My 17 year old son bought it for me for my birthday. I've been enjoying it a lot. I do in fact like thinking in systems and learning more about it, and reading it in a more generalized fashion than I tend to in the computer science world has provided a refreshing perspective. It's all very approachable, nothing very complex, but gives names and discreet patterns to things I intuitively understood but previously wouldn't articulate easily. Definitely one of my favourite gifts in a long time.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

I read bits of this to my wife at night occasionally. One of the first trips we went on together was camping on a little island, and I had Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami) with me which I suggested I read to her in the evening. She really liked it and I've done it since. I wish I did it more often. Anyway, Stories of Your Life and Others is a wonderful collection. I've read it a few times, not always completely, and I enjoy it. Story of your life is the standout. It's what the movie Arrival is based on, which I consider one of the best scifi movies of all time. It's a beautiful story.

Silo series by Hugh Howey

I've been watching the show and decided the books deserve a shot. If the show is as good as it is, the books must be great, right?

They have a special place in my heart. Vinge didn't write much, but what he did write I think is very special indeed.

I've also taken to buying hardbacks of my favourite books from ebay.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/77711.A_Fire_Upon_the...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/226004.A_Deepness_in_the...

Now reading: "null: $cat /dev/null_", by Dienw Neb[0]. I don't know what it's about yet. I heard about it in an ad in the back of "2600 Magazine" and it caught my attention. Initial impressions are that 1) Neb is really good at dialog, and 2) their recreations of IRC chats is so perfect that I know they had to've spend many hours online in the middle of the night. Basically, the author knows how to write things I want to read. I do so hope they stick the landing and that the story turns out as wonderful as the writing.

[0]https://nebulaofbooks.com/books/null-cat-dev-null_/

The next one was Lonesome Dove, this was my first time reading a western and I didn't think I'd enjoy it as much as I did. The book is also absolutely hilarious and has one of my favorite characters in a book(shoutout to Gus).

I'm currently reading The Count of Monte Cresto and, boy, it's turning out to be quite the epic tale of revenge(no spoilers please!).

I'm on Book Two of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series.

Non-Fiction:

More than I can count, as far as "I've read at least some, put a bookmark in it, and intend to finish it eventually." But in terms of the books I'm really actively engaging with right now, the top one is:

Neuroscience: Exploring The Brain[1] by Mark F. Bear, Barry W. Connors, and Michael A. Paradiso

And sort of in parallel with that, is

Analog Computing: Development, Programming, Applications, and Future Directions[2] by Bernd Ulmann

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0781760038/

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Analog-Computing-Development-Programm...

Recently I managed to find the list again, and it's been endless pleasure:

- American Gods -- Neil Gaiman

- Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley

- The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett

- Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks

- Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson

- Cloud Atlas -- David Mitchell

- The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson

- The Dispossessed -- Ursula K Le Guin

- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick

- Dune -- Frank Herbert

- Foundation -- Isaac Asimov

- Giles Goat-Boy -- John Barth

- Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon

- The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams

- I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov

- The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

- The Left Hand of Darkness -- Ursula K Le Guin

- The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick

- Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland

- Neuromancer -- William Gibson

- Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell

- Orlando -- Virgina Woolf

- The Shockwave Rider -- John Brunner

- Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson

- Stand on Zanzibar -- John Brunner

- Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein

- Trouble with lichen - John Wyndham

- UBIK -- Philip Dick

- Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

- Woman on the Edge of Time -- Marge Piercy

(I am creatively interpreting "The Colour of Magic" as "all Discworld", "Dune" as "the six Dune books", etc.)

I don't tend to be great at finishing (or starting) books, and this is a big one. I've also never had any interest in Medieval or Renaissance history, for me it's been a black hole between the fall of Rome and the modern age.

But recently I saw some Youtube videos of Ada, and her enthusiasm is totally infectious [2]. She's fun and paints these vivid pictures of Florence and renaissance Europe that are incredible, absurd, and relatable, which makes sense since given she's also an accomplished sci-fi writer. She also reminds me of one of my favourite high school teachers. So I ordered the book right away.

The book is in the same tone as her videos, so it won't be for everyone, but I've really been enjoying it and now I'm fascinated by Renaissance Italy, Machiavelli, merchant republics, etc.

1. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo246135...

2. (My favourite example) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68p3jVQQdFk

* Seeing Like a State - great overview of how states (and corporations) lose visibility into reality due to the abstraction levels they operate at

* Normal Accidents - all about how things like nuclear reactors, ships and large systems naturally have accidents

* Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty - great easy read about how high reliability organizations manage complexity and dangerous, high tempo situations.

"7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy" - Recommended by @pc in an interview. I'm ~50 pages in and not really blown away. Its a nice accumulation of Alpha creating strategy... but I think its really missing some nuance. I do LOVE that they take an economist approach and actually provide the math/algorithms behind the concepts. Theres some good stuff in here but so far it feels like 30 pages stretched out to make a book.

"Monetizing Innovation" - dropped this book, do not recommend. I was expecting a really nice accumulation of how pricing should work with companies who are innovating... and it came no where near that hopeful concept. The case studies were weak, the hypothesis were weak, the writing was weak.

- "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang - "Ficciones" by Borges - "I have no Mouth and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison.

I'm also slowly plowing through "The Big Book of Science Fiction" edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer.

I love short speculative fiction. And the above are among my favorites.

Some other bits I’ve read recently that I’ve loved: - Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie” is a beautiful short story by the Three Body Problem’s translator - Cryptonomicon feels like a great balance between heady reading (it goes into WWII-era crypto thinking) and pulpy humor. I loved reading it. - “Stoner” by John Williams (not the Stoner you think, and also not the John Williams you think) is kinda in a different direction, but it’s a really well paced and beautifully written book about a farmer’s son who falls in love with literature. It’s one of those books that’s hard to sell in a sentence, but is effortless to read and makes you think a lot in a non-engineering-brained way.

About halfway through- it’s really good so far. He makes a compelling case for how our culture has changed in many ways, often for the worse, with the introduction of television.

This year I also read "The Brothers Karamazov" after having read "Crime and Punishment", "The Idiot" and "Demons" in previous years. It was not an easy read but it stays with you for a long time (or maybe even forever).

Also did some re-reading this year:

"A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles

"Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius

This may be my favorite "Children of Time" book yet (and I really liked the first and second book).

I'd say the biggest reason I enjoy science fiction is being exposed to new ideas. In book one of this series, I enjoyed imagining how a hunter spider species would evolve when imbued with a "brainiac-empathy" gene. In book two, I loved the idea of a central (Id) mind with a 8 distributed actuators (ego).

This one introduces the notion of a punchy, aggressive, status driven mantis shrimp.

I really enjoyed thinking about what it would mean to be an evolved mantis shrimp. Human beings have technically carried around deadly weapons since we developed tools. But a mantis shrimp is an organism that has two deadly weapon everywhere it goes. Imagine how much different human society/evolution/whatever would have been if we were constantly holdings blunderbuss' at each others heads at all times? Where being in range literally meant that either party (whoever fires first) can immediately and almost certainly kill the other. I suppose we have had potentially deadly weapons since we realized we could brain with rocks, but this is a risky (and messy) way to do things compared to the instant death that a mantis shrimp represents. What would that do to trust, to boundaries, to aggression and bluffing?

It is just such a fun humorous world, where 4 (5 with lowercase humans) species are learning to coexist despite their very different ways of looking at the world.

https://stephencagle.dev/posts-output/2026-07-20-children-of...

- The Women by Kristin Hannah

- Jurassic Park by Micheal Crichton

- Platform Decay by Martha Wells

- The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

- Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the End of the World by Eric Jay Dolin

- All the Sinners Bleed by S A Cosby

- Project Hail Mary and Artemis by Andy Weir

- Cibola Burn and Nemesis Games by James S A Corey (the Expanse series)

I'm also trying to transition into software development and have been watching John Ousterhout's talks and just yesterday started reading "A Philosophy of Software Design" - enjoying it so far.

It's quite good - not as good as Killers of the Flower Moon. I won't spoil anything you won't learn from the first few pages. The Wager was a British naval ship in the early 1700s that was lost to inclement weather. All were presumed dead. Some time later a boat arrives in England with a small number of survivors. Then a while later, another boat arrives with some more survivors. They each accuse the other of terrible acts.

The book tells the story of what happened after the ship went down.

It's a good read.

I had to listen to the books twice because there are a lot of details that you won't get the first time through unless you're extremely intentional and detail oriented, but I found it was worth it to listen again. I'll probably listen to Infinite Jest again sometime soon, even though it's 64 hours long. IJ is actually really great sci-fi with some important questions for our time.

Sadly found I could have been reading a better abridgement, which I'll get for the 2nd reading now.

"Over the course of this book, we have looked at some eighty years of this history. We have seen how the idea of nuclear secrecy was initially born out of a very specific fear—that the world’s worst nation could achieve nation-destroying power—that, over the course of many transformations, morphed into something more generalized. More than totalitarian regimes were the target of this secrecy: allied nations, private industry, democratic institutions, and “the public” more broadly became understood as targets as well, for reasons both justifiable and not. The secrecy problem moved wherever the problem of the bomb went, which was far indeed. The desirability of control over nuclear knowledge became totalizing because the threat of loss of control was tied to the almost unimaginable power of the bomb itself. These two forces—the desire for control, the fear of its loss—became locked in a vicious cycle, each driving the other."

https://qntm.org/ra

I'm guessing that many people here are familiar with this work already since HN was where I found out about qntm in the first place. If you haven't read Ra, though, I greatly enjoyed it and would strongly recommend it.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

I'm 50% of the way through and it's good but I don't entirely see the hype. Brontë is more atmospheric, Austen funnier and more incisive, Dickens more immersive. But I've still got a way to go.

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (1818/1831), https://frankendiff.com; and Tales of the Dead, by Mrs. Utterson (1813), https://archive.org/details/talesofdead00utte

Just started Homer's Iliad (Fagles translation) and Christopher Logue's War Music (2015).

Just finished re-reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams (1980). I think it holds up well. Last time I read it, I was much younger than Arthur Dent; now I'm much older. And now that we have computers with Genuine People Personalities, it's hard to remember what it was like in the Before Times.

Recently finished Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908). For better or worse (no spoilers here), it kept me guessing.

This is a bit of a departure - I normally read action thrillers where a retired navy SEAL foils a plot to bring down the US Government.

Also listening to the audiobook autobiography of Anthony Hopkins which I recommend.

For reading before bed, I recently finished "The Mountain In the Sea" by Ray Nayler. I found it very good, with primary themes centered around the nature of consciousness, robots, AI, and corporatism. Highly recommended.

The Years of Apocalypse by UraniumPhoenix:

Timeloop fantasy that starts out in a magic university. It's quite a fun read and I'm enjoying how different the MC approaches the timeloop from how I expect I would. She seems quite empathetic which adds an excellent emotional element to the story that I'm enjoying.

Worth the Candle: Through Adversity by Alexander Wales:

I'm a big fan of Alexander Wales. He has an intelligent way of writing plots and characters that I enjoy. This is a meta narrative LitRPG(?) fantasy book. The basic premise is that the MC is sent to a world that has elements of his previous DnD creations. I'm not much of a tabletop RPG person but excited to see where Wales takes this series.

https://archive.org/details/wisdomofinsecuri00watt

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/agatha-christie

For the near future, I've got some of Emily St. John Mandel's books loaded up (I liked the Station Eleven series a lot), as well as Peter Heller's The River.

I'm not sure any are that cognitively challenging, but all of them are certainly lovely.

Non-fiction: Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Michael Sipser. It's fun. It looks at things like pushdown automata, Turing machines, decidability, ... Not reading it too rigorously, but more exploratively.

I recently finished Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive.

The Expanse have been great, but I think I will be good and ready to say good bye when I'm done with the mainline novels.

I don't really read long form non-fiction, which is probably a character flaw, but for me reading is a form of escapism. I love Sci-Fi very much (both classical and modern) and I try to mix and match so I read about equal amounts sci-fi and non-sci-fi.

Recently read books by Anthony Doerr (Shell Collector, About Grace, Memory Wall, All the Light We Cannot See) and Simon Singh (Code Book, Fermat's Last Theorem, Trick or Treatment, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets).

The Power Broker by Robert Caro.

Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka.

The Time Tax by Annie Lowrey.

I knew many everyday expressions and phrases come from his work but I had no idea it was so many.

I'm currently about halfway through at 3.2k pages.

I was very happy to find this. I heard complaints that it's just a Tolkien clone and Jordan doesn't portray women well. But what I found was kind of a relic. It's an excellent fantasy series that probably couldn't be written again. Wish we had more like it.

It's some of the best sci-fi I've read. Very interesting depiction of technology and I love how the different types of tech and societal structures are not explained, just showcased and talked about like it's obvious until you get it. It reminds me of Philip K. Dick but with a lot more scientifically grounded yet far out technology.

The authors argue that rigid, goal-oriented planning and metric-driven objectives actively prevent true innovation and groundbreaking achievement.

The Works of Vermin. Exceptionally well written. Not an ounce of flab anywhere.

The Carryx series, 2 books so far. Best villains ever.

Tainted Cup and sequel. Sherlock Holmes meets Godzilla.

Goblin Emperor

The Prophet (Gibran)

Los Alamos (Kanon)

Hyperion (reread)

Finally, a shout out to the best book I read in 2025: Terra Ignota. Yes, the whole series.

Question for some of y'all: Those who are listing 3 or more (sometimes way more!) books -- do you read them in parallel? I'm a dyed-in-the-wool serial book monogamist and can't fathom having like 8 or 10 storylines in my head at once.

No judgement, just curious and somewhat awed :)

Otherwise started on a saga of going straight through The Expanse series. Haven't done a big series straight through since a >1 year re-read of Wheel of Time so I'm excited for that.

Neal Stevenson - Diamond Age

Rudy Rucker - Ware Tetralogy (old-school cyberpunk / high-scifi. i read Juicy Ghosts by Rucker last year and really dig his extravagant ideas. I had trouble understanding Juicy Ghosts at times, but the concepts that man is able to bundle together and flesh out, while creating an engaging page-turner is amazing. not much fluff.)

I'm now reading Brothers Karamazov, because someone else on HN recommended it (well, that was the immediate catalyst, but I've been wanting to read a big Russian novel). There's a lot of jawing about the church which is a little boring, but I'm appreciating the way all the characters are bursting with life and feeling. And also that Dostoevsky never beats around the bush.

I like how he has the slow, almost clinical way of revealing interesting worlds and systems. It’s not the kind of book that’ll make me cry, but I really like world building with fun enough characters

On my Kindle I have two ham radio books I'm reading, one is about grounding antennas, the other a General test prep.

- Grounding and Bonding for the Radio Amateur - Ham Radio General Class License Study Guide

Ostrom summarizes her empirical investigations of common pool resources (fisheries, forests, ground water, etc.) and how stakeholders can collectively govern them, a polycentric approach that is neither governmental nor proprietary. She abstracts 8 principles of governance, elements of successful community based resource governance.

Alvin Roth's Who Gets What — and Why: Matchmaking, Mismatch, and Market Design

Roth discusses market failures and how one builds market coordination organizations to perform matchmaking. He focuses on non-monetary markets such as paired kidney exchange, which he pioneered. Another example is medical residency matching.

He has a knack for being critical and optimistic at the same time. Funny too!

It was a mix of fantasy & humor. It is a bit long but it is extremely funny & entertaining. It is the first fantasy book I have read other than the Harry Potter series (not sure if it is considered fantasy) but I loved it.

One of the best non-fiction books I read this year was Doppleganger: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/138505710.

I'm looking for something a little meaty to keep the brain working...

- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks comes to mind. I had no idea how rampant purposeful discrimination was so recently for example, but the point of the book is the HeLa cells - and biology is also not my forté so loads of new information there as well. It was very interesting in expected and unexpected areas for me

- Daniel Suarez' Kill Decision has only gotten more relevant since its release in 2012. Not sure I'd call this meaty though, but his thrillers are always good (near-ish future tech) and the author iirc also said this particular one is meant as food for thought and not only entertainment

It gives very strong Fallout vibes. Having played the original games I think there is an influence.

2. Obvious (?) observation: Today's list consists of human-authored books. Will that trend hold? Can you imagine this question being asked in X years with predominantly AI-authored books as the answers? Novels or nonfiction. I get a thrill out of a good book, partly, because it lets me into the head of a lucid or genius or maniacal fellow human.

Historical books that are great... Empire of the Summer Moon, Undaunted Courage, Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates

For programming I am reading HTML5 Games: Novice to Ninja, which I quite like so far. And JavaScript for Kids - both with the intent to entice my kids into game programming.

For work I am reading Learn dbatools in a Month of Lunches and outside of lingering questions about whether anything command line oriented matters in the age of AI, it has been really helpful in encapsulating solutions to things that are distinct problems in administering SQL Server.

Done: QED, Richard Feynman. Lectures on explaining quantum electrodynamics but with no more math than geometry.

Currently: One Good Turn: A natural history of the screwdriver and the screw, Witold Rybczynski. The discourse goes into his references in depth. It has yielded an excellent list of museums to visit.

On deck: Impossibility: The limits science and the science of limits, John Barrow. A re-read for me. Barrow discusses what we can never know in a way that’s like P vs NP but for the physical world.*

I also recently finished "A Cage Went in Search of a Bird", which is an anthology of Kafka-esque short stories. I'd recommend it if only for reading "God's Doorbell" (which imagines swarm-behavior RSI building the Tower of Babel).

I keep track of all my favorite books here: https://recleague.com/james/collections/books

(Full disclosure: I'm a cofounder of Rec League)

- My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok

Upbringing of a painter and the beginning of his journey in 1950s New York in a Hasidic Jewish family. Existentialism, art, passion.

- The Art of Doing Science and Engineerig, by Hamming

Surprisingly fresh and piercing, even today.

- Miracle of Love, Ram Dass

Stories about Neeb Karori Baba, as mentioned in Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs.

- The Name of The Rose, Umberto Ecori

Murder mystery in a famous library-monastery in medieval Europe. Amazing portrayal of that time.

I have a books site: https://ritoghosh.com/books

It's a few months outdated.

Instead I'm sneaking off to reread a Pratchett novel (he had very few duds until the Alzheimers really got its teeth into him).

After that/those I'm dithering between SS/GB by Deighton and some other re-read.

Reading now: - Hyperion by Dan Simmons (getting harder than two above, but enjoying it so far)

[1] https://bookshop.org/lists/elle-s-sci-fi-book-club

Also, "Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto"

So I started to reread Brandon Sanderson "Wax and Wayne" series again and was immediately relieved how easy it is to read.

(1) Roadside Picnic (the book which "Stalker" game is based from).

This was a page-turner! Fascinated by the science artifacts & effects (like gravitational glitches, frozen black sparks, etc)

(2) "Childhood's End" by Arthur C Clarke (who wrote 2001 Space Odyssey)

The sheer time scale of the story is impressive, and the technology is so interesting - especially for 1950s! There are some interesting time effects too (like an unborn child telepathically channeling information to a conversation in the past!)

I've personally neglected national (Portuguese) authors for about a decade now, so I've started focusing on that; I'm currently reading "Livro do Desassossego" by Fernando Pessoa.

For the few months before that, I'd focused on some classics:

- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

- 1984 by George Orwell

- The Village by Ivan Bunin

- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

- Siddharta by Hermann Hesse

I read quite a bit and love it; if only I could be paid to do it at my own pace and rhythm!

[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37004370-the-memory-p...

I'm also reading some less highbrow, yet highly entertaining novels that I'm obsessed with. I'm currently on book 16 in in Lindsey Davis' Falco series[0], which are murder mysteries set in Ancient Rome. I've been enjoying them non-stop ever since HN user "vintagedave" recommended[1] them around 4 months ago.

[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/series/42173-marcus-didius-falco

[1]: https://smackernews.com/item/48323766 HN

I'm gonna recommend an author I never saw over here and that I found interesting.

Peter Kingsley. He's an academic who studied classical Greek philosophers and what he calls "the origins of western civilization" and he's also a mystic.

While reading him sometimes I think he may be mad, and at other times I think that his explanations make a lot of sense. His central idea (or what I got from him) is that at the origin of western civilization and its fundamentals there were mystics, not intellectuals. He includes among these mystics Parmenides and Empedocles. Then intellectuals gained popularity and took control of the discourse and diminished and ridiculed the real role of Parmenides and Empedocles and their teachings.

As a starting point, his shortest book "In the dark places of wisdom" is a very good introduction of his ideas and would allow a reader to know if he wants to read more or not. As a second book I think that "Reality" is a good choice.

It was quite an engaging read, and lead to a series. You'll learn lots about the infrastructure of civilization along the way.

It started off promising, with some hints about monte carlo methods implemented in spreadsheets, but kind of detours into statistics basics, layman summaries of the author's prior scholarly work, and various business consulting anecdotes. I did not, for example, expect to read a chapter on the FASB-II's flaws regarding options pricing. And a few are downright concerning a decade later. I would not, for example, brag about advising Wells Fargo executives on their employee incentive programs after the cross-selling scandal came to light.

The final chapters, which I have not yet gotten to, supposedly cover the solution to the flaw of averages. Given the book is 15 years old, I'm expecting it to be pretty dated implementation wise, but I might be able to apply it to Prometheus histograms or t-digests. And I've learned a few things, like Jensen's inequality, and found a few sheets demoing a sampling approach.

Fantastic book and look into Death and what comes after, well, at least for your corpse.

My reading list is ahead of Halloween, so trying to plow through all of these

https://robheffern.palaich.net/booklists/halloween/

Let me know what you think and if you have recommendations or criticisms!

https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/player...

I'm also reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, though I'm on a bit of a break after the third book. I'd like to continue soon.

If I'm in the mood for neither of those, I read the Mushoku Tensei light novels.

Recent completions:

- The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick. I found it well written, but ultimately lacking in something - I kind of wanted the other boot to drop at the end.

- Poor Charlie's Almanack. Stripe Press published this collection of Charlie Munger's speeches and I've found I broadly agree with him on a ton of stuff and am slightly excited by some of his ideas that are new to me.

I'm about to have some time off recovering from a planned medical procedure and expect to have a mix of sci-fi, good quality non-fiction and at least one heavy "literary" book. I'm a big fan of Borges, so I might reread some of that work, or maybe pick up some adjacent/similar authors like Calvino too.

I recently read another book (Autobiography of a Yogi) that included an excerpt from this book, and it piqued my curiosity into Gandhi’s struggles in India. So far I’ve found it different than other biographies I’ve read because the author is self-critical and reflective which helps in understanding him as a person and his actions.

I've also picked up his Revanche series which is apparently in the same greater universe though perhaps not literally the same world, involving a fantasy version of papal intrigue, I'm only two chapters into the first book. Apparently all the series do cross over at some point, so we'll see how well he sticks the landing.

It’s about the stock market crash of 1929, and done in way that leaves no stone unturned. the book could be thought of as an obsessive pursuit of financial journalism in order to truly understand every domino that fell and lead to the crash - and not just the high level story.

I’m only about a quarter of the way through, but it’s a great read!

https://www.georgesaines.com/blog/2026/9/24/the-best-25-book...

People complain about how it's written, but it's nevertheless an interesting exploration of the parallels between natural ecosystems and human economies. As someone with no particular interest or background in economics (and who hasn't read anything else by Jane Jacobs), I find it a fascinating and easy read.

Anyway it was an emotional read. I’m surprised I had never encountered the book before, since “alternate choices affecting how your life turns out” is a concept I’ve always been into. But on the other hand this one would not have been nearly as powerful to me earlier in my life. Me being the same age (or close enough) to the main character at the start is what does it, of course.

So, recommended, especially if you’re in your early-mid 40s.

As to the story: to protect herself and her nephew from a local lord with an ugly grudge, a courier gets sucked into helping an obnoxious prince take a dangerous route to bypass an avalanche and deal with an urgent, secret mission. The mission gets complicated when said prince ends up possessed by a haunt from ancient ruins; and of course, the courier has her own secret to keep...

He knew he was right 800+ pages

Framley Parsonage 700+

Eustace Diamonds 800+

And currently reading:

The small house at Allington 800+

Now, why did I list the pages? Because I have ADHD and it's very hard for me to read even 100 pages. So that should say sth about the quality of writing Trollope has.

I have reviewed them on my blog (link on HN profile). But I will mention here:

Forget Dickens, and any other 18-to-19th century writer from Britain. Trollope is far more intelligent, his prose elegant like well-written code, his style inimitable yet persistent, his works useful but also entertaining and usually hilarious.

According to WKPD:

"It (The small house at Allington) enjoyed a revival in popularity in the early 1990s when the British prime minister, John Major, declared it his favourite book."

Also of interest:

Wilson, Jennifer Preston (2012). “On Honour and Consequences: The Duel in Trollope’s The Small House at Allington.” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 43: 169–186.

I'm not stellar at this yet, trying to juggle three turns into progressing two fairly quickly with the third much slower...

Clive Barker, Books of Blood - Currently in volume three. I've always found horror to require, like fantasy, a concentrated effort on my part as a reader to sustain suspension of disbelief. But these are great fun even if that's difficult sometimes.

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We - With sci-fi for whatever reason I do not suffer from the suspension-of-disbelief problem, the worldbuilding is much easier to immerse myself in. (Before this I was reading Roadside Picnic which was extremely good)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago - The slow one, still very interesting, nonfiction is uncommon for me

nearing the end. i've found it a bit complicated to follow in some spots (there are several 'main' protagonists and it switches between them without much warning or introduction) but overall it's scratched the fantasy itch.

(i suppose it's actually 3 books, but i have the omnibus version)

I'm reading Deadly Quicksilver Lies, right now.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/series/49491-garrett-files

Currently reading and enjoying: Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel.

Next to Read: Hollywood, Ending by John Green.

Deep Work by Cal Newport - Going through this book to help my focus, especially in the super-connected world we find ourselves in.

Every Tool's a Hammer by Adam Savage - Huge fan of Adam Savage and it is fun reading stories about him establishing himself and his views on making.

I'm also planning a reread of "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" by Neal Stephenson as his references to greater and greater resources being used for supplying computer power seems dangerously relevant to our current data center arms race our world is watching.

Ask HN: What Are You Reading? - https://smackernews.com/item/45283087 HN - Sept 2025 (42 comments)

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I've found all three very enjoyable and unexpectedly applicable to real life for being philosophical texts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_J%C3%BCnger

Austin worked for British Intelligence during World War II, running the Martians section and helping assess possible invasion sites for D-Day. After the war, as a philosopher of language, he helped bring ideas such as performative utterances and speech acts into the discussion.

A fascinating overlap between intelligence work and philosophy of language.

And because the Brewers are in the playoffs, "Catcher in the Wry" by Bob Uecker. Despite being a Cleveland fan, I have to admit the book is amazingly fun. Uecker was Uecker long before he became everybody's favorite baseball storyteller, and he was the Cleveland announcer in Major League.

Highlights from the past year or two:

Revelator by Daryl Gregory - Appalachian weird fiction with a tinge of cosmic horror.

The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias - Tragic story about the cartel underworld plus magic realism.

The Expanse (all of them) by James S A Corey (pen name for two writers IRL) - Everyone probably knows this one. Books were better than the show in many ways the the prose quality was pleasantly good. Fun read.

Tomato Red by Daniel Woodrell - One of the best openings I have ever read and I’ll leave it at that.

I like to read a wide variety of styles and genres, but the writing has to be good. I’ll drop a book if it’s got flat characters or clunky prose or cringey tropey stuff.

As someone who fled the desolation of the rust belt this book spoke to me and I found it credible and compelling. My book club spent 4 hours discussing this book.

Finished Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia yesterday, and also have been reading Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee mysteries - currently on The Haunted Monastery.

I'm halfway through and is quite interesting and enjoyable. behind the scenes documentary view into his life, academic period, pre-DeepMind, forming DeepMind, raising capital, working on various projects like the Atari games, the AlphaGo period (currently immersed in). Definitely recommend

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/241434373-the-infinit...

Just started On The Equality of All Things by Carlo Rovelli and Holy the firm by Annie Dillard

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen. (Much more disjointed than the film, but a quick read.)

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

On audiobook (I know, not technically reading):

Garth Marenghi's horror trilogy (Matthew Holness is one of the best narrators I've heard.)

On Kindle:

Cut Throat: the Vicious World of Rod Maclean by Wayne Thallon (I don't believe the half of it, but I know many of the locations discussed in it. I seem to find true crime my light reading these days)

An Angel at my Table by Janet Frame

The Summer Son by Craig Lancaster

Recently finished:

Sky Above, Great Wind by Kazuaki Tanahashi

Jew(ish) by Matt Greene

The House that Evolves by Pauline Hunter

The Inheritors by William Golding (made much less of an impact than the last time I read it.)

As I was reading the account of the assault on Omaha and Utah beaches, a lot of the stories reminded me of the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan. Eventually the similarities got so great that I looked it up and, sure enough, the author of the script of SPR based those scenes on this book.

Every single vignette of horror which you see in that film really happened. If anything I think the film under-exaggerated the events unfortunately. I don't think I can watch that film the same way again.

Its a pretty good history of the X-48 program.

Edit: also reading the "The Anduril Thesis" in parallel.

About to start her Biological War.

https://www.goodreads.com/series/42766-quadrail

I'd be re-reading Tolkien's _Old English Exodus_, but proofreading the typos got to be too much.

Apart from being an interesting book on fashion history, it also draws a lot of interesting connections & facts.

For example, that renowned Japanese magazine Popeye has this weird, almost construction catalog structure because it was inspired by... "The Whole Earth Catalog."

Or how in post-war Japan western formal wear was a punk-like form of protest of teens against elderly.

The most impactful book I've read recently has been The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, which deals with a man in a reincarnation loop.

Since I was going through a bit of a reincarnation phase I also quite enjoyed Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore, although it's a bit jumpy and all over place.

[0]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-emergency-with-geo...

Also, "Heaven on Earh", by Emma Wells, about nine or ten Gothic Cathedrals (mostly the history of their building and preservation). A bit too plain for my taste but includes interesting facts and anecdotes.

Finished recently:

-Flowers for Algernon, which I liked a lot.

-Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, so beautiful and surprising.

-The Great Gatsby, which I had not read yet and which I have loved reading.

It's not for the faint of heart, it's relatively difficult, but it's very satisfying so far. You know the feeling when it's maybe an autumn evening and some blue light comes throught the window, hits the curtains a certain way and the shadows remind you of something from your childhood that you thought you had forgotten forever? Well, it's like this, on steroids.

Just finished Jill Lepore's "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State" -- a history of the popular fascination (esp. among idealistic tech types) for ending human-based governance and replacing it with computer automation (esp. via AI). I appreciated her coverage of the rise more than her case for the fall.

Both books are largely about how the psychological defense mechanisms a person uses play a large role in determining how successfully they adapt to and navigate life.

It's an autobiographical history which recounts the lives of the author, her mother, and her grandmother throughout an extremely transformational century in Chinese history.

I went into this knowing little to no Chinese history, and it has opened my eyes to this fascinating country. I hope to visit China for the first time in 2027. Before I go, I'm doing a deep dive into Chinese history. Open to recommendations on what to read next!

Non-fiction: Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh.

Previous fiction: Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. Loved Ender's Game when I was younger, but for some reason never picked this up. It's brilliant, even better than Ender's.

Previous non-fiction: Endurance by Alfred Lansing. Well, I couldn't put it down. What a book.

From the title, it sounds very tedious, but I think it’s super cool. It chronicles the history of notebooking/journaling and the impact it’s had throughout time. Notebooks haven’t been been around and accessible for very long (relatively), and it’s interesting to hear about how somebody like Leonardo da Vinci used them to grow ideas. Makes you wonder how we possibly could’ve progressed without them.

I don't usually do fiction outside of classics (Tolkien, Dostoevsky, Huxley, etc), so I'm hopeful this will be interesting.

My wife just sent me a video of his: what I didn't know about central banking! TBH I'm shocked. Apparently we'd all be so much better if we had more local banks doing local lending to local businesses.

Explains a lot, actually, so I even mentioned him in an article I just wrote about my freelancing career. Now I know why the market has been increasingly impossible ...

Very good way to discover new authors, and the proximity of different styles (I hope) develops my conscious awareness of them.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1005670.50_Great_Shor...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HK6F7LJ2

Beyond that, I'm steadily working my way through Finders Keepers by Stephen King, and then I have a couple of John Scalzi books queued up.

That particular book bored me to death, but from the same author / series I recently read "Player of Games" and "Use of Weapons" and I can't recommend (both) enough.

Dungeon Crawler, I started the series recently but got bored mid 3rd book. It is quite more denser than the first 2, and it feels like never ending.

Extremely prescient ideas that feel like they were written today in a world with AI, but many of the essays are 15 years old or older!

I just finally finished “The Ferryman” (Justin Cronin), and “Vera, or Faith” (Shteyngart). I have “Reverse Centaur” (Doctorow) open and “Rainbow’s End” (Vernor Vinge) on deck.

A few of my favorite reads so far this year:

- The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones

- Angel Down, Daniel Kraus

- Piranesi, Susanna Clarke

- Between Two Fires, Christopher Buehlman

- The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow

- The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy

- Nettle & Bone, T. Kingfisher

- The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett

- The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead

Fiction: just finished The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott; about to read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (for the 2nd or 3rd time)

I just started reading The Blacktongue Thief (hardback) and The Name of the Wind (ebook). I've heard very good things about the latter, and although I'm aware that the series may never complete, I'm trying to not let that dissuade me.

https://archive.org/details/structuralfuncti0000arno/page/n8...

- Selected Stories - Anton Chekhov

- Death in Venice - Thomas Mann

- The Burnout Society - Byung-Chul Han

Currently I am reading an Austrian economics classic - Economics in one lesson by Henry Hazlitt

My goal is to read the history of ideas from Renaissance period till 2000s. Started with The Florentines by Paul Strathern. Then read The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick. Now at the enlightenment era. It has been eye opening to read about the life and times of some of the great minds like Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Locke and more.

Recently, I remembered a short SF story that I read back in high school and tracked it down, "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers".

I find new wave SF to be really playful and enjoyable to read, not to mention that the experimentation with funky themes and formatting adds a lot of novelty. The above Japanese title is a nice collection of late era stories in this genre.

I am fed up of this "you should be fast with AI" and this book explains how your can really improve the global performance.

Not super complex. It is written so even management should understand it. But it makes you think about your organización.

Like the Ferrari paradox: give everybody in the city a Ferrari and the traffic won't improve or even be worse. The same with AI

* Fun - Vince Fynn's "Mitch Rapp" Series - a bit dated, but if you like Tom Clancy it's got a similar vibe.

* Beautiful/Thought Provoking - Things In Nature Merely Grow, by Yiyun Li

scifi - the murderbot diaries, old man's war.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/82104

It started slow (booting) but I'm enjoying the books (currently on #3), the universe-building and the length (10 books) of it.

The book is called “The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993”.

After this, I have The Gales of November by John Bacon and then The Power Broker by Robert Caro.

Here's a few of the ones I've read and enjoyed:

“The Jigsaw Man” by Larry Niven

“The Night That All Time Broke Out” by Brian W. Aldiss

“A Toy for Juliette” by Robert Bloch (although I was surprisingly not a fan of Harlan's continuation)

“The Man Who Went to the Moon — Twice” by Howard Rodman

“Flies” by Robert Silverberg

Master Alvin by Orson Scott Card Kinda impressed that he finished the series after 30 years. GRR Martin loses another excuse.

Just started : Catch the Devil by Pamela Colloff, true crime about a con artist in Florida who traded overheard (probably fabricated) jailhouse confessions for a seemingly endless chain of get out of jail free cards.

It's a fascinating read on how loose the ethics were when experimenting with African Americans back then.

This book also makes me wonder about the current practices, which we do "normally", that the future scientists will consider downright crazy.

I have grown playing MMORPG's and this one brings the nostalgia vibes without investing the time into grinding for gear.

These two feel especially relevant:

Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered - E.F. Schumacher

Tools for Conviviality - Ivan Illich

and

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - John Koenig

Try Charles Stross's Accelerando and the Laundry Files series if you need good sci-fi. Foundryside and Empress of Forever are also decent. If you want fantasy, The Name of The Wind and Discworld are classics.

I'm going to read The Nerd Reich by Gil Duran next because that seems rather pertinent to the modern time. I haven't really looked at reviews and am going in blind.

Rereading the Lies of Locke Lamure. If only the sequel were half as good as it...

I have a long-ish commute at the moment with some opportunities to read on the train, so I’ve been reading more. Been knocking out some of the books on my shelf.

Full of lovely lines such as “I hear they’re building a telegraph line from Maine to Texas. Have they stopped to ask, does Texas have anything to say to Maine?”

Both in Italian, both masterpieces of contemporary sci-fi. Separazioni might need another pass of editing, but it's strikingly good nonetheless.

I'm also reading Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne by David Gaider, the original writer of Dragon Age.

Nettle and Bone I really enjoyed

Some desperate glory also enjoyed

East of Eden very meaty if you want an epic

- Hiroshima

- The Doomsday Machine

- Command and Control

Highly recommended if you’re feeling too happy and full of faith in humanity.

Katabasis by RF Kuang - magicians from Oxford go to hell on purpose

And, meatier

The language of the night, essays by Ursula Le Guin

Great read on tyranny and it's adverse effects. Very relevant to what's happening in the world day.

https://archive.org/details/taxationthepeopl033026mbp

It's from 1924 and US centric, old new ideas in there.

(re-reading) Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett

(re-reading) Invitation to Forth by Harry Katzan Jr

(reading to my son) Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl, Der Kleine Peter in der Katzenstadt, An Caisteal fòn Mhuir.

Got quite a lot going on at the moment, really, in terms of books.

The description of the actual world of shamanism leaves me feeling massively disillusioned. McKenna et al. did us a disservice by shaping the western popcultural idea of what indigenous shamanism is.

An indepth history of Stuxnet. A bit long but recommended. You can not find any other book which goes this much in describing a mallware (no code).

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold - This has been on my to-read list for years. Pretty great so far.

* That All Shall Be Saved by David Bentley Hart

* Almost Transparent Blue by Ryū Murakami

* The Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cormwell

* The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (rereading after his recent passing)

The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (How to Think About Artificial Intelligence-Before It's Too Late) By Cory Doctorow

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...

Just finished "there is no antimemetics division" an absolutely astounding read

It explores why we love metrics in games, but hate them at work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Trilogy

Playing Off the Rail: A Pool Hustler's Journey by David McCumber (1996) - hustling in the golden era of pool in the usa

Fascinating (to me) book, basically setting up the question, is human endurance limiting factor physical or psychological …

God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre by Richard Grant about hiking through cartel-run Mexico alone

- Google News and the occasional full article

- Email

- Slack

- ChatGPT/ Codex responses

- Road signs

- Various things in various mobile apps I use

- Websites

- Movie/Show subtitles

Off the top of my head, that accounts for most of the things I read on a weekly basis.

No time for books.

Currently reading and recommending - Endurance by Alfred Lansing. Sir Earnest Shackleton’s attempt to cross the Antarctic.

I normally read a lot of nonfiction and history and am trying to make a point to read more fiction this year.

Fiction(before bed): Quicksilver Neal Stephenson

Audio(during chores): Dungeon Crawler Carl(Up to book 6)

Next up:

Non-Fiction: Ten things I wish I knew about raising boys, Outdoor kids in an indoor world, Intentional(Chris Bailey)

Fiction: The rest of the Baroque Cycle, then moving onto The Laundry Files by Charles Stross, then the rest of Discworld

Audio: The rest of DCC then I'm going to switch to podcasts for a while nothing else planned after this right now.

Mostly seeking design tips for a vacuum tolerant micro-positioning stage project. =3

Tells individual stories of hedge funds and their founders such as Simmon, Tudor-Jones, Soros and more

Great lessons in how each thought about markets, how they lost and made money

I will admit, I needed the spoiler afterwards to untangle it.

The American by Martin Booth

pretty much you've to sell dollars to high up decision makers. and promise ROI. pretty radical.

just have to put what I have been reading in practice.

Dungeon Crawler Card - Not for me but I might give it another chance

Bukowski - Post Office - Worth reading, Gen-Z might get triggered

So far read about 20%, seems like a lovely theory tying together a lot about how the mind works.

I guess it will take me years to have reason of both.

I just want it do it right, for my child.

* Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer -- post-apoc dystopian, somewhat cozy, told from a robot's perspective (who is joined by a companion cyborg dog)

* Blacktongue Thief by Chris Buehlman -- witty and snarky fantasy, solid character development and world building; and, if you like it, book 2 in the series (book 3 if you count a prequel) comes out soon

* Mortedant's Peril -- Fantasy mystery in a world where magic allows the "detectives" to touch the dead and sense their final thoughts/words; in that world, someone learns a dark secret from a victim...

* Trade of Blood -- Another fantasy mystery that is exceptionally well told; it's Book 3 in a series so I'd start with Tainted Cup if you haven't read that already

* The Infinite State -- new SciFi by Richard Swan (usually a fantasy author); a universe where ultra wealthy can establish colony planets, someone attempts to start a democracy.

I’m slowly rereading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.

I am perpetually rereading the works of Richard Rorty.

Weaveworld, by Clive Barker. my 2nd read

Surface Detail, by Ian M. Banks

devtest reads of my WIP book on computer performance

Non-fiction: 21st Century Monetary Policy

https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/

That book led me to Quantum Computing for Everyone. It's good so far, but more work than expected to follow along being that I'm dumb.

Since the question is what are you reading (not what have you read): Ant-Kind by Charlie Kaufman. It's too soon to say if it's good or not, but it has made me laugh out loud several times. I'm about 80 pages in, and it's only just now started to open up into Kaufman's recursive, meta story telling that makes his film stuff so cool.

Highly recommend the game for anyone who liked Dark or Primer (or any other fiction that features stable time loops).

I’m specifically talking about the New Testament.

I’m currently reading Hebrews 6.

Oh hell, what truly great novel. It’s a long collection of people’s inner monologues, and it’s confusing as hell at first that every Russian has at least three names. But so good.

Before this: The Subtle Art Of Folding Space… biggest pile of shit I’ve read in years. Fuck. So stupid. If you made me pick between reading it again and a Kristin Hannah… I’d just go get my wine glass and basic bitch sweatpants now. It was supposed to be “modern sci fi” it was actually a food snob that seems like they’re in a cult and trying subtly to tell you how everyone else is so fucking stupid except the smart people that choose to be mentally superior to everyone else. Bad bad bad.

Highly recommended if you want to challenge your view of the world.

- Most Jewish victims of the Holocaust died by gunshot in the occupied USSR

- In March 1942, 80% of Holocaust victims were still alive and by February 1943 80% were dead.

- Per capita incomes were equal in the first and last years of the British Raj

- Indian grain exports increased in the 1880s and 90s and there were 3(?) different famines at that time

rattling around in my head in the same part that holds on to "Pakistan has never had a PM finish a 5 year term," "The Lions, Falcons, and Bills (non-exhaustive) have never won a Super Bowl," "There are no surviving contemperaneous attestations of Hamilcar and Hannibal Barca" and "the first drummer of the Beatles was called Pete Best and made an album called Best of the Beatles"

1. "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny

At work I'm currently trying to read SF light novels from the turn of the millennium. I finished Murasaki no Qualia some time ago, and it's just as amazing as I remember the manga being when I read it as a teen. Right now I'm reading Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu. Sadly very few of these are translated. The Last and First Idol story collection is also a good read if you're interested in this genre.

Not sure if this one qualifies as more meaty :)

I just finished 'All Quiet on the Western Front' - reading with https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicBookClub/. Really great book, though a bit heavy content - ww1 from a german soldier's pov, gets you to feel the mindnumbing senselessness and horror - highly recommend it if your tastes run that way.

Also reading Iliad, the Fagles translation, through https://catherineproject.org/ about a third of way through right now and we'll also be reading the Emily Wilson translation later this year. It's been fun discussing it with people. This translation has been a easy read, far easier than I expected. And the discussions make it thought-provoking. For meaty, this might work.

Also reading 'When Things Fall Apart' by Pema Chodron. This is slow going, thoughtful. I read a few pages every few days, never more than a chapter at a time. I suppose it's all variants of being fully in the present moment to some extent. And I think I might re-read it after I finish. It did get me thinking again about loving-kindness and tonglen. In this vein, 'Taming the Tiger Within' was also great - short and sweet, simple language but still thought-provoking.

Earlier this year I read 'The Road' which I loved, and highly recommend. Dystopian with language to match. On the fantasy side the 'Ana & Din' novels by Robert Jackson Bennett, think sherlock holmes but in a fantasy setting and magic for science. I liked the earlier ones in the series better or maybe I just read too many of them in a short period. Either works for a good read though I think Ana & Din might be easier.

Other slightly off the beaten path fiction recommendations would be 'Eagle in the Snow' - set in Roman times about an officer holding the line against attacking german forces, starts a bit rocky and I was lost a bit and found it hard to understand initially but totally loved it as it progressed. I came to it from a fivebooks recommendation. Also, CJ Sansom's shardlake series, another fivebooks recommendation I think. This is about a hunchback lawyer investigating something each time. I love how it gets us into the time period and the personalities involved.

Now that I'm done with the book for classicbookclub, I might start 'A Tale of Two Cities'

* Dead Hand

* Atomic Accidents

* Hiroshima

* Command and Control

I didn't really get this book the first time through.

- "On Writing Well" by Zinsser

will be giving my trainee this book too, and hoping we can discuss parts of the book we agree and don't agree with.

Just finished reading: Middlemarch by George Eliot

When I was young, thought that Raskolnikov was an example of an intelligent, moral person who was struggling with higher concepts which led him to murder. And moreover back then, thought he was a overall a good protagnist who was just in an impossible situation.

Now, realized the novel is more about psychology and how people who are overall good and others who are overall bad make choices, and then they have to mentally deal with these decisions. Yeah, think Dostoevsky is saying Raskolnikov was actually very misguided in the reasoning behind his murders. Eventhough his intentions were in many respects actually good, they were egotistically and overly idealistic. Eventually, Raskonikov realized he had deluded himself and that he was hyperinflating his own merits and value as a person over other people. And also, at a more basically level, he struggled with his conscience on whether to avoid being caught, commit suicide or turn himself in. He himself didn't believe he was an immoral person, and when he realized he had deluded himself, he struggled in the end on what course of action to take.

One downside of the book is by today's standards, it is very long-winded and often take several pages to go through something that would take a single page by many writers today. But think this also makes it more realistic, because most people in actual life don't get to the point that quickly. Really fascinating.

I'm not a doomer, but I'm trying to understand the perspective. Up to chapter 10, I'm still not convinced. There's too much hand-waving around what will happen. It's like: 1. AI smarter than us 2. ??? 3. We're dead. What happens in 2.?

I just got past the "extinction scenario" and I'm wildly unconvinced. I agree that AI can theoretically create a bioweapon. I'm unconvinced that an AI can hide its ability to RSI, find money to run its weights on a random GPU farm, train itself to be smarter _outside_ a lab with no human input, then somehow manipulate people to give it supplies to build a bioweapon which it uses to kill us all. I to believe that Yudkowsky was good at fanfiction; this senario did not demonstrate that. My number 1 question: why do they think an RSI capable model would be first developed OUTSIDE a frontier lab? The labs have more compute, more data, more human brains working on the problem. Also thousands of variations of that same model that escaped. The escaping model somehow acquires the millions of dollars it takes to run training to somehow RSI itself into infinity then decides to kill us all, all before the frontier labs manage to achieve RSI?

Come on.

Anyway. Finishing the book for completeness, but massively underwhelmed.

Also started "Sutskever's list" by Richard Heimann, which goes into the history of the current AI paradigm "one paper at a time". It's written for a curious audience : people who can vaguely understand the concepts, but not go into details. That means that I kinda "get" some chapters because I already read about the topics, and I'm completely stumped by some. But the "insider baseball" history is illuminating sometimes.

- From Third World to First

Last finished: Human Use of Human Beings

Always.

Becky Chambers, the long way to a small angry planet (very good)

Asimov, Second foundation (just finished, not as good as Foundation but good still)

Maybe Knut Hansun, The last joy (Nazi sympathizer, might just put the book down - and book not blowing my mind)

Edit0: writing this and seeing Hansun was a Nazi collaborator - putting the book down

Chips wars, for me as a dev without a strong hardware background is a fascinating read into the history of Silicon Valley, from the 50s right up to nvidia and Taiwan semiconductor.

Starting today: “In the shadow of man”.

The economy of anonymity by Amaya

Artificial Intimacy by Sherry Turkle, just out

Other books I’ve enjoyed recently:

The Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft - I read Endurance by Alfred Lansing last year so it was fun having a real Antarctic adventure in my mind while reading it.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy - I actually started this a couple of years ago and quit part way through deciding I couldn’t put myself through it anymore. I kept thinking about it though, until I finally picked it back up and finished it this summer. Horrifying, but quite a masterpiece.

If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky - I was about a year late to the party on this, but it still holds up. I would recommend it.

The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Malaby - Excellent! Fascinating seeing a glimpse inside of the companies currently eating the world.

...but this year I set myself the goal of reading 10 books. One of the things that has really helped, is giving myself permission to quit a book if I am not enjoying it after the first 50 pages, or if it's too much of a struggle.

Also having 2 books on the go at the same time has been helpful too.

I am currnetly reading:

+ The Eloquence of the Sardine - Bill Francis

+ What about you doing with your life - J. Krishnmurti (recommended by Naval)

I am enjoying the first, learning lots of interesting facts about fish and the ocean but the second is quite slow and difficult and I might give up soon.

There was an article on HN a month or two ago about how some books drive people to the kind of madness that would make them do a degree in literature. This is probably the one for me. Excited to read it again in 5 years and see it differently again.

My friends have begun saying they are reading books when they listen to them.

It enrages me.

I had just finished the first "Dungeon Crawler Carl" and found it harmless and not worth the money. Frankly I'm a little surprised its a best seller. Do the later books get any better?

Hyperion is a first-time read and as I near the end I know I'll seek out the next one.

Also still working through Civilization and Capitalism by Fernand Braudel.

What I finished recently and was really surprised by: Der Geisterbanner by Karl Friedrich Kahlert from 1792.

I'm currently reading More Fearless Change by Manns & Rising. I've always enjoyed being a change agent, and I would've been more effective if I'd read this book a decade ago.

Next up, I plan to read Facilitating Software Architecture by Harmel-Law.

Oh, and every day or two I read aloud a chapter of Magic and Meaning Expanded by Burger & Neale to my wife. We're both magicians and big fans of Eugene Burger's work.

- Middlemarch

Something from every food group there.

https://what-are-you-reading-september-2026.aljosa-asanovic....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purge_(novel)

"The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst" - This story is about the first round-the-world solo yacht race, and the one contestant who died at sea. His story is really strange - an anti-hero tragedy with a touch of mental illness. The author does a great job bringing the reader on this descent into madness.

"Protocols" - Andrew Huberman's recent book. Like his podcast, it's full of solid advice backed by published science - but also with some repetitive filler and product name drops. The sections on exercise and diet were not very informative to me, mainly because I've already incorporated most of that into my life already. The sections on light exposure and its relationship to sleep, melatonin and cortisol is the most fascinating new-to-me info. I've started morning/evening walking without my sunglasses to get those sweet sweet photons.

I'm now working my way through "I Am Not A Robot: My Year Using AI To Do (Almost) Everything" by Joanna Stern.

https://joannastern.com/

- The Left Hand of Darkness

- The Nerd Reich

- What Happened to Liberal Democracy?

A beautifully written travelogue/nature book/eco activist screed that tours the world visiting rivers and the people engaged in living with and protecting them. Fascinating, hopeful, heartbreaking and lyrical. Really enjoying it (evidently)!

absolutely love this. I never could imagine this style of narration. One of the best books "about Stalin era" i read.

- End Times Fascism, And the Fight for the Living World (Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor)

- The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity (Tim Wu)

https://a.co/d/08zSx2LD

DCC is strangely hypocritical - a massive commercial success where we the readers revel-wallow in the graphic suffering of the fictive protagonists/victims, and author & co are making truckloads of profits, precisely on the kinds of sheenanigans the books on the surface critisize :-). It is also a bit ironic, that the books/Carl critisize fascism, while at the same time, Carl is on a kind of one-man fascist/tyrant purging the existing elite, with summary and graphic executions. Sigh :-)

I'm not reading anything at the moment since I'm taking a break and watching season one of Deadwood and also re-watching season one of Boston Legal.

But when I'm done, I plan to re-read "The Cold War A Very Short Introduction" by Robert J. McMahon. I read it about five years ago and it's time to read it again.

Having said that, I can't pass on this opportunity to share the books I've read (some are re-reads) thus far this year that I recommend. I'll just list them while saying that they all come highly recommended by me.

In the famous words of Frank Zappa - So many books, so little time.

1. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris

2. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris

3. Lying by Sam Harris

4. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

5. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

6. Cosmos by Carl Sagan.

7. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

8. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

9. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

10. Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

11. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J. K. Rowling

12. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling

13. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

14. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

15. Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan

16. Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide to Atheism by Richard Dawkins

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168840-the-arab-of-the...

- https://www.goodreads.com/series/329945-sapiens-a-graphic-hi...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/769712.Palestine

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/196618871-1177-b-c

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203767306-the-hidden-lif...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/207003952-capital-ideolo...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9844623-feynman

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23167775-the-age-of-self...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38589785-to-kill-a-mocki...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208512484-the-mythmakers

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61783727-the-bomb

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50159458-kent-state

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12959045-my-friend-dahme...

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32951507-the-park-bench

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6493321-logicomix

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218569864-insectopolis

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48638303-billionaires

Currently I'm reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/210384823-shroud

- Fiction: Pure entertainment, with no shame, although I do enjoy working in a mix of slop and more high-brow works. I generally go through one of these every 5-10 days.

- Non-fiction: Big, meaty, interesting book. These take me forever to finish but I really enjoy them. I get through like 100 pages in a good month.

- Children’s: I have been reading to my son, which is entirely for me as he’s only ~5mo old. But I have a stack of lovely children’s classics that I have greatly enjoyed going through.

Here’s what I’m currently reading and some recommendations on previous stuff I’ve read.

Fiction

Right now I’m finishing up The Kremlin’s Candidate. Not great, the series has been going a bit downhill. Some recent hits:

- The Dog Stars (Heller): Awful movie, incredible book. Highly recommended.

- True Grit (Portis): For everyone recommending Lonesome Dove, definitely get a copy of True Grit. A fantastically fun masterpiece. A real achievement.

- The Force (Winslow): The first 80 pages are deep cringe but it picks up into a really compelling and fast crime novel. Pulp for sure but fun.

- All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy): Incredible book. I could read it 100 times.

Nonfiction

- The Politics of Heroin (McCoy): Dense but very very good. First hand reporting of the CIA’s role in the global drug trade and how it has, to a surprising degree, shaped the modern world.

Children’s

- The Last Unicorn (Beagle): Surprisingly nice. Some rough edges but I’m enjoying it. If my son was able to understand more than just that he’s spending time with me and that I’m making comforting noises I think he’s enjoy it.

- The Wind in the Willows (Grahame): Stop everything you’re doing and go read this. Aloud, your kids if you have them but as a treat to yourself if you don’t. What a joy this is.

————

Some things I haven’t read that are on the shelf thaf I really want to dig in to:

- Challenger: History of the tragic NASA accident.

- First Casualty: Inside the CIA’s paramilitary ops and the early days of the Afghanistan war.

- The Great Game: Historic book on the power struggles of the British and Russian empire in Afghanistan.

- Lonesome Dove: I love westerns, I have this whole series on the shelf, and am kind of just waiting and keeping it in my back pocket for a rainy day.

- Power of the Dog series: I just know I’m going to love this. Cartel/DEA saga spanning decades.

- McCloskey’s CIA series: It’s slop, and the tradecraft is dated to the point that what is happening in the field now is completely unrecognizable from the dead drops and SDRs and such of the cold war, but… it’s fun!

* Iain M. Banks is a bad writer. His books are predictable. You know the goodies (1990s neoliberals with space helmets) are gonna win. There's no moral uncertainty and not even really any jeopardy.

* I'm seeing an alarming amount of Dungeon Crawler Carl. Look, if you don't want to read, just don't read! There's no point reading rubbish. Just play a computer game or pick your nose or something. There's a thousand years of literature out there. Some of it is really good.

* Neil Gaiman. American Gods was so unbearable I couldn't finish it. How can any decent person like this vain, pompous writer?

I am judging typical hn-er tastes, sorry, but it's as if I thought PHP was the best programming language or something. No. It is not.

Genre is fine! There's great SF and fantasy. But bad writing is bad writing. Genre is not an excuse.

On the non fiction side, I'm slowly chipping away at Joe Studwell's book How Asia Works, about East Asian development. In the first section of the book, the author argues that the foundation for successful development was boosting agricultural output -- instead of spending precious foreign currency on food imports, surplus agricultural output can be exported & intensive farming provides a way to soak up and use labour before other industries develop.

Studwell also argues for the importance of land reform in boosting agricultural output -- appropriating land from wealthy landlords & redistributing it to landless peasants & tenants. This happened in both socialist & capitalist societies. There was a huge demand for land reform from landless peasants. I was completely ignorant of this chunk of history & found it fascinating. Agricultural output increases on a per hectare basis when farmers have the incentive to work hard - unlike if they're day labourers or share croppers paying much of their output as rent. Landlords don't have an incentive to increase output as its easier for them to earn money from renting out their land & lending money. Studwell gives examples of small farmer-owned farms being much more productive than colonial plantation style farming. Developmental success stories (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) were those where governments supported their huge newly created markets of tiny landowner-farmers with subsidised fertiliser inputs, better varieties of crops etc & where peasants & tenants got a seat at the table to influence the land redistribution process. There are also stories of failures where wealthy elites got control of the land reform process & rendered it largely ineffective (the Philippines).