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Ask HN: Best books you read in 2013
My favorites were Decisive, by the Heath brothers, Little brother, by Cory Doctorow and I listened to the Graveyardbook, by Neil Gaiman.
- sfrechtling 13y agoIn no particular order: The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati True Grit, Charles Portis Thoughts, Marcus Aurelius Its not all about me, Robin Dreeke The unwinding, George Packer Lives of the Laureates, William Breit AntiFragile, Nassum Taleb
- lmm 13y agoLoup Garous, which the internet tells me is by Natsuhiko Kyogoku. The only dystopia I've read which was both legitimately scary and utterly plausible.
- akg_67 13y agoNon-tech books, I read and liked in 2013: Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau Anything Your Want by Derek Sivers The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar Are You a Stock or a Bond? by Moshe Milevsky The Most Important Thing by Howard Marks Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- argimenes 13y ago'Graph Databases' by Ian Robinson, Jim Webber, and Emil Eifrem 'Hackers and Painters' by Paul Graham 'Virtual Reality' by Howard Rheingold 'Stack Computers: The New Wave' by Philip Koopman 'Thinking Forth' by Leo Brodie 'WIMP Programming for All on Acorn RISC Computers' by Lee Calcraft and Alan Wrigley 'Frank Herbert' by Timothy O'Reilly 'Modern Painters: volume 1' by John Ruskin 'Aratra Pentelici' by John Ruskin 'The Art and Craft of Drawing' by Vernon Blake 'The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci' by Dmitri Merezhkovsky ('romance' in the old sense of 'biographical novel') 'Prehistoric Avebury' by Aubrey Burl 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Walter M. Miller
- mindcrime 13y agoNon-fiction: On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkins How To Create A Mind - Ray Kurzweil The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker The Origin of Wealth - Eric Beinhocker The Signal and the Noise - Nate Silver The Money Culture - Michael Lewis Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations - David Warsh Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing - John E. Kelly III and Steve Hamm The Idea Factory - Jon Gertner Winning The Knowledge Transfer Race - Michael J. English and William H. Baker Wellsprings of Knowledge - Dorothy Leonard-Barton If Only We Knew What We Know - Carla O'dell and C. Jackson Grayson Started, but haven't finished yet: The Discipline of Market Leaders - Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema Marketing Warfare - Jack Trout and Al Ries Naked Statistics - Charles Wheelan Wiki Management - Rod Collins Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal - Ayn Rand Fiction: NOS4A2 - Joe Hill The first four books in the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman Innocence - Dean Koontz Deeply Odd - Dean Koontz Doctor Sleep - Stephen King The Black List - Brad Thor Most of The New Lovecraft Circle - an anthology of Lovecraft mythos stories by contemporary writers And started re-reading Asimov's Foundation last night. I've read the original trilogy before, but this time I intend to read all seven books. But I'm starting with Foundation and going to the end, before going back to the prequels.
- p1esk 13y agoHow would you compare 'On Intelligence' with 'How to Create a Mind'?
- mindcrime 13y agoGood question. I felt like there was some significant overlap between the two, and I think that's borne out by commentary from other people who have read both. I think a few people have even accused Kurzweil of borrowing a little too freely from Hawkins' HTM idea. But, to my mind, they complement each other well. Between the two, you get a strong dose of case for thinking of the human mind's primary algorithm being some form of pattern-matching. For anybody who is interested in AI topics, and who hasn't read either or both of those, I'd really recommend reading both.
- cabbeer 13y agoLolita by Vladimir Nabokov Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut 1984 by George Orwell To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie My Antonia by Willa Cather (1918) On the Road by Jack Kerouac The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson Mccullers The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934) Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf Ulysses by James Joyce
- waqasx 13y agoyou read all this in 2013? I call bullshit.
- p1esk 13y agoWhy? 20 books, 500 pages each on average, that's 10k pages. Divide by 300 days, that's about 30 pages a day. Certainly doable for fiction.
- waqasx 13y agoits not the question of "is it possible?", its just that these are always listed amongst the 'top 100 books of all time' and each needs more than just 'reading time' you cannot read Ulysses and 1984 the same month, physically you can, but that would be useless.