4 ms·
Ask HN: What Are You Reading?
I've gotten many great literary recommendations in random HN comments.
Wondering what the community at large is currently interested in!
- SMAAART 1y agoIdeaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters, by Jeremy Utley
- jus3sixty 1y ago“How Can I Help” by Linda Hand
- shawn_w 1y agoCurrently: Moby-Dick and Termination Shock. (That the former gets brought up a lot in the latter is a coincidence.)
- ValtteriL 1y agoReminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre (1923)
- kratom_sandwich 1y agoHow do you like it?
- ValtteriL 1y agoI'm 3/4 through it. It's been quite entertaining to read how he went from picking off bucket shops to going bust on Wall Street and how he proceeded from there. Old-fashioned writing that goes straight to the point. His art-like approach to speculation is refreshing after spending time on /r/quant. I cannot say if any of his high-level speculation wisdom hold water anymore, though. Would recommend!
- chistev 1y agoOn Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy D. Snyder
- card_zero 1y agoI read The Whispering Mountain by Joan Aiken and was struck by similarities to Pratchett, for instance the part where the main character heroically defeats monsters in a wood by using knowledge gleaned from an old encyclopedia that he carries everywhere, and how he ſpeakſ like thiſ when reading aloud from it, and the part about underground camels in Wales. It references The Far-Distant Oxus at one point, which I want to read (a pony adventure story written in 1937 by teenagers). (I know the long s wasn't really used at the ends of words, that was just a hurried example.)
- chairmansteve 1y agoPost Soviet Britain by Abby Innes. Excellent so far (70 pages in). Crossing the Unknown Sea by David Whyte. Also excellent. Nearly finished it.
- andyjohnson0 1y agoCormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. As with some of his other work, the punctuation can be a challenge and the prose can sometimes border on the ponderous, but I'm enjoying it. Currently about half way through.
- wara23arish 1y agoreading Blood Meridian now, honestly it just flows for me. I grew up reading arabic and sentences are just feel longer so maybe thats why Im not struggling with it.
- gaws 1y agoListen to the audiobooks. They help distinguish which characters are speaking.
- andyjohnson0 1y agoI have a Random House audiobook version of the trilogy read by Brad Pitt. His Spanish pronunciation isn't great (although better than mine) but I enjoy his quiet voice and slightly careworn delivery. It's abridged, though, and I wanted to read the whole work. The Recorded Books recordings of The Road and No Country for Old Men narrated by Tom Stechschulte are very good too.
- BOOSTERHIDROGEN 1y agoHow to get along
- alberto_ol 1y agoPride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- badpun 1y agoMe too! I'm about 40% through.
- aosaigh 1y ago"Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History", about our first civilisations.
- defrost 1y agoRereading Bliss by Peter Carey after opening a 45 year old box o' books from a back shelf in the shed. It's a red pill fable for marketing directors (and other threads are pulled). Later adapted for film, it saw 400 viewers walk out on it when screened at Cannes... most likely when the fish hit the floor. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifR7tsVT_-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifR7tsVT_-Y
- jorisboris 1y agoJust finished Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
- lberk 1y agoHow did you like the book (compared to the movie)?
- jorisboris 1y agoI like the old world charm The book was written in the 50s, its way slower than the movie (though still a short read). Some things from the movie plot are the same I love details like how difficult it was to get something communicated across a border only 75 years ago
- gaws 1y agoHave you read any of John le Carré's books?
- jorisboris 1y agoYes, I’ve read the spy who came in from the cold, and i tried to read a perfect spy I liked the first one but its very raw and dark, no glitter and glamour I quit the second one, part of the book are flashback scenes and I had a hard time staying concentrated, i forgot why exactly i didnt like those scenes
- cafard 1y agoA Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit by Quentin Lauer Augustine's Confessions Last fiction: Nice Job by David Lodge
- whatamidoingyo 1y agoI'm reading The Inner Citadel by Pierre Hadot for the second time. It's full of gems.
- precompute 1y agoThe Night Land by William Hope Hodgson.
- constantinum 1y agoWar and peace - third attempt
- mattmanser 1y agoIt's really good. A story that still pops into my mind occasionally today. As a Brit I'd never really thought about Napoleon's invasion of Russia. The retreat in the book is evocative and really left an impression. But I read it when I had far more free time than now.
- constantinum 1y agoGetting past 200 pages is the tough part. Hope I’ll get through. Also, getting used to so many characters with unfamiliar Russian names is slowing things down. Let's see. Any tips and tricks for reading the magnum opus? Would help!
- mattmanser 1y agoNow that you mention it, I also struggled with that to begin with. My penguin edition had a dramatis personae list at the start that I ended up referring to a few times. Rare for me to use them. So, a crib sheet if your edition doesn't. There's a sequence with the boys out on the town which helped me cement each of the main male protagonists images in my head. Fairly early on I think. Pierre + Andrei being main characters, Nikolai (the younger) and Antole being the rest of that group. I also I ended up classifying the characters into three generations, the young men/woman, the older parents, and the younger children.
- constantinum 1y agoThanks for the tip.
- kapilkaisare 1y agoSimmons, Dan. The Terror I'm about 50 pages in, and am entranced with the prose.
- omosubi 1y agoCivilisations by kenneth clark - an art critic tries to understand western civilization through the "book" of its art.
- chistev 1y agoI'm favoriting this for later.
- bodantogat 1y agoI mostly read science fiction and fantasy, and I’ve just started Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It follows a scientist sentenced to a prison camp on a planet teeming with bizarre lifeforms. So far, it hasn’t drawn me in the way Children of Time did, though I’m only about a quarter of the way through.
- bodantogat 1y agoOh and also listening to an audiobook - Mythos by Stephen Fry. Liking it so far.
- mattmanser 1y agoI loved some of his fiction, but haven't got past the first chapter of that book.
- random_moonwalk 1y agoFiction: It by Stephen King Non-Fiction: The Spy and the Traitor by Ben MacIntyre. It's about the KGB spy-turned-MI6 agent Oleg Gordievsky and reads like a thriller.
- abhijat 1y agoJust finished Dreadnought and started Castles of steel by the same author, Robert K. Massie.
- ryanchants 1y agoI'm always reading a few books across a categories. Fiction: Reaper's Gale, book #7 of the fantasy series Malazan Book of the Fallen. Non-fiction(history): Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy And then I'm dabbling in a few books around the math behind and practical hands-on machine learning/deep learning.
- carlnewton 1y agoFor some reason I've been really enjoying stories with endless and well described repeating rooms. Borges' Library of Babel got me started, I have just finished Susanna Clarke's Piranesi - which was so wonderfully described, I don't know if I'll find anything to beat it. I'm now on A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck, which outright mentions Borges' novel. If anyone has any similar recommendations I'd love to hear them.
- agcat 1y agoDesigning data intensive applications