. The narrator is also being manipulated by alien powers beyond his control. The relationships of the characters are weird and complicated. And it is true--Wolfe deliberately constructed the books so that rereading them would make these connections apparent in different ways. (I should say that Shadow of the Torturer was published when I was 17, and over the next decade I must have gone through the series four or five times, even taking up a correspondence with Gene, who was actually pretty good about answering questions).
- observation 9y agoIf you get another opportunity to write, I'd like to ask Wolfe whether there exists an allegory with the present world Wolfe lived through e.g. The Oil Shocks in the 70s, the esotericization of Nuclear Energy, the half century unvisited moon. I want to know whether the "New Sun" is symbolic of nuclear power in the present. I wondered reading the book whether Gene Wolfe was writing of a Dark Age in the present because the very first few words out of Sevarian's record are "presentiments of the future", which I thought to be kind of telling given the historical circumstances Wolfe has lived, especially since he obviously has the mind of an engineer.
- nayuki 9y agoUnderstanding good idioms in Java, instead of learning from scattered pieces of folk knowledge: * http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/effectivejava-136174.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/effectivejava-136174.... * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1vQf4qyMXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1vQf4qyMXg (a talk by the author) Corner cases in the Java programming language: * http://www.javapuzzlers.com/ http://www.javapuzzlers.com/ * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbp-3BJWsU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbp-3BJWsU8 (a talk by the author)
- fizwhiz 9y agoNot sure if trolling or serious...
- SirLJ 9y agoMore Money Than God - very inspirational and a glimpse into some of the best minds on the planet... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Money_Than_God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Money_Than_God
- nategri 9y agoKim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Jam packed with ideas crucial to the next 100-150 years. I reference these the way more insufferable people reference Ayn Rand.
- jotjotzzz 9y agoI'm sure a lot of people have read it, but it's the best book for me. The Tao Te Ching (I have the Stephen Mitchell translation).
- dirtyaura 9y agoRobert Kalpan: The Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy It's a part travel book, a part geopolitical analysis. In the hindsight, Kaplan was probably wrong on many things, and his views were US and West centric, but personally it was inspiring read, a travel book that was much more than a travel book.
- clock_tower 9y agoNot a bad idea -- I've only read his book on the formerly-Ottoman world (_Eastward to Tartary_, I think), but this sounds worth looking up. Have you come across Tony Horwitz? He's goofier than Kaplan, but his writing scratches the same itch.
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- kevstev 9y agoRacing the Beam: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam Its about how hard it was to program the Atari 2600 and the clever tricks required to get the most out of the machine. One of my favorite anecdotes was that in I believe Yars revenge, one of the sound effects was produce by reusing a section of code as sound data because it sounded good enough.
- jriot 9y agoThe Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. Chinese Science Fiction, really different perspective of hard questions particularly from a Western perspective.
- elyrly 9y agoWonderful series
- jboggan 9y ago"Modern Times" and "The Birth of the Modern" by Paul Johnson which cover world history from 1919-1989 and 1815-1830 respectively. Amazing histories written in a breadth and exploratory depth that illuminate so much of the past and make the present more understandable.
- emhac 9y agohttp://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-mind/history-of-thinking/index.html http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-mind/history-of-thinki... History of thinking is the book which Sapiens / Homo Deus would like to be. I think it is one of the best complete arguments on the nature of our relationship to computers.
- briga 9y agoIn Search of Lost Time. It's definitely famous and well-known, but I think it's far more talked about than actually read. Proust is a philosopher and psychologist more than a novelist, and large chunks of the book are basically just philosophical essays, but its still probably the greatest novel I've read. I think it's one of the greatest achievement of the human mind to date and it has more to say about the human experience than anything since, as far as I can tell.
- FiatLuxDave 9y agoI love the idea of looking for overlooked gems. Here are a few of mine: Infinite in All Directions, Freeman Dyson : just a book of his thoughts, but I really appreciated his perspective on respect between religion/spirituality and science. Ignition! An informal history of liquid rocket propellants, J.D. Clark : I picked up a copy of this in a roadside bookstore on a lark. Entertaining tales of people blowing themselves up in the name of science. Apollo 11 Press kit : My grandmother was a journalist for Florida Today during the space race, and she gave me her copy. It is amazing to see how much detail was provided. I don't know if our modern press ever gets press kits like these, but it was not dumbed-down much at all, which was very nice to see. The Adventures of Samurai Cat, Mark Rogers : Silly fun. Kind of like if Bored of the Rings had been written by Jerry Bruckheimer and Spider Jerusalem. Into the cool, Sagan and Schnieder : about complexity and thermodynamics. Written for a layperson, I still learned a lot from it. Order out of Chaos, Prigogine and Stengers : More thermo, also written for lay audience, also learned a lot from it. Controlled Thermonuclear Reactions, L. Artsimovich : Of all the plasma physics books I have read (many) this is the one I remember most. Rather out-of-date now, it contains loads of information about the early Soviet fusion program, with pictures and discussion of now-forgotten experiments.
- clock_tower 9y agoRory Stewart, _The Prince of the Marshes_. It's about general dysfunction in the early Iraq War, but it's also about the meaning of life. Perhaps it's just how Stewart writes? (His _The Places In Between_ is also well worth reading, but is much better known.) Tony Horwitz, all works -- especially _Baghdad Without a Map_ (which will leave you with a much healthier view of the modern Middle East) and _Confederates in the Attic_ (a dress-rehearsal for the Age of Trump?). Pearl Buck, _Sons_. (Best to read _The Good Earth_ first, but you've probably already read it.) I doubt it's a very accurate depiction of China, and the characters' morality is hair-raising (while the narrator is so far off the deep end that he/she is impossible to take seriously); but it's a memorable adventure story firmly grounded in the plausible, and it dramatizes some important lessons about the dangers that can afflict families and middle age.
- Bakary 9y agoRoma Æterna - Robert Silverberg The Happiness Hypothesis - Jonathan Haidt Alamut - Vladimir Bartol Non Stop - Brian Aldiss A fortune teller told me - Tiziano Terzani
- fadolf 9y agoI am so thankful for this Thread tbh :3
- Powerofmene 9y agoIf you like history, I would highly recommend: Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson. Probably one of the best books about the Civil War that has been written.
- tomdre 9y agoA Treatise on Painting by Leonardo Da Vinci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Urbinas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Urbinas
- cromd 9y agoI really enjoyed "Software and Mind", which I first read about on HN, though the discussion was short and people didn't seem to like the author's angle much. It's largely about how "mechanistic theories of software" hold us back, how programmers aren't getting to exercise their brains, and how most people are giving more and more control of their life up to others in order to avoid having to program. Avoiding programming becomes more of a goal than expanding the mind. The author is very passionate about all this - and I think most people would find the intensity off-putting. He manages to fill ~800 pages. I am not sure I agree with everything. While it resonated strongly, I'm also not that bummed out about the ability to launch a website from scratch in 5 minutes. But, in much the same way I feel about the writing of Nassim Taleb, despite having many statements that are incendiary and possibly wrong, it approaches a topic from an angle that you probably haven't been getting elsewhere. I immediately thought of this book when I read the question because I've never met anyone who has read it or who has any interest in reading it after hearing about it.