Curious to know which books you've read that genuinely felt worth the time and attention you gave them. Can be fiction, non-fiction, self-help, technical, philosophical, or anything else.
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 It's a bit old and outdated now (published in 1999) but it was responsible for forming a lifelong interest in me.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.