12 ms·

Good Books for a Lousy Year

199 points by yarapavan 6y ago

jcynix 6y ago
I'm currently reading "The White Plague" (1982) by Frank Herbert, which seems somehow appropriate given the current pandemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague (contains spoilers)
- robin_reala 6y ago
  On a similar theme, try A Journal of the Plague Year, The Decameron, and Plague Ship. https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/daniel-defoe/a-journal-of-the-plague-year https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/daniel-defoe/a-journal-of-... https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/giovanni-boccaccio/the-decameron/john-payne https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/giovanni-boccaccio/the-dec... https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/andre-norton/plague-ship https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/andre-norton/plague-ship
  - agency 6y ago
    Also The Plague by Camus
- dharmab 6y ago
  I read Station Eleven in 2019 and the timing was impeccable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_Eleven https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_Eleven
russellbeattie 6y ago
I've read The Spy and the Traitor, and it was quite good. I had just come off a binge of spy novels written by John LeCarre and it was amazing to read the same exact sort of craziness, but in a real life situation. I would actually recommend doing something similar, as the fiction definitely help set the mental stage for the history. That said, Roger Federer is a generalist?!? Why, because he has trouble beating Rafa on clay?? As a techie generalist who has knowledge a mile wide and an inch deep, I'm not sure he would qualify. But I'll read the book and see.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Read Spycatcher by Peter Wright. It's an opinionated tale of someone actually doing the business of catching spies. Even better for the HN crowd, the author was an engineer so there's some tidbits about just how advanced spook technology was even in the 50s and 60s (i.e. using acoustics to lift encryption keys through embassy walls as they were being typed)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - 4926394057 6y ago
    The fact it was banned for a while is also a fairly good indicator that there's something in there worth reading.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      The more factual parts are genuinely dangerous if not for the late date it was published. The more speculative aspects like the authors' judgement of Roger Hollis is genuinely really weird. We will probably never know the truth, but if he wasn't a spy there are some genuinely abnormal correlations to be explained. If you're familiar with the case the Australian intelligence analyst Paul Monk gives a fairly strong case that even if the official story on Hollis isn't wrong, it is wildly inconsistent and economical with the truth. Wright is a bit of a loose cannon, but the late Chapman Pincher wrote an enormous book on effectively everything publicly known about the (at the age of about 100 no less) which is much more methodical. There was a IWP panel about the case a few years ago; some evidence is so murky that some analysts were, even with a fastidiously planned and documented "argument map" to summarize the known evidence, joking about resorting to sending a freedom of information request to the GRU.
- freddie_mercury 6y ago
  > That said, Roger Federer is a generalist?!? Why, because he has trouble beating Rafa on clay?? I don't know why people bother to take umbrage at things without even trying to learn the context. What you are assuming the author claims doesn't exist anywhere in the book. He never says the Federer is a generalist. The only mention of Federer in the book is to contrast his childhood with Tiger Wood's childhood. "By the time [Federer] finally gave up other sports—soccer, most notably—to focus on tennis, other kids had long since been working with strength coaches, sports psychologists, and nutritionists. But it didn’t seem to hamper his development in the long run." In contrast, Tiger Woods famously focused on golf exclusively at an early age. Woods specialised in golf from a young age. Federer didn't specialise in a single sport from a young age. Federer is never mentioned again after the 4th page of the book.
happy_path 6y ago
When I see this kind of lists I always think of getting some of these books and reading them. However, I feel like reading books that have no relationship with my job (software engineer) is a waste. Do any feel the same? Is this a harmful mindset and should stop worrying about "wasting" my free time?
- jcynix 6y ago
  Your free time should be the time when you do things unrelated to your professional work. A healthy advise I got from Usenet a long time ago is that one should have a hobby unrelated to computers. That advise was given when there where no eBook readers, Smartphones or other mobile stuff. But it's still a good advise IMO as long as you use these tools for mainly recreational activities. So long note, short answer: reading books isn't a waste of time.
  - happy_path 6y ago
    Well, my native language is not English, so I could think that reading in English improve that language skill. What about if I feel I'm not a good software engineer?
    - lentil_soup 6y ago
      I'd advise you try to not think of all reading as something that needs to "improve" something in you. We do many things just for pleasure; we go on holiday, we have friends, we eat dessert, we go for walks, we read books. If you feel you need to improve your English or your technical skills, that's fine, you can study. But that's unrelated to all the other activities you might do for your own pleasure.
      - rramadass 6y ago
        >I'd advise you try to not think of all reading as something that needs to "improve" something in you. Well said! This is the curse of the modern society/economy that everything you do should be towards some "improvement" either materially or otherwise. The concept and importance of "play" has all but been forgotten. Incidentally, much of Science progressed only because many of the Scientists actually loved "playing" with what interested them. The actual inventions/discoveries were more accidental like. Knowledge for Knowledge's sake is a very good thing.
badjeans 6y ago
Was it a tough year for Bill Gates? How? Net worth US$ 119 billion
- AntiImperialist 6y ago
  He has enough money to not have to care about money. He just didn't get to kill as many Africans as he and his father would have liked to. Give the poor guy a break. It's been a tough year for him.
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  I guess the world's biggest monopolizer is trying to show empathy for others.
- freddie_mercury 6y ago
  His father died in 2020. Most people that are being a jerk on the internet would say that counts.
  - hue3 6y ago
    People here seem to know only one metric to quantify well-being: money! It says a lot about current times and the community around HN
apples_oranges 6y ago
I have read "Range" and was underwhelmed. I feel like the idea in it can be summarised in a 5-15 minute blog post. I also think that this year was probably not lousy for many people, me included, and I'm a bit tired of giving 2020 negative adjectives.
- hue3 6y ago
  Most books could be summarized in an article. And while I think attributing negative adjectives to 2020 is arbitrary, since the bad things happening now are not bound to the calendar, this year was particularly bad for an even bigger number of people than the average year. It may not have been bad for you, but passing off the year as remotely good is disrespectful and shows a lack of empathy to the millions who had it bad because of covid, racial conflicts, natural disasters, terrorism, increased poverty etc etc.
- sradman 6y ago
  Or a wiki page [1]. The question then turns to what value the long form book adds. I think one aspect is that consuming content over multiple days approximates the first few cycles of a Spaced Repetition system [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range:_Why_Generalists_Triumph_in_a_Specialized_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range:_Why_Generalists_Triumph... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
- st1x7 6y ago
  This is the case for most non-fiction life/business advice books that come out these days. Many of them actually start out as articles/talks. The author then gets contacted by a publisher who proposes to stretch things out into a book.
- redelbee 6y ago
  I also read Range and I too was a bit underwhelmed. I took it as a sign that I’ve read too much in this area already as much of the book was familiar. It would probably be a good introduction for those who haven’t read about the topic before. I keep telling people that 2020 is our chance to both address the lousy situation many are in, and to recognize what is truly important in our lives. The fact that many people did in fact have a very lousy year and you did not also falls into that category. Why do you think your year was not lousy, and what can we learn from it?
Brajeshwar 6y ago
Every year, I add Gates' recommended books to my reading list. This year, 2020, when the Pandemic hit and our prospective Investor walked off, leaving me with a team I cannot support; I turn to extra reading for support. In early 2020, when I realized I read over 50+ books in 2019, I had decided to read slower, and more picky to digest the books better. Unfortunately, I ended up reading lot more this year. By GoodReads counts I have already read 70+ books, so, with the re-reads and other physical books, I will be hitting 80+ books this year (I didn't participate in their book count this year). When I'm anxious, I either read or play chess. If I'm pitching or have an important meeting, I would have likely played few games of chess.
- TtEdN7jwT 6y ago
  I stand in awe with the amount you've read. Which ones have you gotten the most benefit from?
  - Brajeshwar 6y ago
    Thanks. Pretty much all books gives you something or the other to learn. I started writing about the books I read, each year, since 2018. For this year, here are few, in no particular order that I feel happy and fulfilled reading them. I will be digging deeper and doing a retrospective, and write a blog post by early 2021. - Cant't hurt me by David Goggins. - Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. - Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. (Re-read) - Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford. A very un-assuming book that taught me lot about leadership. - How to influence and win friends (re-read 3rd or 4th time). - Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein. - I am Malala (daughter like it and so I read it) - Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Issacson. (I'm taking this real slow, still reading after 6+ months.) - Range (the one mentioned by Bill Gates) - The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. - The Future is Asian by Parag Khanna. - Turn the Ship Around. - Under Pressure by Lisa Damour (I have a daughter, turning teenager in another year.) - Venture Deals (still valid in today's fund raising scenes) - Why we Sleep by Matthew Walker. Still reading but learning a lot already.
    - ckosidows 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
_tik_ 6y ago
I like this kind book list. My only complains is most book list is too US centric. I cannot appreciate some of the items in the list. Is there any good book list that is more for international audience?
hairofadog 6y ago
Not exactly on topic, but in case anyone is interested, the most reliable source I know for fiction recommendations is the Tournament of Books: https://themorningnews.org/tob/ https://themorningnews.org/tob/
- cambalache 6y ago
  Seeing that website and its picks it reminded me of the acerbic comment of a Swedish academic: "Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl told the Associated Press that US writers were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture", which he said dragged down the quality of their work. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining." https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/01/us.literature.insular.nobel https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/01/us.literature....
  - hairofadog 6y ago
    For sure; I should have added a note to say it's not any sort of definitive list of books – they cover a pretty narrow set of tastes, mostly English-centric literary fiction [^1] – and they're pretty explicit about the idea of it being a contest is really just "dumb fun" (their words) to kindle discussion about books they like. I'm always looking for good sources of book recommendations if you've got any that cover a wider array of tastes. [1]: That said, one of my new favorite authors is an Argentinian writer named Samanta Schweblin whose I discovered on TOB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samanta_Schweblin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samanta_Schweblin
    - cambalache 6y ago
      For sure. For worldwide literature translated to English you could do a lot worse that the Complete review[1] its father site the Literary Saloon is quite good too[2] If you know French La Republique des Livres is a good choice[3] In Spanish there are lots of sites, but this book recommendation section from Clarin has a good selection from all over the world [4] I really liked this site[5] in English about "post-modern" writers (Kafka, Borges,Joyce,Beckett etc), too bad it was shut down, but you can still read it on Internet archive. Surprisingly 4chan /lit has very good taste in literature.They have several guides,for example one by origin of the work[6] To finish I will give 7 books, very well known, but they wont always appear in, say a reddit top 100 books or whatever: 1. The tartar steppe. Dino Buzzati 2. Pedro Paramo. Juan Rulfo. 3. Life and fate.Vasily Grossman 4.Memoirs of Hadrian. Marguerite Yourcenar 5. The book of disquiet. Fernando Pessoa 6. The House of the Sleeping Beauties. Yasunari Kawabata. 7. Midaq Alley. Naguib Mahfouz [1]http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html [2]http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html [3]https://larepubliquedeslivres.com/ https://larepubliquedeslivres.com/ [4]https://www.clarin.com/tema/libros-recomendados.html https://www.clarin.com/tema/libros-recomendados.html [5]https://web.archive.org/web/20130401045155/http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130401045155/http://www.themod... [6]https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading/Literature_by_origin https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading/Literat...
newbie578 6y ago
Range is a great book! I really enjoyed reading it, it is a worthwhile read which expands your line of thinking. I definitely also recommend Barking Up The Wrong Tree, it goes hand in hand with Range, books which challenge our way of thinking and what success is or what the correlation is.
chad_strategic 6y ago
I'm not sure I'm would be comfortable reading books recommended by Bill Gates. Maybe the books are good, but I would rather have them recommended from other sources, with a mix of other books. The last thing I would want to do is think like Bill Gates. I wouldn't read books recommend from Donald Trump either. I also question any books that algorithm put together for me. The only good book list is probably a list of books that have been banned from libraries or the government wants you not to read. I think there are 451 of those books? Full disclosure: I'm not a fan of windows.
- svachalek 6y ago
  I'd look at them more as a representation of the image the older, philanthropic Gates wants to project rather than as indoctrination to become a ruthless billionaire. I don't tend to read the kind of socio-political stuff he always includes, but he's quite smart and has pretty good taste in science reading.
- chad_strategic 6y ago
  P.S. Wouldn't read book the ghost of Steve Jobs put together either.
tuxguy 6y ago
https://apps.npr.org/best-books/#view=covers&year=2020 https://apps.npr.org/best-books/#view=covers&year=2020
credit_guy 6y ago
We will look back at 2020 and we'll think it was not such a lousy year. I personally consider that Covid19 was a godsend. Everyone (including Gates) were saying that a pandemic is not a matter of if but rather of when. And one came. But remember, we have a flu pandemic every single year. For a pandemic to be registered as serious, it has to be more lethal than flu. And Covid19 was, but not by so much. It was quite the minimum extra-lethality needed to shake people into action. And we did act. We saw how bad we are at preparedness (I mean, if the famous "stockpile" doesn't have N95s, then what does it have?). It exposed so many holes. But then Pfizer and Moderna pulled the miracle. What they have done is not just come up with the vaccine for Covid, but they have broken the 4-minute mile of vaccines. Shattered it. Like going from 4:05 to 0:35. When the next one will come (and come it will), a 10-month sequencing-to-EUA cycle will be the target to beat. Not a 5-year timeline. Will we be able to have a vaccine in 6 months, or maybe 3 months? That's not entirely inconceivable now. So, sure we've paid a dear price in blood with this Covid19, but it could have been much, much, much worse. And when the truly bad one will come, we'll be so much more prepared.
- mrtranscendence 6y ago
  > it has to be more lethal than flu. And Covid19 was, but not by so much. COVID-19 is five times deadlier than the flu. It's killed over 1.5 million people worldwide, and almost 300,000 people in my home country (USA). It'll be many months before enough people are vaccinated to ensure herd immunity, if it ever happens. Yeah, I suppose it could improve outcomes for an even deadlier next time, but calling it a godsend seems queasily rosy.
  - credit_guy 6y ago
    I would say it's probably more than five times deadlier than the flu. In 2018 about 60k people died because of "influenza and pneumonia" [1], so 300k deaths due to Covid is five times worse, but that's with some quite strict lockdowns. Without lockdowns it's anybody's guess, but twice as many deaths doesn't appear outrageous. That said, what "flu multiple" would have scared people into action? Even now, in December there are surprisingly many people in denial, up until the last moments of their lives. There are people who think this whole Covid is only a conspiracy (did you hear the one about "Gates' vaccine" which is actually just a way to inject people with nanorobots?). If Covid was only twice as deadly as the flu, would the Congress have passed the CARES act in 2 weeks? Maybe they would've if it was exactly 2.85 times as deadly as the flu, but we'll never know. What we know is that we all die one day or another. In a regular year 2.8 to 2.9 million people die in the US. 300k is 10% of that. That's bad, and every single death is a tragedy, but this was no Bubonic Plague. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

199 points by yarapavan 6y ago

I'm currently reading "The White Plague" (1982) by Frank Herbert, which seems somehow appropriate given the current pandemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague (contains spoilers)

robin_reala 6y ago
On a similar theme, try A Journal of the Plague Year, The Decameron, and Plague Ship. https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/daniel-defoe/a-journal-of-the-plague-year https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/daniel-defoe/a-journal-of-... https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/giovanni-boccaccio/the-decameron/john-payne https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/giovanni-boccaccio/the-dec... https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/andre-norton/plague-ship https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/andre-norton/plague-ship
- agency 6y ago
  Also The Plague by Camus
dharmab 6y ago
I read Station Eleven in 2019 and the timing was impeccable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_Eleven https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_Eleven

russellbeattie 6y ago

I've read The Spy and the Traitor, and it was quite good. I had just come off a binge of spy novels written by John LeCarre and it was amazing to read the same exact sort of craziness, but in a real life situation. I would actually recommend doing something similar, as the fiction definitely help set the mental stage for the history. That said, Roger Federer is a generalist?!? Why, because he has trouble beating Rafa on clay?? As a techie generalist who has knowledge a mile wide and an inch deep, I'm not sure he would qualify. But I'll read the book and see.

mhh__ 6y ago
Read Spycatcher by Peter Wright. It's an opinionated tale of someone actually doing the business of catching spies. Even better for the HN crowd, the author was an engineer so there's some tidbits about just how advanced spook technology was even in the 50s and 60s (i.e. using acoustics to lift encryption keys through embassy walls as they were being typed)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 4926394057 6y ago
  The fact it was banned for a while is also a fairly good indicator that there's something in there worth reading.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    The more factual parts are genuinely dangerous if not for the late date it was published. The more speculative aspects like the authors' judgement of Roger Hollis is genuinely really weird. We will probably never know the truth, but if he wasn't a spy there are some genuinely abnormal correlations to be explained. If you're familiar with the case the Australian intelligence analyst Paul Monk gives a fairly strong case that even if the official story on Hollis isn't wrong, it is wildly inconsistent and economical with the truth. Wright is a bit of a loose cannon, but the late Chapman Pincher wrote an enormous book on effectively everything publicly known about the (at the age of about 100 no less) which is much more methodical. There was a IWP panel about the case a few years ago; some evidence is so murky that some analysts were, even with a fastidiously planned and documented "argument map" to summarize the known evidence, joking about resorting to sending a freedom of information request to the GRU.
freddie_mercury 6y ago
> That said, Roger Federer is a generalist?!? Why, because he has trouble beating Rafa on clay?? I don't know why people bother to take umbrage at things without even trying to learn the context. What you are assuming the author claims doesn't exist anywhere in the book. He never says the Federer is a generalist. The only mention of Federer in the book is to contrast his childhood with Tiger Wood's childhood. "By the time [Federer] finally gave up other sports—soccer, most notably—to focus on tennis, other kids had long since been working with strength coaches, sports psychologists, and nutritionists. But it didn’t seem to hamper his development in the long run." In contrast, Tiger Woods famously focused on golf exclusively at an early age. Woods specialised in golf from a young age. Federer didn't specialise in a single sport from a young age. Federer is never mentioned again after the 4th page of the book.

happy_path 6y ago

When I see this kind of lists I always think of getting some of these books and reading them. However, I feel like reading books that have no relationship with my job (software engineer) is a waste. Do any feel the same? Is this a harmful mindset and should stop worrying about "wasting" my free time?

jcynix 6y ago
Your free time should be the time when you do things unrelated to your professional work. A healthy advise I got from Usenet a long time ago is that one should have a hobby unrelated to computers. That advise was given when there where no eBook readers, Smartphones or other mobile stuff. But it's still a good advise IMO as long as you use these tools for mainly recreational activities. So long note, short answer: reading books isn't a waste of time.
- happy_path 6y ago
  Well, my native language is not English, so I could think that reading in English improve that language skill. What about if I feel I'm not a good software engineer?
  - lentil_soup 6y ago
    I'd advise you try to not think of all reading as something that needs to "improve" something in you. We do many things just for pleasure; we go on holiday, we have friends, we eat dessert, we go for walks, we read books. If you feel you need to improve your English or your technical skills, that's fine, you can study. But that's unrelated to all the other activities you might do for your own pleasure.
    - rramadass 6y ago
      >I'd advise you try to not think of all reading as something that needs to "improve" something in you. Well said! This is the curse of the modern society/economy that everything you do should be towards some "improvement" either materially or otherwise. The concept and importance of "play" has all but been forgotten. Incidentally, much of Science progressed only because many of the Scientists actually loved "playing" with what interested them. The actual inventions/discoveries were more accidental like. Knowledge for Knowledge's sake is a very good thing.

badjeans 6y ago

Was it a tough year for Bill Gates? How? Net worth US$ 119 billion

AntiImperialist 6y ago
He has enough money to not have to care about money. He just didn't get to kill as many Africans as he and his father would have liked to. Give the poor guy a break. It's been a tough year for him.
bergstromm466 6y ago
I guess the world's biggest monopolizer is trying to show empathy for others.
freddie_mercury 6y ago
His father died in 2020. Most people that are being a jerk on the internet would say that counts.
- hue3 6y ago
  People here seem to know only one metric to quantify well-being: money! It says a lot about current times and the community around HN

apples_oranges 6y ago

I have read "Range" and was underwhelmed. I feel like the idea in it can be summarised in a 5-15 minute blog post. I also think that this year was probably not lousy for many people, me included, and I'm a bit tired of giving 2020 negative adjectives.

hue3 6y ago
Most books could be summarized in an article. And while I think attributing negative adjectives to 2020 is arbitrary, since the bad things happening now are not bound to the calendar, this year was particularly bad for an even bigger number of people than the average year. It may not have been bad for you, but passing off the year as remotely good is disrespectful and shows a lack of empathy to the millions who had it bad because of covid, racial conflicts, natural disasters, terrorism, increased poverty etc etc.
sradman 6y ago
Or a wiki page [1]. The question then turns to what value the long form book adds. I think one aspect is that consuming content over multiple days approximates the first few cycles of a Spaced Repetition system [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range:_Why_Generalists_Triumph_in_a_Specialized_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range:_Why_Generalists_Triumph... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
st1x7 6y ago
This is the case for most non-fiction life/business advice books that come out these days. Many of them actually start out as articles/talks. The author then gets contacted by a publisher who proposes to stretch things out into a book.
redelbee 6y ago
I also read Range and I too was a bit underwhelmed. I took it as a sign that I’ve read too much in this area already as much of the book was familiar. It would probably be a good introduction for those who haven’t read about the topic before. I keep telling people that 2020 is our chance to both address the lousy situation many are in, and to recognize what is truly important in our lives. The fact that many people did in fact have a very lousy year and you did not also falls into that category. Why do you think your year was not lousy, and what can we learn from it?

Brajeshwar 6y ago

Every year, I add Gates' recommended books to my reading list. This year, 2020, when the Pandemic hit and our prospective Investor walked off, leaving me with a team I cannot support; I turn to extra reading for support. In early 2020, when I realized I read over 50+ books in 2019, I had decided to read slower, and more picky to digest the books better. Unfortunately, I ended up reading lot more this year. By GoodReads counts I have already read 70+ books, so, with the re-reads and other physical books, I will be hitting 80+ books this year (I didn't participate in their book count this year). When I'm anxious, I either read or play chess. If I'm pitching or have an important meeting, I would have likely played few games of chess.

TtEdN7jwT 6y ago
I stand in awe with the amount you've read. Which ones have you gotten the most benefit from?
- Brajeshwar 6y ago
  Thanks. Pretty much all books gives you something or the other to learn. I started writing about the books I read, each year, since 2018. For this year, here are few, in no particular order that I feel happy and fulfilled reading them. I will be digging deeper and doing a retrospective, and write a blog post by early 2021. - Cant't hurt me by David Goggins. - Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. - Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. (Re-read) - Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford. A very un-assuming book that taught me lot about leadership. - How to influence and win friends (re-read 3rd or 4th time). - Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein. - I am Malala (daughter like it and so I read it) - Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Issacson. (I'm taking this real slow, still reading after 6+ months.) - Range (the one mentioned by Bill Gates) - The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. - The Future is Asian by Parag Khanna. - Turn the Ship Around. - Under Pressure by Lisa Damour (I have a daughter, turning teenager in another year.) - Venture Deals (still valid in today's fund raising scenes) - Why we Sleep by Matthew Walker. Still reading but learning a lot already.
  - ckosidows 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

_tik_ 6y ago

I like this kind book list. My only complains is most book list is too US centric. I cannot appreciate some of the items in the list. Is there any good book list that is more for international audience?

hairofadog 6y ago

Not exactly on topic, but in case anyone is interested, the most reliable source I know for fiction recommendations is the Tournament of Books: https://themorningnews.org/tob/ https://themorningnews.org/tob/

cambalache 6y ago
Seeing that website and its picks it reminded me of the acerbic comment of a Swedish academic: "Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl told the Associated Press that US writers were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture", which he said dragged down the quality of their work. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining." https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/01/us.literature.insular.nobel https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/01/us.literature....
- hairofadog 6y ago
  For sure; I should have added a note to say it's not any sort of definitive list of books – they cover a pretty narrow set of tastes, mostly English-centric literary fiction [^1] – and they're pretty explicit about the idea of it being a contest is really just "dumb fun" (their words) to kindle discussion about books they like. I'm always looking for good sources of book recommendations if you've got any that cover a wider array of tastes. [1]: That said, one of my new favorite authors is an Argentinian writer named Samanta Schweblin whose I discovered on TOB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samanta_Schweblin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samanta_Schweblin
  - cambalache 6y ago
    For sure. For worldwide literature translated to English you could do a lot worse that the Complete review[1] its father site the Literary Saloon is quite good too[2] If you know French La Republique des Livres is a good choice[3] In Spanish there are lots of sites, but this book recommendation section from Clarin has a good selection from all over the world [4] I really liked this site[5] in English about "post-modern" writers (Kafka, Borges,Joyce,Beckett etc), too bad it was shut down, but you can still read it on Internet archive. Surprisingly 4chan /lit has very good taste in literature.They have several guides,for example one by origin of the work[6] To finish I will give 7 books, very well known, but they wont always appear in, say a reddit top 100 books or whatever: 1. The tartar steppe. Dino Buzzati 2. Pedro Paramo. Juan Rulfo. 3. Life and fate.Vasily Grossman 4.Memoirs of Hadrian. Marguerite Yourcenar 5. The book of disquiet. Fernando Pessoa 6. The House of the Sleeping Beauties. Yasunari Kawabata. 7. Midaq Alley. Naguib Mahfouz [1]http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html [2]http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html http://www.complete-review.com/main/main.html [3]https://larepubliquedeslivres.com/ https://larepubliquedeslivres.com/ [4]https://www.clarin.com/tema/libros-recomendados.html https://www.clarin.com/tema/libros-recomendados.html [5]https://web.archive.org/web/20130401045155/http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130401045155/http://www.themod... [6]https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading/Literature_by_origin https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading/Literat...

newbie578 6y ago

Range is a great book! I really enjoyed reading it, it is a worthwhile read which expands your line of thinking. I definitely also recommend Barking Up The Wrong Tree, it goes hand in hand with Range, books which challenge our way of thinking and what success is or what the correlation is.

chad_strategic 6y ago

I'm not sure I'm would be comfortable reading books recommended by Bill Gates. Maybe the books are good, but I would rather have them recommended from other sources, with a mix of other books. The last thing I would want to do is think like Bill Gates. I wouldn't read books recommend from Donald Trump either. I also question any books that algorithm put together for me. The only good book list is probably a list of books that have been banned from libraries or the government wants you not to read. I think there are 451 of those books? Full disclosure: I'm not a fan of windows.

svachalek 6y ago
I'd look at them more as a representation of the image the older, philanthropic Gates wants to project rather than as indoctrination to become a ruthless billionaire. I don't tend to read the kind of socio-political stuff he always includes, but he's quite smart and has pretty good taste in science reading.
chad_strategic 6y ago
P.S. Wouldn't read book the ghost of Steve Jobs put together either.

tuxguy 6y ago

https://apps.npr.org/best-books/#view=covers&year=2020 https://apps.npr.org/best-books/#view=covers&year=2020

credit_guy 6y ago

We will look back at 2020 and we'll think it was not such a lousy year. I personally consider that Covid19 was a godsend. Everyone (including Gates) were saying that a pandemic is not a matter of if but rather of when. And one came. But remember, we have a flu pandemic every single year. For a pandemic to be registered as serious, it has to be more lethal than flu. And Covid19 was, but not by so much. It was quite the minimum extra-lethality needed to shake people into action. And we did act. We saw how bad we are at preparedness (I mean, if the famous "stockpile" doesn't have N95s, then what does it have?). It exposed so many holes. But then Pfizer and Moderna pulled the miracle. What they have done is not just come up with the vaccine for Covid, but they have broken the 4-minute mile of vaccines. Shattered it. Like going from 4:05 to 0:35. When the next one will come (and come it will), a 10-month sequencing-to-EUA cycle will be the target to beat. Not a 5-year timeline. Will we be able to have a vaccine in 6 months, or maybe 3 months? That's not entirely inconceivable now. So, sure we've paid a dear price in blood with this Covid19, but it could have been much, much, much worse. And when the truly bad one will come, we'll be so much more prepared.

mrtranscendence 6y ago
> it has to be more lethal than flu. And Covid19 was, but not by so much. COVID-19 is five times deadlier than the flu. It's killed over 1.5 million people worldwide, and almost 300,000 people in my home country (USA). It'll be many months before enough people are vaccinated to ensure herd immunity, if it ever happens. Yeah, I suppose it could improve outcomes for an even deadlier next time, but calling it a godsend seems queasily rosy.
- credit_guy 6y ago
  I would say it's probably more than five times deadlier than the flu. In 2018 about 60k people died because of "influenza and pneumonia" [1], so 300k deaths due to Covid is five times worse, but that's with some quite strict lockdowns. Without lockdowns it's anybody's guess, but twice as many deaths doesn't appear outrageous. That said, what "flu multiple" would have scared people into action? Even now, in December there are surprisingly many people in denial, up until the last moments of their lives. There are people who think this whole Covid is only a conspiracy (did you hear the one about "Gates' vaccine" which is actually just a way to inject people with nanorobots?). If Covid was only twice as deadly as the flu, would the Congress have passed the CARES act in 2 weeks? Maybe they would've if it was exactly 2.85 times as deadly as the flu, but we'll never know. What we know is that we all die one day or another. In a regular year 2.8 to 2.9 million people die in the US. 300k is 10% of that. That's bad, and every single death is a tragedy, but this was no Bubonic Plague. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm