Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46391572

by kwar13 • 7 months ago

340 448 7 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

I mostly read newspapers and technical journals, but two books that I read that made an impression: "The Changing World Order" and "The Gulag Archipelago".

cjmcqueen• 7 months ago

Lots of news and articles, but also "The Craft", a history of Freemason's by John Dickie, was one of the more interesting books.

KineticLensman• 7 months ago

Frankenstein. Superb science fiction, very readable even though written 200 years ago. And Wuthering Heights, which strangely like Frankenstein, has a complex narrative structure and an unhinged, obsessive central character

spudlyo• 7 months ago

I read it this year too. I was surprised by the amount of heartfelt soliloquising the monster did, he was much more compelling than I expected. Victor of course was the real monster in the story, self obsessed, not taking responsibility for his actions, I found myself actively rooting against him.

pm3003• 7 months ago

- Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard, very entertaining.

- Lolita, it's mostly what you've read about it.

- a few short stories by Heinrich von Kleist.

cmiles74• 7 months ago

I mostly read fiction but I made time for a couple of nonfiction books this year. On the fiction side I really enjoyed "Luminous" and "When We Where Real".

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_(novel)

- https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/When-We-Were-Real/Dar...

On the nonfiction side, I can recommend "Careless People" and "Apple in China".

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China

neuralkoi2• 7 months ago

"Apple in China" was pretty good! I can second that one. If you haven't checked it out, "Chip War" is also pretty good and along the same style. I'm reading it right now.

metadope• 7 months ago

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Careless People. The unexpected peek into the author's personal childhood and family ethos was really interesting. The look at Facebook from within was a cautionary tale.

I also liked I Am Not Your Enemy by Reality Winner.

tor825gl3• 7 months ago

I also thought it was very good.

Did a very good job of answering the question: why do (did) bright, ethical, motivated people want to work for a company like this?

jeremyscanvic• 7 months ago

I read Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno. Really unsettling but definitely worth reading.

troymc• 7 months ago

One of my favourite reads from this past year was Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven Strogatz. It's a wonderful review of the history of calculus, including intuitive explanations of the basics.

anovikov• 7 months ago

History of the Franks, by Gregory of Tours

paganel• 7 months ago

For those interested in the subject (and who can also read French) I also heartily recommend the most recent edition of Augustin Thierry's Récits des temps mérovingiens [1]. Of course that it has most probably long been surpassed when it comes to historic accuracy, after all it was written almost 200 years ago, but it is very interesting nonetheless for being one of the first books that really put the focus on the Merovingians from a historical perspective that was "scientific", for lack of a better word.

[1] https://www.fnac.com/a21142694/Thierry-Augustin-Recits-des-t...

coderatlarge• 7 months ago

if you do read french, proust’s “in search of lost time” (vol 1) is a lot more accessible and enjoyable than my high school teachers made it sound years and years ago. it even contains a depiction of what a learned engineer should be like.

kretaceous• 7 months ago

Getting into reading again this year after a long break.

The most memorable read of this year was "The Count of Monte Cristo" (1846) by Alexander Dumas .

It's one of the greatest stories ever told. It's ~1250 pages but I sped through it in 3 weeks even if I'm a slow reader.

Highly recommended!

I also read The Stranger by Camus and the two top Orwells which lived up to the hype.

motoboi• 7 months ago

The Count of Monte Cristo was published in serial form. Daily from 1844 to 1846.

That explains a lot the format, which tended to try to retain the audience.

Also, the author wrote in advance of the daily publication, but the book was written "live", answering to public perception and response. This is a reason why the book is so "good": the author had the chance to adjust the story based on data from sales and feedback from readers.

Of course Dumas was a great writer too, but this live writing, data based is probably why the book resonates so well with audiences.

So, as a joke, if you read count of monte cristo in 3 weeks, you did the equivalent of bing reading it.

This happens with soap operas too. 10 years ago, they lasted 1 year. They had an initial structure, the story, the characters, but responded in "real-time" to audience feedback.

For those willing to read the book, give yourself some time. Try to read it over a course of some years. Read a little, come back to it.

There are several famous books written in the same form, like Crime and Punishment or The Three Musketeers.

Oh, and also authors got payed by installment, so that explains the lenght lol

BloondAndDoom• 7 months ago

Loved the stranger, I read it for the first time this year too. I read plenty of sub culture (mostly modern; Irvine welsh etc) but the stranger was just so different than anything I’ve ever read. Like the language is so olan yet it works so well, and then you have this great finish, it’s a weird masterpiece.

DJBunnies• 7 months ago

Very much enjoyed the Hyperion Cantos series by Dan Simmons.

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

TheAceOfHearts2• 7 months ago

Spoilers, but the excerpt posted here [0] of Aenea was one of my favorite scenes from Hyperion Cantos. "Choose again" as a gentle reminder to reevaluate our beliefs and structures, and to really choose, not just go along with whatever. You can always choose again.

[0] https://raccaldin36.livejournal.com/1849917.html

secstate• 7 months ago

Oh man ... it's been years since I read this, but it all came flooding back reading that post. Brilliant. And interestingly, "Choose again" is shockingly similar to Steve Job's "Don't be trapped by dogma," philosophy.

liamconnell2• 7 months ago

I read the second two books this year and was unfortunately disappointed.

First two were so fun but I think I got hung up on some of the more clumsy stylistic parts of the Endymion books. I guess my “trust” in the author comes from the style and tropes they use, and if I they lose my trust none of the deeper parts resonate. Glad you enjoyed!

oleggromov• 7 months ago

Me too. It's phenomenal, especially the first book and the pilgrims' stories. Such a moving mix of religious mystics, science fiction and the dreaded AI. The second one builds up the tension and the last 2... are good.

eunoia• 7 months ago

Read the first two this year. Absolutely incredible and now some of my all time favorite sci-fi.

flopsamjetsam4• 7 months ago

I have read the first one many times. Such a great read, will have to tackle the rest of the series next year.

jaimefjorge3• 7 months ago

Such a good read.

reidrac4• 7 months ago

I find very difficult deciding about my all time favourites on anything, but the Hyperion books are pretty close to it.

Not sure about the Endymion ones.

mckirk• 7 months ago

For me, these books are in the rare category of 'wait I didn't know it was allowed to come up with a story _this good_'. I envy all those that have yet to read it for the first time.

EvanAnderson5• 7 months ago

One of the most eerie experiences in my life: I was just finishing the second-to-last book in the series and had a kidney stone. Talk about empathizing with a character...

georgeecollins2• 7 months ago

I love Hyperion! This year I read The Terror by Dan Simmons which is historical fiction but also really good!

kneel25• 7 months ago

I got really into Hemingway’s work, reading all the best ones, but my favourite being ‘A moveable feast’ his diary essentially released at the end of his life set when he was mid-twenties in 1920s Paris. Me being the same age, I was inspired enough to go there and retrace some of his steps.

nickcw• 7 months ago

My favourite SF book this year was "Translation State" by Ann Leckie. It is set in the Imperial Radch world so having read the Ancillary trilogy is useful but not essential.

I like it because it contains the strangest aliens (the Presger) that I have come across. They are as far from humans in costumes as you could get. What the Presger do (and their proxies in the Human world the Translators) is totally unguessable.

A fabulous hard SF read and a must if you read the Ancillary trilogy.

eleventen2• 7 months ago

I enjoyed Translation State so much. It thought that Leckie got lost in the depths of Octavia Butler’s extra weird shit (and Xenogensis) and cross bred it with the political novel style of the Ancillary trilogy, and the result was chefs kiss.

I feel comfortable recommending it even if you haven’t read any other Leckie.

Edit: if you haven’t read the Bloodchild anthology by Butler, give it a read. Some of the short stories will seem very familiar after Translation State, especially the alien parts.

asplake• 7 months ago

I enjoyed it too, but I was already a big fan of the Imperial Radch series. Does it work standalone also?

Edit: just to add that the audiobook is really well narrated

elric5• 7 months ago

I can warmly recommend anything written by Leckie. Her scifi is great. But her attempt at fantasy (The Raven Tower) is also most excellent.

blandflakes• 7 months ago

I still haven't managed to get around to her scifi (but plan to!); but can wholeheartedly endorse The Raven Tower.

elcapithanos• 7 months ago

My favourite by far was Adam Becker's More Everything Forever.

Special mention also goes to Taming Silicon Valley by Gary Marcus.

ThouYS• 7 months ago

I got deep into the stormlight archive by brandon sanderson. great escapism!

timeforcomputer2• 7 months ago

I still have to read Wind and Truth but I'm still waiting for the same paperback edition I have the other books in haha. Great series

alex-moon• 7 months ago

The History of Medieval Europe by Maurice Keen

Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli

The Brain: The Story of You by David Eagleman

I had a crack at reading the first Game of Thrones novel (I think it's just called A Game of Thrones) but my brain seems to be in non-fiction mode at the moment. I think I'm drawn to a kind of sweet spot halfway between "related to my everyday experience" and "removed from my everyday experience" - not sure I could read about programming or business at the moment, though I also haven't tried.

kyleblarson• 7 months ago

I reread The Secret History by Donna Tartt for the umpteenth time and it is still wonderful.

arvid-lind• 7 months ago

Not enough. Going to try to rein in some sustained attention in the new year.

- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

- Playground by Richard Powers

- Designing Data Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppman

I'm curious how much AI-generated stuff I read this year... likely at least a book's worth, but it would be more like one of those books with 365+ random deep dives into stuff that's not really relevant to my life.

aabiji• 7 months ago

The most interesting books I read this year were:

Acting class - I found this book surprisingly compelling. It made me reflect on my own search for connection and identity, and how easily it is to be misled and manipulated when you've got no one close.

Earthlings - The book's plot gets really horrific (don't let the cover fool you). However, it did make me think about social norms and taboos a little differently.

1984 - It was my first time reading the book, and man, looking around and seeing bits and pieces of the surveillance mentioned in the book in real life is kind of terrifying...

Grapes of Wrath - It's definitely the most heart-wrenching book I've ever read. Watching the Joad family get absolutely devastated by the monster that is unchecked capitalism is so sad :(

Skunk works - Really good book on the development of Lockheed's stealth planes. However, I did wish I got more technical details.

I would love to see some more book recommendations :)

nmora• 7 months ago

I read a decent amount of books but the ones that stood out are:

- Anatomy of the State (Murray N. Rothbard)

- Diaspora (Greg Egan)

- The Freeze-Frame Revolution (Peter Watts)

Mossy9• 7 months ago

Humble Bundle has spoiled me and my ebook library has grown by around a 100 books this year...

Tech book recommendations: 'Secure by Design', 'Designing Data-Intensive Applications', 'Building Secure and Reliable Systems' and 'Fundamentals of Software Architecture'.

For scifi: 'Murderbot Diaries' and 'The Expanse' - both are just great entertainment

kwar136• 7 months ago

I actually have a large backlog of books I got on HB. Time to go through it

kristopolous• 7 months ago

I was actually writing, been doing it full time for months. I've spent probably over 1,000 hours ...

Not trying to make any money, just feel compelled to do this.

A fiction story about how personal computers have dismantled society over 40 years... it takes place in 1983 and involves a vulnerable opportunistic time traveler who's getting more than he bargained for.

Here's some quotes to give you a feel:

"The smartphone is the electrical stunner in the slaughterhouse of society"

"You’ll be able to access any TV or radio station in real time, around the world, talk to people overseas in high resolution video with live translations for free and be bored by it"

"In the future the hermetic spaces of solitude will be breached as we build a global village. The private will become public and, ironically, the public will become private as the streets empty of experiences taken indoors, inside of bedrooms, beneath our screens of glowing grace."

It's intentionally meant to be ambitious, brutal and challenging. And hopefully insight will materialize from the dust of forgotten dreams.

If you are interested in reading it, just hit me up

weakfish3• 7 months ago

Interested. Sending an email

criddell3• 7 months ago

I gave Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations a go and gave up around half way. Maybe if I knew the historical context it would seem more profound?

I enjoyed Three Body Problem a lot more than I thought I would. That was probably the best book I read in 2025.

vtomole2• 7 months ago

Which version did you read? I read this one: https://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Penguin-Classics-Hardcove..., which provides a lot of context. Here are my thoughts on it: https://vtomole.com/blog/2025/12/14/aurelius

criddell3• 7 months ago

The Gregory Hays book.

bencornia• 7 months ago

I also read Meditations this year. Definitely not what I was expecting. It's not cohesive at all. My biggest takeaways were the inevitability of death and generally letting go of our sense of control.

elric5• 7 months ago

Expecting it to be "cohesive" seems like an odd thing, considering it's literally a bunch of musings & meditations which were taken from a man's private journal.

I've found many of the individual musings to be quite interesting. In particular the ones that relate to perception (my own biggest pitfall).

shmoe8• 7 months ago

Did you read the rest of the 3 body problem books? Some of the best scifi i've read in a looong time for sure.

criddell3• 7 months ago

No, not yet. I only recently found out there was more.

primaprashant• 7 months ago

Started making side projects as a developer this year and hope to start working on my own products full-time from next year. Two books I found useful for positioning the product:

- Obviously Awesome by April Dunford (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45166937-obviously-aweso...)

- Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/210137279-building-a-sto...)

kwar136• 7 months ago

Tx. I've been building a lot of projects as well. These seem interesting!

GrahamL• 7 months ago

This is so funny. I've read both these books and absolutely loved Obviously Awesome and could not stand StoryBrand.

Wrote reviews on both Obviously Awesome[0] and StoryBrand[1] for anyone interested.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5369411790 [1] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5686301930

rochansinha2• 7 months ago

How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg

Bhagvad Gita by Eknath Easwaran

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

How The World Really Works by Vaclav Smil

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

Chaos by James Gleick

Wind and Truth (Stormlight Archive #5) by Brandon Sanderson

The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle

The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

flopsamjetsam4• 7 months ago

Chaos by James Gleick

I read this quite a while ago, and can't remember it at all. What did you think of it?

The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

Loved this when I was a kid.

rochansinha2• 7 months ago

It’s a great introduction to chaos theory and emergent phenomena. Makes you look at the world in a different way!

quantpunk• 7 months ago

The Gleick book is a good quick introduction to complexity.

Introduction to the Theory of Complex Systems is an incredible second book on the subject but it wouldn't be fair to compare it to the Gleick book.

I enjoyed How The World Really Works also.

peterspath3• 7 months ago

Anything from Frederick Forsyth is good.

bronco21016• 7 months ago

Early in the year I picked up "Dark Wire" by Joseph Cox. It was a fascinating dive into the world of "secure phones", particularly a company called Anom.

I also read:

"Digital Fortress" - Dan Brown (not strictly technically plausible but the suspense kept me hooked) "Never Enough" - Andrew Wilkinson (meh)

Currently working on: "The Technological Republic" - Andrew Karp "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" - Martin Kleppmann

I had a tendency of a lot of false starts on books this year. I picked up several recent LLM/AI books and would make it like a chapter before realizing it was mostly just AI generated slop and gave up.

dbuxton• 7 months ago

Loved “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance” by Herman Wouk - middlebrow from the 70s but no less good for that.

Re-read “The Art of Not Being Governed” by James C Scott which is really mind-expanding stuff.

vtomole2• 7 months ago

Turns out, a lot of Plato this year. See https://vtomole.com/ for the list.

neuralkoi2• 7 months ago

How to Think Like Socrates - I normally have a difficult time digesting philosophy in older translations or language, but this one was really nicely written and well communicated.

Water by Rumi (translated by Haleh Liza Gafori) - also unexpectedly good. She uses a modern style and it reads so beautifully. It gave me glimpse of the beauty of the Persian language.

sestep• 7 months ago

For fiction I read a lot of Brandon Sanderson: the second Mistborn series, plus a few of the Secret Projects. I quite liked Tress of the Emerald Sea. Also currently reading R. F. Kuang's Katabasis which I'm really enjoying so far.

For nonfiction, I found Amanda Ripley's High Conflict to be excellent and insightful. I also finally got around to reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins; I expected it to be fine, but it far exceeded my expectations! On top of that, the edition I read also had "end notes" interspersed throughout the book with retrospectives from decades later, which only added to the book's richness.

weakfish3• 7 months ago

Sanderson really writes incredible stuff. I read the entire cosmere last year and got a tattoo =)

edanm3• 7 months ago

Wow, that's a lot of reading! Cosmere is, what, 20-ish books at this point?

What was the tattoo if you don't mind sharing?

ThinkingGuy• 7 months ago

I reread “The Screwtape Letters” by CS Lewis for the first time since high school and appreciated it even more. Although it’s written from a Christian point of view, the principles are applicable to any moral framework.

joewhale• 7 months ago

Would you be open to sharing more? I’m a Christian, and I’d love to hear from your perspective.

haensi• 7 months ago

I’m a Christian as well and spent a day in Oxford earlier this year. After spending some time at Magdalen College, I bought every book I could by C.S. Lewis and just finished Letters to Malcolm (on prayer) today.

His refreshingly honest take is very relatable, humorous and encouraging.

I can highly recommend it if you’re interested in prayer life (and how to use powerful formulations in letters)

mindcrime2• 7 months ago

My goal for the year was 15 books. I've finished 14 so far and should finish #15 in the next couple of days if all goes well. Here's what I've read (it's a mix of fiction and non-fiction) in reverse order by completion date:

Nash Falls - David Baldacci

Exit Strategy - Lee Child & Andrew Child

Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry - Marvin Minsky & Seymour Papert

We are Legion (We are Bob) - Dennis Taylor

Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition: Volume 1: Foundations - David Rumelhart & Jay McClelland

Semantic Information Processing - Marvin Minsky

Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts, and Representational Change - Andy Clark

Associative Networks: The Representation and Use of Knowledge of Computers - Nicholas Findler

The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science - Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, Boicho N. Kokinov (eds)

Similarity and Analogical Reasoning - Stella Vosniadou (ed)

Never Flinch - Stephen King

The Bad Weather Friend - Dean Koontz

Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind - Gary Marcus

After Death - Dean Koontz

The 15th book that I hope to finish will be:

Principles of Semantic Networks - John F. Sowa (ed)

Cub3• 7 months ago

The bobiverse books are fantastic, would suggest continuing the series as it gets even better

mindcrime2• 7 months ago

Yeah, I've been hearing that sentiment, and riffs on it, here on HN for years. But it took me this long to finally get around to actually picking up Book 1. I enjoyed it a lot though, and definitely plan to continue with the series.

chistev• 7 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46384109

fogus• 7 months ago

Technical followed by non-technical. I read more than these, but these are the highlights.

Mouse, a Language for Microcomputers by Peter Grogono - Mouse is basically an esolang with barely any abstraction facilities, but the book was well-written and the language compelling enough to explore further.

Notes on Distance Dialing (pdf) by AT&T - Described the telephone systems of the USA and Canada in the mid-1950s. The reading is a dry as it gets, but it was a fascinating dive into a vastly complex system solving extremely hard problems. This is a must-read for folks interested in systems-thinking. That said, I am actively looking for recommendations for books about the process of designing and building the unbelievably complex telephony system over the rudiments of the earlier systems. Recommendations welcomed!

The Eye of Osiris by R. Austin Freeman - This is the first book that I’ve read from Freeman and I suspect that I will read many more in the future. The story follows the disappearance of John Bellingham, Egyptologist and the subsequent investigation. As the investigation stalls, the eminent Dr. Thorndyke digs into the case. The story sets up the mystery nicely and indeed provides enough information to the reader to infer how the disappearance occurred and who or what facilitated it. The book is one of the best whodunits that I’ve ever read.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens - His final work remains unfinished as he passed away before he could complete it. Further complicating the meta-story is that he also didn’t outline the ending nor even put to paper the “villain” of the story. The meta-mystery of the ending has motivated a mountain of speculation around the ending including dozens of continuations of the story from other authors, all deriving their pet endings from textual hints, accounts from Dickens’ friends, illustration notes, and even in some cases seances supposedly accompanied by the spirit of Dickens himself. What was written by Dickens is spectacular and a compelling mystery and although it would be great to know the resolution, in some ways the “Droodiana” that has cropped up over the past 150+ years is reason enough for it to remain a mystery. The whole lore around Edwin Drood is a worthwhile hobby in itself and well-worth exploring. The Chiltern Library edition of the book contains the story and a good bit of the lore around the writing and the meta-works available at the time of its publication.

The Shadow People by Margaret St. Clair - Sadly out of print and difficult to find, but I’ve had it on my shelves for decades and finally got around to reading it. The book came onto my radar in the 1980s when I learned about it in the appendix-n of the 1st edition Advanced D&D Dungeon Masters Guide. I enjoyed many of the books at the time and have slowly swung around to re-reading them over the past few years. Sadly, most on the list do not stand the test of time for me, but St. Clair’s mixture of 60s counter-cultural leanings in a fantasy/sf world still works. The cultural touch-points in the book feel quite dated, but despite the occasional awkwardness, the story is unique even today.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner - The book started as a passable novel of manners focused on a turn of the century British middle-class family. The titular character was mostly background decoration for the first third of the novel and AFAIR was talked about only in the third-person. It’s only when she made the choice to move out on her own to the country in her middle age does she gain a central role in the narrative and her inner thoughts revealed. This is where things really pick up because I was shocked to learn that this unassuming woman’s inner thoughts had a delicious darkness to them. I don’t want to give away too much, but I’ll just say that you will not expect how the story ends.

Patience by Daniel Clowes - A profound graphic novel using time-travel to explore the idea of enduring love with a story that proceed through time, following Jack as he tries to alter the past and save the woman he loves. This well-known science fiction motif is elevated by Clowes’ signature psychological complexity.

Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse - I’ve read most of the books by Hermann Hesse but this one escaped my attention until this year. The story follows the parallel lives of a monk Narcissus and his passionate friend Goldmund as they respectively search for meaning in life through spiritual means and through pleasures of the flesh.

We Who Are About To… by Joanna Russ - A small group of astronauts crash land on a hostile alien world and quickly realize that rescue is unlikely to come. Many SF stories have started this way and so the expectation is that this is a colonization story… but Russ thrives on subverting reader expectations.

Fifty Forgotten Records by R.B. Russell - Another lovely entry in Russell’s series (one can hope) of autobiographical explorations of art, so far covering literature and now music. This book describes 50 records of varying popularity and Russell’s personal connections to each. While I certainly enjoyed finding a dozen or so new albums to explore, the true triumph of the book lies in the vulnerable, reflective memoir threaded throughout.

The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler A novel that follows 4-generations of the Ponitifex family, with a particular bildungsroman-esque thread around Ernest, a young man who’s naivete leads to his downfall and how his life unfolds thereafter.

I wrote about these (and more) at https://blog.fogus.me/2025/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-o...

jayflaherty• 7 months ago

Check out:

Introduction to Telephones and Telephone Systems (3rd Ed.) by A. Michael Noll: A great system-level overview covering instruments, transmission media, switching, and signaling.

Understanding Telephone Electronics by Carr, Winder, & Bigelow: Focuses on the electronic components and workings of telephone systems.

homarp• 7 months ago

The Shadow People: https://archive.org/details/bwb_P8-AVK-513/page/n4/mode/1up

umvi• 7 months ago

Deju Vu... https://blog.fogus.me/2025/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-o...

dang• 7 months ago

Discussed here!

The best things and stuff of 2025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46365726 - Dec 2025 (97 comments)

me_jumper• 7 months ago

Started rereading Pratchett's discworld novels. Gosh I love his writing.

TheAceOfHearts2• 7 months ago

I read The Buddha: Biography of a Myth, by Donald S. Lopez after hearing him on Conversations With Tyler. That's probably my top non-fiction book this year. Key takeaway was that the history of Buddhism is incredibly deep. Two highlights: First, the Buddha said that minor rules could be disregarded after his passing, but the person that was informed of this forgot to ask for clarification of what rules were minor, so there's debate over which rules must be followed. Second, the Buddha left us because nobody asked him to stay. This second point makes me reflect on the importance of reminding people that they are valued.

I also read The Red Book, Reader's Edition, by Carl Jung. I'm still processing that one. The artwork in the book is breathtaking and I strongly suggest looking it up even if you only look at the art. Narratively, it feels a bit like rambling at times. I'd previously read Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, and Aion, and felt like those had a bit more intelligible substance. The first few chapters of Aion are excellent, but then Jung just goes on for like a dozen chapters about fish symbolism which completely lost me.

I also read a few other books on occult and esoteric topics, but my thoughts on those books are more complex than what I'm willing to type out on mobile. Key takeaway from a book on Wiccan Witchcraft was that they also believe in a system of reincarnation. I'm interested in reading through some of the core texts of Chinese Mythology at some point, but there aren't any good audiobook recordings for some of them.

I'm sad to say that I made very little progress in getting through proper college level textbooks, but I'm working through Molecular Biology of the Cell.

andystep• 7 months ago

Not a huge book reader, but this year two impressed me:

- Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler

- The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson

Brajeshwar• 7 months ago

I stopped reading newspapers long back (early 2010s). During the Pandemic, I started a newspaper subscription (very common in India, delivered to the home) so I can use it to segregate wet waste properly. I started reading bits and pieces: horrors/misfortunes sell; news is stale, etc. Of late, I decided to look at it from a different angle, bringing back my childhood nostalgia, when I devoured every piece of reading material I could find. Now, I pick the ones I want to read, marking them as a reminder of continuity, a small bridge to a past life. I’m going to continue this slow reading with Newspapers. Wrote an article about my feelings, scheduled to be published on my personal blog in 2026-JAN.

For books, this year has been the year with the fewest books read.[1] I ended up reading the past: John Keats’s Poems, Marcus Aurelius, The Great Gatsby, Odyssey, and Iliad by Homer.

As a habit and a tribute to something I liked in the past, I read Dan Brown’s latest, “The Secret of Secrets.” I also started re-reading some of Sidney Sheldon’s books, but, as of this day, I could no longer summon the enthusiasm to continue beyond Master of the Game and The Sands of Time.

I also re-read the fantastic book, “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions”[2] by Edwin Abbott Abbott.

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/books/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland

Scarblac• 7 months ago

I was suffering from a burnout for much of the year and read mostly to relax. Reread a bunch of Discworld and read most of the Expanse series for the first time. Some Murakami. The Conway biography ("Genius At Play"), also a reread because it's fun.

But "The Dream Machine: JCR Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal", often recommended om HN, was amazing. It has so much of the history of how personal computers came to be, and so much that was new to me.

eleventen2• 7 months ago

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee stuck with me more than anything else I read this year. It is a work of simple beauty.

It’s a story of several generations of poor Korean women who eventually immigrate to Japan. The front half of the book is wonderfully paced to spend time with the characters. The back half can feel a bit rushed, but it becomes more of a page turner.

The Cold Millions by Jess Walter is another period novel about union organizing in the Pacific Northwest around the turn of the century, and follows two brothers. The depth of research makes this book wonderfully vibrant.

BhavdeepSethi• 7 months ago

Pachinko has been one of my favorite reads for a long time. If you enjoyed that, you'll also like Green Bone Saga by Fonda Lee.

edanm3• 7 months ago

Really? I read both, though fairly far apart, and I never connected them before.

ketzu2• 7 months ago

Technically last year, but less than 365 days ago:

* The Mom Test

* The SAAS Playbook

Actually in this year, the ones I remember the most:

* Start Small, Stay Small

* From Yao To Mao (more a series of lectures on chinese history)

The most recent one I haven't finished yet but was surprised I liked:

* Software Engeineering at Google

Many more things described ring true or feel desireable, and I recognize too many of the anti-patterns from companies I worked for. Although, I also recognized the good things people were doing and started to appreciate them more.

kwar136• 7 months ago

I've heard a lot of good things about "The Mom Test". It's the next one I read.

ketzu2• 7 months ago

I really enjoyed it and it helped me spot some unhelpful questions even outside startups!

card_zero• 7 months ago

I read Murder Must Advertise, by Dorothy L Sayers. Quote:

All over London the lights flickered in and out, calling on the public to save its body and purse: SOPO SAVES SCRUBBING—NUTRAX FOR NERVES—CRUNCHLETS ARE CRISPER—EAT PIPER PARRITCH—DRINK POMPAYNE—ONE WHOOSH AND IT'S CLEAN—OH, BOY! IT'S TOMBOY TOFFEE—NOURISH NERVES WITH NUTRAX—FARLEY'S FOOTWEAR TAKES YOU FURTHER—IT ISN'T DEAR, IT'S DARLING—DARLING'S FOR HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES—MAKE ALL SAFE WITH SANFECT—WHIFFLETS FASCINATE. The presses, thundering and growling, ground out the same appeals by the million: ASK YOUR GROCER—ASK YOUR DOCTOR—ASK THE MAN WHO'S TRIED IT—MOTHERS! GIVE IT TO YOUR CHILDREN—HOUSEWIVES! SAVE MONEY—HUSBANDS! INSURE YOUR LIVES—WOMEN! DO YOU REALIZE?—DON'T SAY SOAP, SAY SOPO! Whatever you're doing, stop it and do something else! Whatever you're buying, pause and buy something different! Be hectored into health and prosperity! Never let up! Never go to sleep! Never be satisfied. If once you are satisfied, all our wheels will run down. Keep going—and if you can't, Try Nutrax for Nerves!

Intriguingly familiar cynicism, vintage 1933.

davedx• 7 months ago

I stumbled upon some great reddit posts this year with reading suggestions, and compiled my own "humanity is fucked" themed reading list, which included:

* Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey

* The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton

* Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

* Dawn by Octavia Butler

I then diverged from this list (I have more) to re-read (though it's not such a great divergence):

* If This Is a Man / The Truce by Primo Levi

Other books I enjoyed reading this year in no particular order:

* Tau Zero by Poul Anderson

* Machine Vendetta by Alastair Reynolds

* Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds

* Aurora Rising by Alastair Reynolds

* Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron (loved this)

* The Lord of the Rings (the god knows how many times re-read)

* The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison

* Future's Edge by Gareth Powell

* Blueshift by Joshua Dalzelle

* The Heart of a Continent by Francis Younghusband (I didn't quite manage to finish it, but it was a fascinating read nonetheless)

reedlaw• 7 months ago

I'm on my fourth George Eliot novel this year, Adam Bede, which was her first published novel. I started with Middlemarch and proceeded to read Silas Mariner, Romola, and Daniel Deronda. The 1985 film adaptation of Silas Marner is very good and faithful to the novel. The 1970 Daniel Deronda film is similarly faithful and well-acted but the 2002 version is neither.

easywood• 7 months ago

A few years ago I promised myself to read the top of "must reads" from world literature. Many of them were literally unreadable (hello Moby Dick). But some of them are true gems, must-reads indeed. I just finished "The Grapes of Wrath" and holy cow, this is an impressive piece of literature. And unfortunately, more relevant than ever. Why not give science fiction a break and try this classic instead.

liamconnell2• 7 months ago

Neither are on-brand for hacker news but:

[Best fiction] Stoner - John Williams [Best non-fiction] Say Nothing - Patrick Radden Keefe

nowandlater• 7 months ago

After reading Primo Levi's "The Drowned and the Saved", I went on a binge of his earlier works: "If This Is a Man", "The Truce", "If not now, when?". All great, but I keep coming back to "The Drowned and the Saved"; it's hard to put my finger on it, but it's a book that provides more meaning about life than anything I've ever read.

tor825gl3• 7 months ago

The Periodic Table is also very special, and like the books you mentioned, the surprising part is that it says something additional about his experiences to each of the other books.

nika1975• 7 months ago

I really enjoyed The Technological Republic by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. It’s sharp, opinionated, and unusually concrete about how state capacity, technology, and institutional competence intersect in practice. Even if you don’t agree with all of it, it’s a book that forces clearer thinking about power, technology, and governance.

bwb• 7 months ago

My 3 favorites were:

Dungeon Crawler Carl - I laughed, I cried, perfect match for my sense of humor.

The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter - Great read, changed some of my training because of it.

Fall of Giants by Ken Follett (#1 of The Century Trilogy series) - An amazing overview of the 20th century through the eyes of several families accross the globe (fiction).

wannabebarista• 7 months ago

I mostly read non-fiction and technical articles.

My favorite book this year was "Differential Privacy" (2025) by Simson Garfinkel. Differential privacy is a mathematical theory of data privacy sandwiched between cryptography, databases, and ML. This is the first book-length non-technical introduction, and it's well executed.

Here's my full book list for the year: https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-books-2025/.

jebarker• 7 months ago

My top reads this year:

- How to Tame a Fox - great popsci history of a genetics experiment

- "The Sixth Extinction" and "Not the end of the world" - compelling but contrasting takes on climate change

- Through Two Doors at Once - posci history of the double slit experiment

- Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist - Luis Alvarez should get just as much attention as Feynman does IMO!

- A Matter of Death and Life - the last book I read this year that was touching and made me remember what’s really important in life

borroka• 7 months ago

I read Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist a few years ago, and I was impressed by the breadth and depth of the great physicist. Later in life, he became a geologist, working with his son.

Those physicists worked hard: he writes in the book that 60 hours of work per week — and there were no phones back in the day to blur the lines between work and non-work — were routine in Berkeley. Those were dedicated people.

shinycode• 7 months ago

SciFi books : old’s man war of John scalzi and Hail Mary of Andy Weird, great books

Pooge• 7 months ago

"Endure" which I highly recommend to anyone ever slightly interested in human performance.

"The Way of Kings" by Brandon Sanderson. Beautiful world-building as always.

And some others that I can't remember but those two were the highlights of the year.

code-blooded• 7 months ago

My favorite reads of the year:

- Futu.re by Dmitry Glukhovsky (author of Metro 2033 series). Interesting take of how life would look like if humans became immortal.

- Blackout by Marc Elsberg. A semi-realistic depiction of a 2-week long blackout in Europe caused by a terrorist attack.

- Millenium trilogy by Stieg Larson. Murder mystery in Sweden. Really enjoyed the setting.

dandano3• 7 months ago

The Will of the Many. An epic high fantasy adventure. I’m just about to finish the second book in the series - The Strength of the Few. I haven’t gasped this many times reading a book in while.

wirtzdan• 7 months ago

I’m half way down The Strength of the Few.

Always looking forward to read the next chapter.

dandano3• 7 months ago

Same here! I’m on the final 200 pages. It’s going to painful waiting so long for the third in the series. I went straight from book 1 to 2 with no wait thankfully.

sedeki• 7 months ago

I read "Pyramid Principle, The: Logic in Writing and Thinking" by Barbara Minto. Highly recommend it.

jppope2• 7 months ago

Ted Chang, Bunch Books on Roman Architecture, "You, me, and Ulysses S. Grant", Raving Fans (for work), 3 body Problem, Not the end of the world, Anti-fragile (3rd time), Transformed (for work, it was trash), Harry Potter (in Spanish), and some other things I can't think of off the top of my head.

Igrom• 7 months ago

Can you expand upon the Roman architecture books?

jppope2• 7 months ago

sure, we went to Rome and I was surprised to find that much of the architecture didn't present as I was expecting. I took a bunch of photos. When I came home I checked out "The Romans: builders of an empire" and then the wife bought me "Roman architecture in 50 monuments" which was really cool. I've subsequently read up on the aqueducts... which are really really cool

toddwprice• 7 months ago

Nexus by Yuval Harari is one of the most influential books I’ve read.

branon• 7 months ago

The Gulag Archipelago is on my shelf, when I rotate back to Russian authors (big fan of Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Bulgakov) I will hopefully get to it.

Here's my log for 2025, most recent at the top. Currently I am slogging my way through Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast" which I'm not a fan of. Halfway done with it though!

Gabrielle Zevin, "The Hole We're In" (not my usual genre, enjoyed this though)

Robert A. Heinlein, "Stranger in a Strange Land" (pretty good)

Robert A. Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love" (PHENOMENAL, highly recommended)

Robert A. Heinlein, "Methuselah's Children" (pretty good, required to understand "Time Enough for Love")

Richard K. Morgan, "Altered Carbon" (very good)

Robert A. Heinlein, "The Rolling Stones" (young adult, but good all the same)

Robert A. Heinlein, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (very good)

Piers Anthony, "On A Pale Horse" (very good, never got very far into the series though)

Lincoln Child, "Full Wolf Moon" (okay, not great)

Lincoln Child, "The Forgotten Room" (pretty good)

Lincoln Child, "The Third Gate" (very good)

Lincoln Child, "Terminal Freeze" (okay, not great)

William Gibson, "In the Beginning… Was the Command Line" (good, but outdated, look up what he's said about it more recently)

Lincoln Child, "Deep Storm" (very good)

James Patterson, "Along Came a Spider" (not my usual genre, okay though)

Jules Verne, "Around the World in 80 Days" (from childhood, revisited)

chickensong2• 7 months ago

William Gibson, "In the Beginning… Was the Command Line" (good, but outdated, look up what he's said about it more recently)

That's Neal Stephenson, not William Gibson.

pmdulaney• 7 months ago

I always get those two mixed up too!

reidrac4• 7 months ago

I couldn't get past the awful sex scenes of "Altered Carbon". OK, after having watched the TV series I should have known, but reading it is completely different. Also, the main character is so dislikeable.

It has been a while since my last Heinlein, you reminded me I should read more.

atlasunshrugged2• 7 months ago

I finally read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and it was phenomenal, I'm sure an excellent re-read

madhadron• 7 months ago

"Time Enough for Love" is the only Heinlein I've felt any inclination to reread in the past few decades that held up at all (and it's still a good read).

pavel_lishin3• 7 months ago

Piers Anthony, "On A Pale Horse" (very good, never got very far into the series though)

I read the whole series as a teenager, and loved it - especially the way he was able to wrap up the entire series at the end.

ffuxlpff4• 7 months ago

Dostoevsky's Memoirs from the House of Dead is a good companion to Gulag Archipelago to show how things got worse into the full medieval sadism in less than a hundred years.

Besides the gulag is a blueprint to basically all the forms of how totalitarian societies treat their subjects, especially if you can see the pattern working in less cruel and plausible forms.

wojciii2• 7 months ago

Richard K. Morgan

This is one of my favorite books. The series actually. I really like the backstory to the main character which gets revealed in the later books.

Did you see the tv series made from the series? I was, to put it mildly, disappointed.

anotherevan2• 7 months ago

If you're on a Heinlein kick, try and catch Farmer In The Sky. It's about the only one of his I re-read every few years or so. Don't know why.

alexashka• 7 months ago

I re-read Plato's The Republic.

It's a must read for 0.001% of the population.

whartung• 7 months ago

I don't read much any more. Mostly magazine articles.

I did re-read "The Long Run" from Daniel Keys Moran (one of the very short list of books I've re-read, and this was #4 or #5).

"Were you taught to hate Peaceforcers?" "Taught? No."

The only new book that I read was "Heat 2" by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner.

It was "ok". It honestly felt like a mashup of "Heat", "Miami Vice", and "Blackhat". So, not as fresh as I would have liked. (Mind, I really like all of those movies.)

I'll see the movie when it comes out, but the book was just "ok".

brokegrammer• 7 months ago

Demian by Hermann Hesse. I wanted to scream "Stop overthinking!" to the protagonist. Something I can relate to.

Siddharta by Hermann Hesse. Helped me understand that a perfect life is a collection of ups and downs and that one must accept it all.

Amerika by Franz Kafka. Could relate to the protagonist because people take advantage of his naivety.

Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Made me see the world in a less pessimistic way.

JKCalhoun2• 7 months ago

Yeah, I too finally read Siddharta. It might have had a bigger impact on younger me. Older me feels like I could have written it. ;-)

dkdcio• 7 months ago

my most interesting reading this year has been Stafford Beer (Brain Of The Firm, Heart Of The Enterprise). fascinating person and books

I’ve otherwise been largely re-reading books I haven’t read in a decade or so

EddieB2• 7 months ago

I’ve been working through more Dostoyevsky- currently ending the year reading The Brothers Karamazov (Constance Garnett translation).

It’s topping The Idiot for me- and a fitting way to end the year. I have spent most of 2025 stuck in a 19th Century reading cycle which started when reading Murakamis “After the quake” short story collection, specifically Super-Frog saves Tokyo where he mentions Anna K.

Anna Karenina-> Crime and Punishment-> The Idiot and some various Kafka in the mix too.

Hoping to visit some modern stuff again next year

adamors• 7 months ago

If you are looking for some modern stuff that would go nicely with Dostoyevsky/Kafka, I can warmly recommend Krasznahorkai, especially his first book, Satantango.

Really well written and well structured novel, and although he uses long sentences and no paragraph breaks, the writing is surprisingly accessible and incredibly immersive.

It was my first fiction book in a long time and it made me love fiction again.

EddieB2• 7 months ago

Thank you adamors, I’ll be sure to give Satantango a go next- I’ve been struggling to find a modern substitute for the Russian classics and haven’t been able to put my finger on why- there is a quality to it that keeps me engrossed.

imzadi• 7 months ago

I'm on my about 10th re-read of Dungeon Crawler Carl. I also reread the Murderbot Diaries.

Some new listens that I liked:

* Blood Over Brighthaven

* Fleabag: A Monster Evolution LitRPG

* Flybot

* The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

* Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

romulobribeiro• 7 months ago

I've listened to Project Hail Mary, even though the story is not that much complex and is predictable at times, the audiobook experience is the best I've had, I have been looking at similar audiobooks but couldn't find any

shmoe8• 7 months ago

Can't wait for the movie man.. first my bump, bro!

brightball2• 7 months ago

You should check out the Dungeon Crawler Carl series.

The audiobook for the most recent one released and immediately became the best selling audiobook in the world. The talent of Jeff Hayes and Soundbooth Theater have ruined other audiobooks for me.

pstuart• 7 months ago

I just finished the book. Can't wait to see the movie.

My introduction to Andy Weir was The Egg https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html -- which I consider to be a classic.

moughxyz• 7 months ago

The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchrist

Completely rewired how I view language, consciousness, and matter.

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

shmoe8• 7 months ago

The Silo series by Hugh Howey -- some excellent sci-fi to go along with the show

The Red Rising series by Pierce Brown -- lots of sci-fi fun, extremely epic

The Dark Tower series by Stephen King -- King's "Lord of the Rings" opus, great writing, ending maybe a little unsatisfying but not abnormal

Artemis - Andy Weir's first book -- Fun read about a heist on the moon. Anticipating Project Hail Mary movie early next year!

Currently in the middle of: The Talisman - Stephen King / Peter Straub

mattkrick• 7 months ago

I just finished the red rising series this year. Do you have any other recommendations in the same genre?

dandano3• 7 months ago

The Will of the Many. I’m about to start Red Rising series as it’s similar to it.

kwar136• 7 months ago

I did watch the show (Silo) and didn't find it that interesting. Hoping the books are better.

shmoe8• 7 months ago

As almost always, the books are definitely better :P

uxcolumbo• 7 months ago

Wasn’t ‘The Martian’ Andy’s first book?

shmoe8• 7 months ago

Second

shmoe8• 7 months ago

Nevermind, you're correct.. The Martian did come first... which makes me excusing some things in Artemis a little odd now.

MezzoDelCammin• 7 months ago

Fiction (shortlist):

-Some Desperate Glory (Emily Tesh)

-A Memory called Empire (Arkady Martin) both of these are a fairly interesting take on scifi worldbuilding. Could be called "highbrow", but IMO pretty easy reads still.

-Piranesi (S. Clark) - well written fantasy and plenty of other stuff that I've seen in other comments (Dungeon Crawler Carl does stand out a bit, but it's really a guilty pleasure / escape kind of a read).

Non-Fiction

-Brakneck (Dan Wang) - slightly outdated (by ~2y, which seems really breakneck), but still interesting take on modern China

-Capitalism (Sven Beckert) - still halfway through this one, but it's shaping up to be my #1 for 2025 non fiction

-The Origins of Efficiency - from B. Potter, the author of Construction Physics blog. The blog is fairly information dense, but this basically reads like a textbook. Still a pretty good reference IMO for people working in manufacturing.

dyukqu3• 7 months ago

# Catch-22 (by Joseph Heller) - had been seeing it mentioned on HN (and other sites) for years, I finally read it and it was one the best novels I've ever read.

# The Universe and Dr. Einstein (by Lincoln Barnett) - recommended for anyone who is interested about Einstein's thought process that gave birth to two great theories.

# What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (by Haruki Murakami) - it's my first book from H. M. and I really liked it. It's kind of a memoir and made me like Murakami and now I plan to read his novels too.

# How to Build a Car (by Adrian Newey) - that famous F1 car designer... Great read. Gives readers a chance to glimpse into both (technical) thought process behind designing a race car and human side of it.

# Basic Mathematics (by Serge Lang) - not *reading* exactly, working through it (to brush the rust off of my math fundamentals).

kaycebasques2• 7 months ago

I've only read one Murakami novel but I loved it. Hard-Boiled Wonderland.

mrexroad7• 7 months ago

Someone recommend H.M. To me a few weeks back. Started w/ Kafka by the Shore and then finished Norwegian Wood a few days after that. Couldn’t put them down, both were terrific.

__alexander2• 7 months ago

Murakami’s fiction novels are extremely different from “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”. If you want to try another non-fiction book of his check-out “Underground : The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche”, I loved it. If you go the fiction route “Kafka on the Shore” and “A Wild Sheep Chase” are a good starting point. Avoid some of his longer works unless you enjoy his style.

rhubarbtree6• 7 months ago

Norwegian Wood is far superior to his magical realism.

He’s a great writer of prose, but I feel it’s wasted on magical realism. He could have been one of the true greats.

dyukqu3• 7 months ago

Thank you for your recommendations. I am aware that his novels will be different. The (memoir) I mentioned just made me like the guy, so his other writings interest me now.

dandelionv1bes• 7 months ago

Catch 22 is just fantastic isn’t it. I might re-read in 2026!

KaiserPro3• 7 months ago

Its funny, I've tried with Catch-22 a few times. I just can't get on with it.

I think that its all just one ginormous side note, and that Yossarian is a shit, means I can't enjoy it.

I also suspect that I am not american enough to pick up on the satire references.

I suspect I feel what americans feel when they read jeeves and wooster.

dyukqu3• 7 months ago

Looked up for "jeeves and wooster", so, you're British then. This makes this little conversation interesting for me, because I'm not American, not even European and so our exposure/approach to this novel is very different then, I guess. Even the language was a little over my head, since English is not my native tongue. However, I really enjoyed it. I liked Heller's style (prose?) and wit. About Yossarian...yes, he's not a "perfect hero", but he is very human with all his earthly desires (I would say) and his struggles for staying righteous at the same time. The chapter about thoughts crossed his mind & feelings he experienced while he was wandering in the cold, damp streets at night was peak for me. I might re-read that very chapter nowadays.

josephb• 7 months ago

I loved this recent "Show HN", I found some gems for the reading list in 2026!

Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46345897

3n4n• 7 months ago

I already forgot what I read for my work (MS in CS), so I'll stick with fiction.

This year was slow for me reading-wise. Not a whole lot:

- The Blind Owl / Sadegh Hedayat - Prince of Annwn (Mabinogion Tetralogy #1) - Norse Mythology / Gaiman: read it before accusations came out - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men / David F Wallace - A Connecticut Yankee ... / Mark Twain (not yet finished)

steve_adams_862• 7 months ago

The Burnout Society - Byung-Chul Han

The Disappearance of Rituals - Byung-Chul Han

Outlive - Peter Attia (This felt like a complete waste of attention)

An Emotional Education - School of Life/Alain de Botton

The Story of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - Hayao Miyazaki

Plants from Test Tubes - Lydiane Kyte; John Kleyn; Holly Scoggins; Mark Bridgen

Some biography I've forgotten

elric5• 7 months ago

What did you think of The Disappearance of Rituals? It's been on my radar, but I've already got a big pile of books waiting to be read.

steve_adams_862• 7 months ago

It scratched an itch I've been having, though very unexpectedly. I left it feeling quite decided and energized insofar as the significance of ritual in my life goes. It changed the way I think and feel about community. Or the lack thereof in my culture.

It isn't a prescriptive book at all, and perhaps very bleak in a sense. He describes how we've lost much of the ritual and innate temporal rhythms which have historically given us a greater sense of time, place, purpose, closure, and so on. Similarly, he suggests we live in a world now which is arguably incompatible with these things, because it is designed to eliminate the conditions in which this rhythm can exist at all. We're trapped in a sense. The thing we crave is mutually exclusive with the environment we now live in.

Similar to the Burnout Society, he writes a lot about our hyper-individualistic culture which is obsessed with personal optimization and productivity. These are not ideals which are conducive to communal, cultural events and connections which transcend the individual. Yet one could argue that they're quite important to humans, and increasingly absent from our lives.

Another important concept is the fragmentation of time and how everything now blurs together.

There's much more to it. I'm only highlighting the parts which stood out clearly and are coming to mind now. Like burnout, it's short enough to read in a day, and well worth it. Han really speaks to me and his essays are absolute page-turners.

If you want something a bit more substantial and argumentative where conclusions are backed with clearly established points and data, it isn't the right kind of read. He also doesn't offer solutions. For me the pleasure is derived from a sense of understanding, appreciating an eloquent perspective on something I feel I'm experiencing, and Han's signature ability to crystalize the malaise of contemporary life. I know some people who would find the book irritatingly thin in too many places, or lacking any kind of rigour in explaining how he arrived at certain ideas or why he's making certain statements. If you can see past that, it's excellent.

I think the key is remembering that he isn't writing a scientific paper or treatise so much as a provocative essay to share his exploration and wonder about an amorphous, vague, yet visceral and pertinent matter.

kashyapc2• 7 months ago

My top book of the year:

Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times, Alan Walker

A riveting read by a legendary musicologist and biographer. Walker spent about ten years researching this. It is 700 pages, which seems daunting but he makes this authoritative bio absolutely enjoyable. It's also a "corrective biography", it dispels a lot of myths. This book is one of the best examples of accessible writing with flair. What a writer!

Throughout the book, Walker tastefully quotes musical phrases (in notation) from Chopin's works to situate them in context. I often paused reading and put on the track on a given page (nocturnes, mazurkas, preludes, etc). It made the reading experience incredibly rich and fun. Other things I enjoyed: Chopin's letters to his friends and family, life in aristocratic salons of Paris, London, Warsaw, and more—Chopin had unparalleled access. Of course, there's also a lot of gut-wrenching stuff. As the book's blurb says, it really is for both the casual music lover and the professional pianist.

If you haven't discovered them yet, give a listen to Chopin's nocturnes. But please, give them an attentive listen and play them on a high-quality audio system. Here[1] is one of his finest nocturnes (it is less famous than the "happier" nocturne that follows it, Op. 9 No. 2).

[1] Nocturne in B-flat minor, Op. 9 No. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThMGf07UBHQ

sillyfluke2• 7 months ago

it is less famous than the "happier" nocturne that follows it

Funny, despite the youtube numbers to me it always seemed to me like Op.1 b-flat minor was the one that would be overplayed left and right (movies and whatnot), maybe because people thought they fit be a moody scene or piece of art better.

give them an attentive listen and play them on a high-quality audio system

I have no music background and I would like tips on this because I'm partial to the preludes (raindrop etc) for example and they have softer key and louder key parts and I want to blast the softer side without overblasting and distortion occuring when it gets to the louder end of the piece and I wish somebody would remaster a normalized version of the recordings. I don't know if this is idiotic since I have no idea how worse it would make the pieces...

kashyapc2• 7 months ago

seemed to me like Op.1 b-flat minor was the one that would be overplayed

I don't watch much movies, but haven't seen Op. 9 No. 1 often in many places. I hope it remains that way! No 2 is wildly popular for its lovely long opening melody.

preludes (raindrop etc) for example and they have softer key and louder key parts and I want to blast the softer side without overblasting and distortion

Yes, the preludes are lovely. But please -- you don't need to "blast" this music. This is not rock :-) Yes, there are a lot of "dynamics" (soft and loud and some gradations: pianissimo, forte, etc), but don't overthink it.

Just use a reasonably high-end speaker (e.g. I use an old, Bose "SoundTouch 20") and pick one of the recent recordings from Deutsche Grammophon. I'm currently listening to the nocturne interpretations by Kun-Woo Paik.

stringtoint• 7 months ago

Work related: The Culture Map - can strongly recommend! Non-work: the Alex Rider series. Both entertaining and serious when it needs to be without being super grim.

testdelacc1• 7 months ago

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles blew me away by the quality of the writing, the endearing characters and the charming setting. I’m glad I picked it up and I strongly recommend it to you.

I haven’t been reading much in the last couple of years and I credit this book for getting me back in the game.

kryptn• 7 months ago

Lots of scifi.

Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, and Absolution of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach series. https://www.goodreads.com/series/112239-southern-reach

Reread books 1-4 of Dennis E Taylor's Bobiverse series to read #5 https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse

John Scalzi's Interdependency Series https://www.goodreads.com/series/202297-the-interdependency

Basically all of the Culture Series by Iain M Banks https://www.goodreads.com/series/49118-culture

Of Peter F Hamilton:

- The Salvation Sequence series https://www.goodreads.com/series/242882-salvation-sequence

- The Void Series, a sequel-trilogy to the Commonwealth Universe series https://www.goodreads.com/series/43520-void

Of Alastair Reynolds:

- Pushing Ice https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48991704-pushing-ice

- Eversion https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60097716-eversion

Of Adrian Tchaikovsky:

- Shroud https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/230237860-shroud

- Elder Race https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56815367-elder-race

- Alien Clay https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199851460-alien-clay

- Going through The Final Architecture now https://www.goodreads.com/series/305076-the-final-architectu...

Also Upgrade, by Blake Crouch https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59439117-upgrade

Also First, by Randy Brown https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/196399619-first

elric5• 7 months ago

Fiction: some more novels in Steven Erikson & Ian C Esslemont's Malazan Empire universe. These two produce some of the best fantasy I've ever read, and I've read a fuckton.

Non-fiction: A System for Writing by Bob Doto was pretty good. Also gave Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal a chance, but found it to be uninspiring, self-aggrandising drivel.

peacefulnerd2• 7 months ago

I RSS read all day about solid state batteries, which recently are in power banks. Hope to hear about folding MicroLED phones on www.microled-info.com But they will start out too expensive.

Because abusive parents false arrested/committed me without a trial as manic for buying a Linux (they can barely use apple) computer and RockBox music player. I spent much time gathering these quotes https://antipsychiatry.yay.boo/

VierScar• 7 months ago

What are the quotes? I don't understand, some of them are just a single word like "Art", "Autoimmune", "Cartoons"; or innocuous phrases with no context.

What am I supposed to understand from this?

peacefulnerd2• 7 months ago

The beginning is a list of ## chapters because there's many. A woman was in the psych ward for more than a decade. Luckily a doctor tested for autoimmune, which cured her.

For example you can search the page for ## False Claims Act. It will show the FBI jailing psychiatrists who illegally over billed Medicaid for fake or unnecessary services.

phtrivier• 7 months ago

I started the year with "Right thing, right now", and I'm ending it with "wisdom takes work" (R.Holiday), but I'm happy to say that I'm now a bit "tired" of re-reading the same rehashing of other people's book, and I want to read the original ones. Which, actually, is the pont.

I wanted to read classics, and devoured "The portrait of Dorian Gray" (O.Wilde), where maybe 50% of all the "as O.Wilde said..." quotes seem to come from (uttered by a single, incredibly obnoxious character.)

I challenged myself to read "Les Miserables" (V.Hugo), and actually managed to get two tomes out of five down. Eminently quotable, heavily skippable - why on earth spend half a time on describing the ins and out of Waterloo, except to show off ? - and, surprisingly, at times, _funny_.

The bio of Pierre Mendès France (J.Lacouture) was very much topical, given the mess in Franch politics. We had more PMs in one year than in a few chapters of the book. It's very weird to read that, at some point, some politicians were "liked" by the people - but lost power anyway.

A small Edouard Phillipe book called "Men who read" almost made me like the guy - his next book is more serious and expected. It pains me to think that our next election is going to be about "well read people who disappointed everyone" vs "popular jocks with no education who will end up disappointing everyone".

"Abundance" (E.Klein / D.Thompson) is an attempt from "well read people" to at least try and understand why everyone is disappointed and prefer the jocks. I don't think they included any solution in their book, though - maybe they save it for the sequel, or for E.Klein's presidential bid.

I want to read all Stripe press - if only, because the covers rock, and they're optimistic. Started with "Poor Charlie's Almanach" (C.Munger), which a disappointing rehash of the same funny speech seven times. (Tldr : be multidisciplinary, study cognitive biases, don't trade). In the middle of "The Origins of Efficiency " (Potter)

"The Wave" (Souleymane) was not optimistic. And not practical at all - sure, AI enabled drones carrying bioweapons will suck. "The Age of predators" (G. Da Empoli) reminds us that the AI enabled bioweapons carrying drones will come from an illiberal state enabled by billionaires from Silicon Valley, and Russian trolls. I wish someone told me where to go to avoid being targeted too early.

"Everything is tuberculosis" (J. Greene) reminded me of a time when scientists were trying to solve problems as opposed to creating brand new ones - but at least the next generations won't die of boredom.

"We, programmers" is a rehash of Uncle Bob's pre talks "history of programming". I loved the long and detailed parts about G.Hopper. He ends with a (failed) attempt to convince that programmers will still be needed in the age of AI.

Steve Yegge's "Vibe coding" goes full "resistance is futile" about programming with agents, and, interestingly, ends up talking more about TDD than Uncle Bob - but the words "electricity consumption" and "climate impact" are not utured, because, why spoil the fun.

"The Common LISP cookbook" tried to explain me the difference between ASDF, quicklisp and whatnot - 2025 was the closest year I ever go to actually writing something in LISP instead of reading books about it.

And also, "The baby is a mammal" (M.Odent) and "Becoming a dad for dummies", because this year was probably the last one we're I'll get so much time to read :)

billwashere• 7 months ago

Completed books:

Project Hail Marry by Andy Weir

Dungeon Crawler Carl (Books 1-7) by Matt Dinniman

I'm currently reading:

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams

flopsamjetsam4• 7 months ago

Project Hail Marry by Andy Weir

The only Andy Weir book I've read. Loved it.

rmnclmnt• 7 months ago

My highlights were the Edward Ashton books « Mickey7 » and « Antimatter Blues » (sequel to the first).

Haven’t seen the movie adaptation yet but the books are such delightful dark humor SF, loved them

lawgimenez2• 7 months ago

Almost done with Genghis Khan and the making of the modern world by Jack Weatherford, I really enjoyed it. If someone can recommend other updated, history reads about empires, world history etc.

amunozo2• 7 months ago

Oh, I read that some years ago. I am not sure if it's very similar, but I can recommend Debt by David Graeber. It is an economic history of the world that deals with the use of credit and bullion in different societies during history.

Another book I enjoyed this year is The Golden Road by William Dalrymple. It explains the crucial cultural, economical, and religious influence that India had in Eurasia before and during the middle ages. This one is more similar to Genghis Khan and the making of the modern world, I believe.

lawgimenez2• 7 months ago

Thanks for the recommendations, will check them out!

brightball2• 7 months ago

- Dungeon Crawler Carl series (and audiobooks)

- ShapeUp

- Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success

rossdavidh• 7 months ago

"The Gentle Grafter" by Henry, O.

"Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic" by Monosson, Emily "Options" by Henry, O.

"Population Fluctuations in Rodents" by Krebs, Charles J.

"In Search of the Old Ones: An Odyssey among Ancient Trees" by Fredericks, Anthony D.

"The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024, edited" by McKibben, Bill

"The English Abbey: Its Life and Work in the Middle Ages" by Crossley, Fred H.

"The Stereoscope in Ophthalmology" by Wells, David Washburn

"Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps – Why Nature's Maligned Predators and Pollinators are Essential to Planetary Health" by Sumner, Seirian

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jacobs, Jane <--- best book I read this year

"The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World" by Kimmerer, Robin Wall

"Making Useful Things Of Wood" by Gottshall, Franklin H.

"States of Disorder, Ecosystems of Governance: Complexity Theory Applied to UN Statebuilding in the DRC and South Sudan" by Day, Adam

"Migration Mysteries: Adventures, Disasters, and Epiphanies in a Life with Birds" by Rappole, John H.

amunozo2• 7 months ago

Crime and Punishment from Dostoevsky is the book I enjoyed the most this year. I don't read much fiction but this is the novel I enjoyed the most in my life. I love how it deals with human thoughts and psyche. I would encourage anyone to read it.

benlivengood2• 7 months ago

I finally got around to reading Wheel of Time. It didn't quite take the whole year but a few solid months. If I had tried spreading it out over a longer period I wouldn't have been able to remember the overall plot or characters, I think.

shoobiedoo2• 7 months ago

What did you think of it? I got to about the third book and completely lost interest

benlivengood2• 7 months ago

Don't finish; read a good summary if you cared about any character or plot point sufficiently.

I enjoyed it overall but in large part for the detail/immersion which it sounds like wasn't interesting enough to keep you.

All character growth and relationships were very slow burns, and so if you enjoy watching the same characters just dealing with things as they come up then you'd probably enjoy the other books as much as the first three. Satisfying arc resolution happens almost entirely at the end.

mellosouls• 7 months ago

My notable find this year was an author who will serve for me as a successor to le Carré as a reliable source of thoughtful spy fiction and I have a backlog of his work to look forward to, but the first for me was:

The Crocodile Hunter by Gerald Seymour

An elderly MI5 also-ran contemptuously tagged "the eternal flame" by his bumptious young colleagues shows doggedness, courage and unexpected depth as he pursues a dangerous ISIS returnee planning an attack on British soil. Unusual and riveting.

flopsamjetsam4• 7 months ago

Dune: re-read the first time since I was a teenager. Mostly to compare my memory of it against the films.

Foundation and Second Foundation: for much the same reason.

Both very enjoyable reads, but quite different from the modern interpretations.

"How Life Works: a users guide to the new biology" by Phillip Ball. Really extended my understanding of where biology is now.

trentnix• 7 months ago

I read five of the Foundation books (stopping before Prelude) in 2024. I had read them as a kid and loved them, but three (plus) decades later and they just didn’t hold up as well as I hoped.

The Mule is still great, though.

otsaloma• 7 months ago

My favorite of the year would be Maxim Gorky's three-part autobiography: I read "Childhood" and "In the World" (a.k.a. "Amid Attendants") and just started the last part "My Universities". Gorky drifted as an orphan from house and job to another and describes an interesting array of characters he came across, mostly poor and misfortunate, but many of them good as well.

"He took me under the arms, lifted me up, kissed me, and placed me firmly on the jetty. I was sorry for him and for myself. I could hardly keep from crying when I saw him returning to the steamer, pushing aside the porters, looking so large, heavy, solitary. So many times since then I have met people like him, kind, lonely, cut off from the lives of other people."

ropable• 7 months ago

The best non-fiction book I read in 2025 was "The Fabric of Civilization" by Virginia Postrel. It was completely fascinating, and made a good argument that the production of cloth/textiles might by one on the most import core developments that allowed modern, organised society to arise.

Highly recommended.

agentultra• 7 months ago

Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky.

The Peripheral by William Gibson.

Enshittification by Cory Doctorow.

ktallett• 7 months ago

The Dream Factory and a lot of quantum photonics papers.

Kerrick• 7 months ago

Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You. This book convinced me to stop widening my skillset by beginning again, and start doubling down on my strengths.

Gene Kim et al., The Phoenix Project. This book reinvigorated my love for management, which I lost in 2021–2022. I'm still an IC, but I decided to stop refusing management roles.

Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained, 2nd Edition. This book lit a fire under my ass to figure out better ways of working. I followed it up with the next one in a book club at work.

James Shore et al., The Art of Agile Software Development, 2nd Edition. This book gave me hope that a productive, humanist, productivity-oriented workflow can work in today's software world. I read it with my teammates in a book club at work, including the software engineers, QA tester, product owners, and UX designer. Unfortunately the rest of my team had little interest in putting it into place where I work.

Robert C. Martin, Clean Architecture. This book was a delightful read. Uncle Bob weaved practical advice together with stories from his past that served both to illustrate his points and to entertain. While I don't agree with every word in the book (e.g. Screaming Architecture), I still recommend it to every Senior+ Software Engineer.

Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software. Aside from its amazing content, this book has some of the best typesetting I've ever seen. I sought out a font that is a match (or near-match) and reverse-engineered the letter spacing, line height, heading font sizes, etc. Its content was great too, but I was glad to have read Vaughn Vernon's DDDD first.

Vaughn Vernon, Domain-Driven Design Distilled. This book followed up Shore's work in our book club at work. Everybody on the team really liked what they read, but nobody felt like they had actionable insights. So the engineers went on to read Vernon's IDDD, and the non-engineers read Adzic's IM and Patton's USM.

Vaughn Vernon, Implementing Domain-Driven Design. I read this book with a book club at work. While Evans's work was well-grounded in theory and left a lot of interpretation in the patterns behind DDD, Vernon is a practical, nuts-and-bolts DIY guide to one approach to DDD. Luckily, these tactics resonated with my team and our codebase has seen marked improvements in the past few months. I'm looking forward to our process catching up so we can do more than "DDD Lite."

Jeff Patton, User Story Mapping. This book was fun, practical, and completely outside any way I'd ever worked. It also helped me understand exactly why I've failed every time I tried to make my own SaaS startup on nights and weekends.

Gojko Adzic, Impact Mapping. This book was basically a pamphlet. The process seems...good? But since I'm no longer in a role with the influence or authority to recommend product direction, I doubt I'll get much use out of this for a while.

Tanya Reilly, The Staff Engineer's Path. This book wants to follow in the footsteps of Camille Fournier's The Manager's Path, but it seemed less specific and useful as a roadmap. Perhaps that's because of how different "Staff Engineer" is from company to company, at least when compared to the roles covered by Fournier. But it did help me earn my promotion to* Staff Engineer, so it was clearly worth reading.

Tamar Rosier, Your Brain's Not Broken. This book was the second I read after I got diagnosed with adult ADHD. I appreciated that it helped me de-stigmatize, because I harbored some bummer feelings when I realized no actually I didn't grow out of it. It also helped me reflect on my habits of action, and see them in a new light. I was surprised to see how much of my anger and frustration in life was a coping mechanism to help me get things done. I've had a much calmer life since recognizing that.

Alexander Tarlinder, Developer Testing. I'm not quite finished with this book, but I'll be done by the end of the year. It's been a great overview of automated testing from the perspective of a programmer. It helped refresh my memory on things I knew but forgot. It filled gaps that I had in my baseline knowledge. It corrected things I "knew" but was slightly incorrect about. I now recommend this to any programmer, whether or not they've got a habit of testing.

Austin Kleon's trilogy: Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work, Keep Going. These books were cute, full of incredibly quotable passages, and fun to read. I didn't spend enough time on them, though. A lot of the lessons I thought I'd learned left my brain like water through a sieve.

Kent Beck, Tidy First?. This book helped me understand the economics of software through a new light. That was important to me, because during the time I spent as a Director of Software Engineering I was not given a budget and asked to manage the department's expenses.

Antonio Cangiano, Technical Blogging, 2nd Edition. This book convinced me to start a blog. It was going really well, and then I shrank back from it due to fear of vulnerability. Since I got over those fears and started blogging again, it's been a lot of fun again. I incorporated what would've been tweets into the blog (as "quick posts") in addition to my longer-form, less-ephemeral content (as "articles"). Writing has been a great way to solidify what I've learned and distill my opinions. Heck, I should migrate this comment to my blog.

I also read other books (especially on my journey to becoming a magician), but these were the ones I thought Hacker News might be most interested in.

cons0le• 7 months ago

Water margin

kwakubiney• 7 months ago

Complications and Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. Made me appreciate modern medicine more. One other l book that shifted my thinking completely about AI and how far we are from AGI: A Brief History Of Intelligence by Max Bennett. Evolution is a heck of an algorithm.

Also read Apple In China. Was pretty interesting to realize how much Apple (and China) are what they are because of how much they poured into each other

killerstorm2• 7 months ago

I read a lot of books, the one I'd recommend the most is Greg Egan's "Axiomatic" short story collection.

cplanas• 7 months ago

Nice! I haven't read Axiomatic yet, but this has been my "Greg Egan year". I have read Permutation City and Diaspora: maybe the two most stimulating scifi novels I have ever read.

TOMDM2• 7 months ago

+1 for permutation city.

The core concept is so well established in the book.

mrexroad7• 7 months ago

Read Diaspora last year w/o knowing anything about it. Easily one of my favorite sci-do books to date—I can’t believe it was there waiting for me the entire time. Permutation City is one of my next 3 reads.

killerstorm2• 7 months ago

I also highly recommend _Distress_ as it continues some cosmology ideas from Permutation City.

There are also several novels which kind of similar to Diaspora: Schild's Ladder, Incandescence, and stories in the Incandescence universe: Ride a crocodile, Hot rock, Glory.

admiralrohan• 7 months ago

I mostly read historical books this year, multiple analysis of WW1 and WW2. George Bruce's book on British expedition in Afghanistan in 1939. The peacemaker, on Reagan's presidential tenure. Stalin's 2-part biography. Deng Xiaoping biography. The book Collapse of Soviet Union. Sharlock Holmes collection. And many more.

aucisson_masque• 7 months ago

The Gulag Archipelago

I did read it a few years ago, that's very though and it describes in a very technical way how gulags worked. In hindsight I'm not sure it was the best way to do it.

If you liked it tho, id suggest the two kravchenko books on the trials, Rudolph Hess book (very interesting), Simon Sebag Montefiore book on Stalin.

I can provide many more about this kind of subject, I found that fascinating for a few months and did read a lot of books on it.

Although I'd argue that the most fascinating is watching the usa, from outside, turn into a totalitarian state. That is truly incredible to be able to witness how much Trump achieved in a few months.

kwar136• 7 months ago

Thanks for the suggestions, added. And yes, I concur sadly...

azuanrb• 7 months ago

The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self by Michael Easter.

Never Finished: Unshackle Your Mind and Win the War Within by David Goggins.

These two books stuck with me. We are often too comfortable with being comfortable. There is nothing wrong with that, but real growth happens when we step outside our comfort zone. We are far more capable than we think.

hberg• 7 months ago

Just finished Ken Kocienda's "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs".

It was interesting to read about the various decisions made along the way to the first iPhone launch and remember the real-time launch back then. Even though the first phone had limitations, they were able to do enough things "right" that you could feel the paradigm shift within a few minutes of using it. Coming from a mobile software company at the time (and having access to all the top phones of the time, various Blackerry devices, Moto Razr, etc) it was easy to see that Apple had really made something extraordinary with its software.

santix• 7 months ago

Jacked: The Unautorised Behind-the-Scenes Story of Grand Theft Auto - David Kushner

The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder

Anon84• 7 months ago

I’ve been working towards my WSET diploma so not much non-wine related fun reading. That being said:

     - Phylloxera: How Wine was Saved for the world by Christy Campbell is a surprisingly fun read on how the entire wine industry was almost destroyed in the late 19th century.
      - Red/Green/Blue Mars by K. S. Robinson hard sci-fi about mars colonization and terraforming. First rereading in 20 years or so. Holds up extremely well.
      - Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. A thought provoking take on how broad stroke human history developed since the Bronze Age.

submeta• 7 months ago

„Essentialism“ genuinely changed how I think about work and life. I used to operate under the assumption that every task deserves attention, often equal attention, which inevitably led to overload and constant context switching. Reading this helped me realize that the most successful people do the opposite: they focus relentlessly on a small number of truly important things and deliberately ignore the rest. That shift alone has been transformative for me.

TOMDM2• 7 months ago

I haven't, but has anyone read "If anyone builds it everyone dies"?

I'd be interested in a HN discussion on it.

ceroxylon• 7 months ago

It obviously leans more into the theories around how things can go horribly wrong if "AGI" is actually a thing (which can get existentially exhausting), but is still worth contemplating.

Hank Green had an interesting discussion with one of the authors, Nate Soares: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CKuiuc5cJM

side-note: i wager that the engagement bait title of the video was generated by AI, which is humorous to me in this context

nirmel• 7 months ago

I have read it. Everyone must read it! It's highly convincing that we see the deadly wall in front of us and we're accelerating toward it.

momentmaker• 7 months ago

The Burnout Society

Strangers in Paradise: How Families Adapt to Wealth Across Generations

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI

The Year in Tech 2024

This Is Strategy

Optimal Illusions

Matrix Energetics

Models

The Value of Others

The Essence of Bhagavad Gita

From Barista to Billionaire

Go On Alone

78 Days Practical Transurfing

The New Game of Life and How to Play It

Getting Real

There Is No Such Thing as Business Ethics

How to Be Happy All The Time

Shape Up

Catching the Big Fish

Babaji The Lightning Standing Still

The Courage to be Happy

Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail

The Art of Spending Money

Laws of Life

The Oracle

Kriya Yoga: Spiritual Awakening for the New Age

Inner Excellence: Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life

55555• 7 months ago

If you enjoyed From Barista to Billionaire, you should check out Andrew Wilkinson's newest book, 98% Down.

jaimefjorge3• 7 months ago

All fiction.

- The Great Gatsby. Really enjoyed it and seemed fitting with the current times.

- Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann. Generational wealth come and gone. Good for putting things into perspective.

- Things Fall Apart, Achebe.

- The Pearl, John Steinbeck

- Hyperion (first book), Dan Simmons. Great sci-fi. Bought the second book and look forward to reading it.

- Stoner, John Williams. Incredibly well written book

- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez. Still finishing but I hope to finish in time for next year

timeforcomputer2• 7 months ago

Hyperion is awesome. Each story could be its own novella but especially the priest's tale. I also loved the consul's tale. I haven't read the rest yet because I am unsure how the story will go without that structure as I wasn't too invested in the space politics, but I hear it is good. Also if you haven't read, The Terror by Dan Simmons is also great and strikes historical/horror like I feel hyperion does scifi/horror

jaimefjorge3• 7 months ago

I sometimes wish that other types of fiction were as easy to read (for me) as sci-fi. I devoured all 6 books of Dune. Loved Hyperion with the canterbury tales structure and the politics - I already know I’m going to like the second book. I must check The Terror, thank you for the pointer. I have also the Neuromancer waiting for me to eat my literary veggies.

huhkerrf• 7 months ago

The tragedy of The Great Gatsby is that we all read it in high school, when we haven't yet enough life experiences to truly be moved by it.

llmslave22• 7 months ago

I had ChatGPT create a list of the top 100 literary classics of the past century and summarize them for me. While I'm waiting for Claude Code to write code for me I listen to the summaries like an audiobook. I'm planning to read a lot more than 100 books next year!

mrexroad7• 7 months ago

To each their own… but what’s the point? Just to know the plot / sequence of events?

llmslave22• 7 months ago

There's a lot of fluff that can be compressed into a much smaller amount of tokens. I kinda hope modern authors start publishing prompts instead of entire novels - imagine a world where anyone can take a prompt and run it through an llm to create their own personalized novel. With their own customizations and preferences.

numbsafari• 7 months ago

This year:

- I read the entire “Frog & Toad” collection. Probably about 30 times, some stories more.

- “Little Shrew’s Day”… probably 25 times.

- Many of the “Construction Site” series books, especially the OG “Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site”. The “Garbage Crew” and “Airport” books featured heavily.

- Started to mix in some “Pete the Cat” titles.

- “Detective Dog Nell” got a lot of air play.

Lots of others, but those are definitely the frequent fliers.

cpfohl• 7 months ago

If Little Blue Truck isn’t on your regular list you should add it. We also loved Pond by Jim LaMarche (older audience, but beautifully illustrated and told), the Boynton books are fun to read aloud especially Barnyard Dance, and The Going to Bed Book. There are more, but these are the highlights from that age range

wj• 7 months ago

Napping House and Pokey Little Puppy were two of my favorites to read with my kids along with the Little Blue Truck.

heyitsdaad• 7 months ago

Frog & Toad is a grown up book disguised as children’s book. I very much enjoyed reading it to my boys.

mcswell3• 7 months ago

Back in the day, I read the Berenstein Bears more times than I wished (my wish would have been zero times), to my kids who are probably about the same age as you.

It was such a relief when I could start reading them the Narnia Chronicles, and much later Lord of the Rings.

jimmydddd• 7 months ago

Surely you mean the Berenstain Bears. --Just a shout out from the alternate universe before we split off.

mkl• 7 months ago

*Berenstain, but you're not alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenstain_Bears#Name_discrepa...

sejje• 7 months ago

I've always thought it seemed early, but in my first grade class we read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe aloud as a group.

I don't really remember us having much trouble. I was hooked, and I read the whole series by third grade. I had trouble finding a couple of them, which held me up.

I got into many other books those years. My Friend Flicka, Black Beauty. The Hobbit. White Fang, Hatchet. The Forest Runners. Where the Red Fern Grows.

Still some of my favorites on that list. They really shaped my life, actually.

cevn• 7 months ago

I rly like construction site one. Spotting the lil red bird became a game for us.

etrautmann• 7 months ago

Are you me? Glad others have this exact experience

EvanAnderson5• 7 months ago

Similar experience w/ my daughter (now 12 y/o) here. We read the heck out of children's books when she was little. There were nights when I really didn't want to slog thru the same Suzy Spafford[6] book again, but I did it anyway. I think it paid off. My daughter is an avid reader now.

She says she still wants me to read to her, so I do. This year was a bit sci-fi heavy, and we've decided to target more fantasy and literature in 2026.

This year's books included:

"Below the Root", "And All Between", and "Until the Celebration" - The "Green Sky Trilogy"[0] by Zilpha Keatly Snyder. We held off on playing the "Below the Root" video game[1] but I'm hoping that as we get into winter weather and outside time becomes more scarce we can get to it. It's arguably the final book in the "trilogy".

"Redshirts"[2] by John Scalzi. We've been slowly making our way through Star Trek TOS in the last couple years so. That gave her enough cultural fluency with the tropes in the book to make it effective.

"To Say Nothing of the Dog"[3] by Connie Willis. My daughter adores Victorian England and comedy. This book also turned her on to Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)"[4] (which I'm still working thru on my own-- I do not particularly love Victorian England but it is a good book).

Besides the books I read to my daughter, I also read Martha Wells' "The Murderbot Diaries"[5] series myself. I'm vaguely interested in the television adaptation. I'd love to hear what somebody who has read the series thinks of the TV version.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Sky_Trilogy

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirts_(novel)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Say_Nothing_of_the_Dog

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Men_in_a_Boat

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murderbot_Diaries

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzy_Spafford

Popeyes2• 7 months ago

We went to America to see some family and we were discussing books and we were shocked that they had never heard of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler who are an absolute staple of UK kids book culture (so much so that they adapt one of her books as animations for each Christmas). So if they aren't on your radar, then they come highly recommended.

https://axelscheffler.com/who-is-he https://www.juliadonaldson.co.uk/books/

gnz11• 7 months ago

The Gruffalo is quite popular in the US. Michelle Obama even read it on PBS Kids during the covid lock down era.

https://www.pbs.org/about/about-pbs/blogs/news/mondays-with-...

rkuska• 7 months ago

I would recommend The Children of Noisy Village, my 3 year old loves it (she didn't like Pippi Longstocking) and we've read all chapters from all the books several times already.

PTOB• 7 months ago

My favorite reading of _Frog and Toad Together_ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmHh29UfAco

Barrin92• 7 months ago

Among non-fiction what stood out to me was David Bentley Hart's All Things are Full of Gods, great book also very fun to read written as a Platonic dialogue. To me one of the most compelling theologians today.

Bruno Maçães, World Builders. Good book on the impact of technology in geopolitics has been consistently interesting.

Among fiction re-read a lot of Lovecraft, noticed that I like the Dream Quest stories more than the horror these days which surprised me. But they're more compelling to me now because of how much you can see Lovecraft as a person in them.

The last three Dune books. Liked the last two about the Bene Gesserit a lot, was surprised how much I disliked God Emperor given the praise it gets, but it honestly reads like Frank Herbert posting twitter hot takes as a worm with no story

Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger. Among the best novellas I've ever read, very different in tone from most of his books.

Shūsaku Endō, Silence. Book about a Jesuit mission in early Edo Japan. My favorite Japanese book in a long time.

Among technical books, re-read The Mythical Man Month, probably more relevant than it ever was in an age of artifical man-hours added to projects. Robert Seacord Effective C, after not having written C in a long time. Really good intermediate level book for modern C. Also making my way through The Little Schemer as a replacement for advent of code in the second half of the month this year.

boarsofcanada• 7 months ago

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.

Highly recommended no matter what your age.

Just a few chapters into The Art of Spending Money by the same author. So far very good as well.

Both cover how personal finance is, first and foremost, personal and specific to an individual and highly dependent on your life experience.

kaycebasques2• 7 months ago

My top-rated books this year:

* C++ Crash Course by Josh Lospinoso

* Deng Xiaoping And The Transformation Of China by Ezra Vogel

* Magic: A Very Short Introduction by Owen Davies

* Trigonometry by Hugh Neill

I rated each one 9/10

LeonardoTolstoy• 7 months ago

I read close to 40 books this year which I assume is up from the previous year, and way more than I used to read prior to starting to do the Rochester Library reading challenge (which I've done for the past two years). I won't get into a lot of it, but after reading Middlemarch three years ago, Napoleon: A Life two years ago, and The Power Broker last year I decided to read two "big" books.

In the first half of the year War and Peace, which obviously was excellent, although I liked Middlemarch more.

In the second half of the year David Copperfield which was very excellent. Just beautifully written. I still think I probably like Middlemarch more... but it might now require a re-read to know for sure.

This year is going to be Tom's Crossing to start as I just got that for Christmas.

reidrac4• 7 months ago

I read 14 books this year and my favourite was Eversion by Alastair Reynolds, followed closely by Pushing Ice by the same author. I "discovered" Cory Doctorow this year, reading 4 books (and I have another in my queue), being "Attack Surface" the one I liked most.

The only technical book I read was Programming in Lua (4th edition), and still didn't work for me. I guess I don't like Lua, and that's OK.

tsujamin2• 7 months ago

Strong recommendation for Alistair Reynold’s Century Rain if you want another of his. It’s part 20th century alternate history, part hard boiled crime noir, and part hard space opera.

drunx3• 7 months ago

Stealing this recommendation.

I stared from Revelation Space - full series. Then did done other ones. Didn't get to the Century Rain.

Thank you!

drunx3• 7 months ago

Alastair is on my S tier for sci-fi. Read so much of him. But didn't read Eversion. Adding it!

In your reading journey, which other authors/books have similar grand space scale as how Alastair writes? I mean, there are a lot, I know, but some overdo it and others oversimplify it. I find Alastair striking perfect balance of being "hardcore" in a way, but still making sense:)

reidrac4• 7 months ago

Give Miles Cameron a go. Artifact Space is a good starting point.

quarkz14• 7 months ago

I have started Kitchen Confidentials by Anthony Bourdain and almost finished it! I am hoping to start reading more next year as I have struggled finishing books most of the time.

mrexroad7• 7 months ago

Been a year of re-reads and some classics I never started b/c of thickness. Standouts for me were “A Tale of Two Cities” and “Norwegian Wood.”

“Kafka on The Shore”, “Norwegian Wood” - Haruki Murakami

“A Tale of Two Cities” - Dickens

“Count of Monte Cristo” - Alexandre Dumas

LotR, “Hobbit” - Tolkien

“World Atlas of Coffee” - James Hoffmann

“Anathem”, “Diamond Age”, “Termination Shock” - Neal Stephenson

“A Timeless Way of Building” - Christopher Alexander

“Where The Wizards Stay Up Late” - Lyon

“Fahrenheit 451” - Ray Bradbury

“Slaughterhouse V” - Kurt Vonnegut

“Neuromancer”/Sprawl trilogy - William Gibson

Plus an assortment of business, systems thinking, and tech related books that were “fine”, but none that really left me with much to chew on afterwards.

czhu12• 7 months ago

I envy your reading abilities

mrexroad7• 7 months ago

FWIW, I’m mildly dyslexic and likely read slower than most. This year I’ve made it a goal to un-do many of the coping strategies I’d developed over the years to keep pace, and instead really focus on stopping and looking up phonetics for words I couldn’t easily sight (kindle is clutch here). On the plus, it also means I’ve had to become rather deliberate about what I read and when I read it — HN, newspapers, and Reddit all took back seat this year (and I couldn't be happier).

ffuxlpff4• 7 months ago

A couple of says ago there was an excellent comment here on Hacker News about that you shouldn't read only in bed but allocate proper not tired time for reading. Otherwise you learn to associate reading with sleeping and drowse off after a few pages.

rhubarbtree6• 7 months ago

Here’s the trick about reading, folks.

Firstly, reading is actually a bit boring and unpleasurable at first. Only once you’ve gotten up to speed does it start rewarding you. A bit like working out at the gym.

The other surprise is that once you start reading, you get really quick. Like, surprisingly fast. After a while you notice the words are going by faster. So the effort compounds.

When you start you think “my god that took 5 hours of boring reading time to get though” and by book 10 you think “that was 2.5 hours and I learnt a lot and my brain is happy.”

s0rr0wskill• 7 months ago

How much do you read weekly? This is an impressive amount of stuff

ilvez5• 7 months ago

First the minimum time: - audiobooks while commuting (mostly walking to work). Even if it's like 30-40 minutes some day at most, it still adds up. - add to that lets say ~15 minutes each night before sleeping.

And on top of that: - sleepless nights, when you want to get back to sleep: 30 minutes - ... - just having a good series to grind through. - audiobooks during some manual labor (home restoration works for example).

So for me audiobooks + capability to read at night without disturbing others (dark mode + backlight on e-reader). And from that it adds up.

rhubarbtree6• 7 months ago

This comment slightly terrifies me. My reading has dipped this year, but generally this is a small amount of reading for 12 months. I think the norm on reading quantity has shifted.

Is social media to blame? TikTok and meta videos are extremely addictive. I have perhaps the strongest willpower of anyone I know, and the only way I can avoid losing hours to them every day is to delete these apps from all devices, and have a separate browser on my Mac for them.

tstrimple5• 7 months ago

Curious about your view on The Count of Monte Cristo. It's one of my more disappointing reads of the year. I'm familiar with the story line from various film adaptations, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer amount of repetition and drawn out bullshit. That's when I learned it was originally published in a journal where Dumas was paid by the word over 18 parts. Then all the meandering bullshit and repetition made so much more sense.

__mharrison__2• 7 months ago

I love the first third. Then it is a slog.

dabiged• 7 months ago

I took read it this year and invested about 8 weeks getting through it. I found the story disjointed, repetitive and very hard to follow. It was only after finishing it I discovered I had read the abridged version that cuts out a number of chapters leaving multiple characters without conclusions. No wonder it was difficult to follow.

mrexroad7• 7 months ago

Similar to other commenter, after the first third, I felt it devolved into a long, overly drawn out and predictable slog. Glad to have finished it, but it’s probably not on my re-read list.

mindwok2• 7 months ago

I loved the first and last third. The middle is meandering and hard to get through. Watching everything unfold though is really satisfying at the end.

rhubarbtree6• 7 months ago

Like many major novels it needs a lot of editing, and that’s often for the reason you’ve pointed out - or similarly, serialisation.

Don Quixote is a long novel that just keeps giving, by contrast.

Still would encourage everyone to read TCOMC at least once.

goodmattg• 7 months ago

Fiction:

A Little Life - challenging to read but exceptional

Sci-fi

Three Body Problem trilogy - forget the Netflix series the books are excellent, in my opinion #2 was the peak.

The Glass Hotel, Station Eleven, Sea of Tranquility - anything by Emily St. John Mandel - hard to place but her distinct writing style transports me.

Non-fiction:

American Moonshot - fine The Path to Power - anything Caro writes is worth reading

emehex• 7 months ago

Favourite books of the year:

"When the Moon Hits Your Eye" - John Scalzi

"Making History" - K.J. Parker

"Let Dogs be Dogs" - Monks of New Skete

"The First Gentleman" - Bill Clinton (it's actually fun!)

"The Thinking Machine" - Stephen Witt

kiernanmcgowan• 7 months ago

Gravity's Rainbow - still chewing on it all

Scubabear68• 7 months ago

The main thing I read was the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman.

It requires even more suspension of disbelief than a usual sci fi / fantasy combo, but was worth it for the characters and laughs and “where will he take this next?!”.

kylehotchkiss2• 7 months ago

I stick to HN for finding interesting technical articles (whenever you all aren't bikeshedding about LLMs lol)

2025 Online: Noahpinion, Zeihan on Geopolitics, Ezra's column NYTimes, Where's Your Ed At

2025 Books: Abundance, Human Nature - Thomas Bell, (Plus a handful of books on maintaining faith despite not being politically conservative)

Looking forward to in 2026: Everything is Tuberculosis - John Green

yuchtman3• 7 months ago

I'd be interested in a recommendation about maintaining faith. Preferably specific-church-agnostic.

kylehotchkiss2• 7 months ago

Mere Christianity - cs Lewis (timeless), “losing our religion” by Russel Moore, “the justice of Jesus” by Joash Thomas are the 3 that helped me out the most. I end up handing out every copy of mere Christianity I get!

gessha• 7 months ago

I started my reading late in the year but two books that I managed to finish are:

“Literary theory for robots” - Dennis Yi Tenen

“Visual Culture” - Alexis L. Boylan

orsenthil• 7 months ago

- Becoming Kareem: Growing Up On and Off the Court, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

- My Gita, Devdutt Pattanaik

- The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Atul Gawande

- Moonshot: Inside Pfizer's Nine-Month Race to Make the Impossible Possible, Albert Bourla

- Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Anne Case

- The Vaccine: Inside the Race to Conquer the COVID-19 Pandemic, Joe Miller

- Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, John Green

- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne and Gary Gianni (Illustrator)

- El Deafo, Cece Bell

- Acts of God, Kanan Gill

- Marvels of Modern Science, Paul Severing

- Empire of AI, Karen Hao

WillAdams• 7 months ago

Michael Moorcock's _The Citadel of Forgotten Myths_ --- probably the last Elric book, it is an interesting closure to a series I've been reading since high school

J.R.R. Tolkien's _The Bovadium Fragments: Together with The Origins of Bovadium_ --- probably the last "new" Tolkien book --- quite the hoot, and an interesting commentary on industrialism and the Oxford Don's opinions on same

Donald E. Knuth's _TAoCP: Vol. 4, Fascicle 7, Constraint Satisfaction_ --- working through exercises now in the hope of finding a typo for the sake of getting an account at The Bank of the Island of San Seriffe to go w/ my physical reward check.

Variety of other things, but those were the notable/interesting ones.

E39M5S62• 7 months ago

The Wheel of Time series, start to finish. So pleased that Brandon Sanderson stepped in to finish it.

jeremypress• 7 months ago

my favorites for 2025

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler the whole Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman

dmd2• 7 months ago

Here you go! https://3e.org/books/

I read ~80-100 books a year, mostly SF/F.

pavel_lishin3• 7 months ago

What did you like more about the re-write of the Antimemetics book? I strongly preferred a few things about the original, especially what happens to (I think?) Bart Hughes and the germ.

dmd2• 7 months ago

It just felt more coherent and tight to me.

kwar136• 7 months ago

That is an incredible pace of reading

pavel_lishin3• 7 months ago

Sci-fi nerd recommendations follow.

I binged the entirety of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. The cover, & the fact that it was on Kindle Unlimited, made me think it was probably cheap crap, but I was impressed with how well-written it was, and how much I empathized with the characters. (I probably should have read it slower; by the last two books, I was just flowing with the text, not paying as much attention to the overarching plot.)

Heinlein's "Orphans of the Sky" was pretty bad. So much early scifi is considered great because it's groundbreaking, writing about things nobody else has before. The concept of a generation ship was pretty new at the time Heinlein was writing it, and it has some very interesting concepts, but the book has some really bad problems. If you've read it, you know; if you haven't, and decide to, you'll see it for yourself.

I binged a few Brandon Sanderson books. The standalones are great; the Stormlight Archive is a huge slog through some beautiful writing, but I'm not sure I'm willing to spend so much time in beautiful books that move the plot forward so slowly.

Exordia, by Seth Dickinson, started off incredible, kept going, but the ending felt like both a fizzle as well as a cliff-hanger for the next book. I'm glad I read it, but I wish it had a clear conclusion it wanted to reach.

Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Memory" delivers more of the great philosophical questions & answers about the nature of consciousness and personhood that the previous books did, A+. No idea where he could possibly go from there, but if he does, I'm going along for the journey. (Honorable mention: Alien Clay. Dishonorable mention: Service Model.)

Eric Flint's "Fenrir" was a fun BDO near-future space adventure. (As was John Sanford's Saturn Run, but that wasn't a 2025 book I read.)

j_w• 7 months ago

For the Stormlight Archive: You have to world build. The first book definitely felt like a slog for the first half-ish. Not much that feels like major plot events happen yet, but if you look at it with the understanding that it's intended to be 10 books, a lot of exposition is needed.

The payoff is worth it, IMO.

socalgal2• 7 months ago

If it did it for you that's great. For me, it started interesting but the characters changed too dramatically for me and it just got annoying in book 5. I'm out

sphars• 7 months ago

I just finished book 4, some chapters of which I started skimming (mostly the Venli/Eshonai throwback ones). I want to finish the series but it's such a slow burn it's getting tough, especially when I have other books on my TBR. I'll get around to book 5 sometime next year.

I did really enjoy the first book, kinda want to go read it again.

tstrimple5• 7 months ago

I think it's Sanderson's attempt at "epic fantasy" and it falls a bit flat for me as well compared to his tighter shorter novels. Of course we have to focus on the world building because it's literally Sanderson's only talent outside of just being a prolific writer. His characters are all very flat and similar. Especially the women. His character arcs are nothing to speak of. His relationship building is cringe worthy. But he always makes interesting worlds and explores the ramifications of culture and magic systems.

shnock• 7 months ago

DCC is êxcéllént. I have also been enjoying Pale Lights and The Years of Apocalypse.

mcswell3• 7 months ago

Back in the 1960s, when I was a tween- or teen-ager, I read every copy of Analog Science Fiction/ Science Fact I could put my hands on. You can now read lots of those stories on-line (like at https://www.freesfonline.net/Magazines2.html). Some of them have stood the test of time, but some are really really bad. John Campbell, the editor of Analog back then, was racist, and also convinced that smoking tobacco was a Good Thing. Many of the stories were written (by others) to convey those ideas; it's almost unusual for lead characters not to light up a cigarette.

It will be interesting to see how much of today's scifi holds up half a century from now---not because the science is wrong, but because the moral qualities will be judged outlandish.

ffuxlpff4• 7 months ago

The sudden all encompassing popularity of smoking is one of the most astonishing things in modern history. I can think nothing that would show better the power of advertising.

Everyone knew from the start smoking is unhealthy, or at least not healthy and addictive. Nicotine probably happened to help with the new kind of stress and frustration the higher tech world caused and so it kind of answered to a real need.

Now when pretty much nobody smokes anymore, at least nobody who don't belong to underclass, it is weird reading. I remember a film of some kind of an underwater station by Cousteau and people where smoking there! A place where air for breathing is sparse if anywhere.

tstrimple5• 7 months ago

If you enjoyed the DCC series, you should check out the live reading sessions from the audible narrator. He does such a fantastic job with the voices. I was legitimately surprised it was a single narrator.

https://youtu.be/yQ54CpkUoaM

zargon3• 7 months ago

Jeff Hays is an incredible narrator. It appears he only narrates LitRPG. Of which, DCC seems to be basically the only readable series. Would love to see him branch out.

UltraSane2• 7 months ago

The first time I heard Donut speak I tried to find the name of the female narrator only to be surprised that the male narrator is just that good at female voices.

giorgioz3• 7 months ago

I'm also reading Dungeon Crawler Carl series!! Enjoying a lot! "Goddamnit Donut!" Carl

jsemrau2• 7 months ago

1. Encyclopedia Autonomica

2. Atmosphæra Incognita - Neal Stephenson

3. Idoru (10x time) - William Gibson.

cloverich2• 7 months ago

10th? That is quite the recommendation. Do you think because it is that good, or the mix of quality with your tastes (to a larger degree than normal).

jsemrau2• 7 months ago

I really like the story and in these times of genAI a story about a virtual idol makes it worthwhile reading it again. Also compared to Gibson's other works I find it a much easier read.

Also, I sometimes like to compare it to Coupland's Microserf's but Microserf's is notably dated by now.

meken• 7 months ago

I started in August, but the two books I read were Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, and East of Eden by Steinbeck.

I tried reading Catch-22, but 50 pages in it just seemed like a bunch of military guys trolling each other by being as autistically literal as possible with absurdist Airplane-style humor. I noped out at the prospect of reading 500 more pages of it. I don’t get why people here recommend it so much.

I recently started reading Moby Dick.

uolmir• 7 months ago

I know what you mean by your comment, but you might want to give catch 22 another try sometime. I'd say that the start with the Texan is far from the best the book gets. Reading it, I think you'll find Yossarian more and more understandable and the situations more and more bleakly comic as you go.

Or don't. There's no end of great novels out there.

MarcelOlsz• 7 months ago

Something Happened is easily heller's best book and it's so slept on. I've never met anyone who read it.

lvl155• 7 months ago

Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History

atlasunshrugged2• 7 months ago

It's a pretty old book, but I think my favorite this year was The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer which was great fun for an avid Simpsons fan (of the first 10 seasons at least).

Of course, I'd also be remiss not to mention that I published a book called Rebooting a Nation about how the nation of Estonia modernized post re-independence and became a hub for startups and e-government in a single generation. Foreign Affairs was kind enough to just do a review: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/rebooting-nation-incr...

ecliptik• 7 months ago

I've read 51 books this year (just finished Hyperion) which is 50 more than 2024.

I attribute this increase to a few things,

1. Borrowing from Libby puts a 21 day time limit to finish a book, encouraging me to read it before it's due.

2. Not discriminating from reading on my phone. Kindle app syncs between devices, and makes it easier to read a few pages here and there instead of waiting for uninterrupted sessions with my Kindle.

3. Continually updating a To Read list, mostly by going to Barnes and Noble, taking pictures of featured book tables, then adding the interesting ones to my Libby hold list.

4. Borrowing with Libby makes it easier to bail out of a book that doesn't intrigue me. Instead of forcing myself to finish something I spent $ on, I can just return it and move onto something else, feeling 0 guilt.

ultrasounder• 7 months ago

Finished scarlet pimpernel on a rainy Christmas Day. Couldn’t put the book down. To think that it spawned a whole genre of super-hero movies where the protagonist hides behind a mask of “ foppiness” and it was written back in 1901 and set against the ever green theme of the French Revolution is mind boggling. Once I finished reading it yesterday, followed it up with the movie of the same title. Well made and acted. Wholly recommend the book first and then the movie.

grehbies• 7 months ago

The City and It's Uncertain Walls - Yet another Murakami novel that I haven't finished, despite really enjoying it. I was reading it during the summer, though, and it's clearly a winter novel. And in that vein, the vibe is immaculate. I should pick it back up.

While We're Young - KL Walther's gender-flipped Ferris Bueller-like, picked up on a whim during a minor existential crisis (it's completely different from my usual fare). What it says on the tin. The sex scene at the end is only slightly less uncomfortable than the one at the end of Contact Harvest. However, combined with a read-through of Edward Bloor's Tangerine, there's a fascinating comparative lit angle to approach them from. They feature starkly different illustrations of the American suburb, perhaps a useful analogue of the real-life and fraught disconnect between the stable and comfortable and uprooted and desperate Americas. Both stories feature intertwined families; one story is focused on matters of love and the other is focused on matters of violence. Perhaps I was just touched by my personal experience with both dynamics.

Death of the Demon (a Hanne Wilhelmsen novel by Anne Holt) - Really enjoyed this Scandinavian Ghost in the Shell fanfic.

jerkstate• 7 months ago

I got into audiobooks this year and so have “read” a lot more than usual. Here are some of the most memorable:

Outlive by Attia - wouldn’t take everything he says as gospel but he helped me focus on what is really important in health and fitness and why

I am a Strange Loop by Hofstadter - trying to get a grasp on Gödels incompleteness theorem, but this book is a lot more. I particularly enjoyed the bits about Albert Schweitzer, and the chapter on his late wife, how we host the souls of others crudely on our own hardware. Helpful book in the age of AI.

The Man from the Future by Bhattacharya, a Von Neumann biography. Really helped understand the context of this great man’s achievements.

On the Edge by Silver. The signal and the noise was a lot better (which I read last year)

Benjamin Franklin by Isaacson. Fascinating renaissance man, interesting tour through US history

Can’t Hurt Me by Goggins. This book helped me through some emotionally difficult times and has some really great life advice (mixed with some really self-destructive behavior)

The Misbehavior of Markets by Mandelbrot, Hudson. Currently reading this, so far pretty fascinating

kickout• 7 months ago

Fort Bragg Cartel (good/great)

Abundance (great)

Anxious generation (great)

Ishmael (great)

Who we are and how we got here (great)

ImaCake• 7 months ago

I read/listened/sampled a lot this year but a few have reached out into my life and changed me at least a little bit.

- In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan. A brilliant "not diet" book about not eating crap and enjoying chocolate cake with your friends. I followed this up with Ultra Processed People to arm myself with the facts to defend not eating the junk people call food.

- The Dispossesed - Ursula Le Guin: recommended in previous year's HN what did you reads. An absolutely triumph for how it manages to portray a believable anarchist society.

- Adult Children of Alcoholics: useful to the multitude of us who grew up with an alcoholic parent(s). I used this to identify the common patterns I share with others who grew up like me. You are not alone!

- The Invention of Clouds (not finished): I really like the context of "dissenting science" which the author conveys brilliantly. Turns out Dark Academia and Bro Science are not new.

- The Art of Frugal Hedonism: Irreverant although it comes off a little pious. This book has helped me accept that I have enough stuff already.

encrypted_bird• 7 months ago

Not quite finished yet (and I don't think I will by the end of the year), but I've been reading Star Trek: A Woman's Trek, by Nana Visitor. I've really been loving it and it's been fascinating learning about the risks & challenges that the various women in Trek! The stories span the different shows too, from Dorothy Fontana (writer) to Nichelle Nichols (Nyota Uhura), Majel Barrett-Roddenberry (Nurse/Doctor Chapel / Lwaxana Troi / so many computer voices), Terry Farrell (Jadzia Dax), Penny Johnson Jerald (Kassidy Yates), and, of course, Nana Visitor (Kira Nerys)!

hsuduebc22• 7 months ago

I had few months of free time and I wanted to get back into fantasy which I loved. Sadly after staring all day into the computer I dont usually have the energy to process any other text.

The Stormlight Archive from Brandon Sanderson got me exactly back. I love it. I must recommend it for anyone who want to experience one of the best high fantasy books.

Also I need to recommend a source where I found it. I somehow stumbled upon https://www.book-filter.com/

Lovely app which scrapped all good reads reviews and let you simply filter through that because for some reason, these pages are garbage.

Have fun and happy new year!

hsuduebc22• 7 months ago

I need to recommend Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization by Ed Conway. Truly fascinated story also available on audible. For anyone interested into how "things works" generally is this a must.

Happy new year!

__alexander2• 7 months ago

Here are the 29 books that I read but I probably read another 100 children books.

• How AI Works: From Sorcery to Science — Ronald T. Kneusel

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values — Robert M. Pirsig

• Martín & Meditations on the South Valley — Jimmy Santiago Baca

• Akira, Vol. 6 — Katsuhiro Otomo

• Akira, Vol. 5 — Katsuhiro Otomo

• Akira, Vol. 4 — Katsuhiro Otomo

• Akira, Vol. 3 — Katsuhiro Otomo

• Slaughterhouse-Five — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

• Akira, Vol. 2 — Katsuhiro Otomo

• Poems & Prayers — Matthew McConaughey

• Akira, Vol. 1 — Katsuhiro Otomo

• Time’s Arrow — Martin Amis

• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter — Stephen Graham Jones

• Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly — Anthony Bourdain

• Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism — Sarah Wynn-Williams

• Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever — Joseph Cox

• Source Code: My Beginnings — Bill Gates

• The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America — Mark Whitaker

• Good Inside: A Practical Guide to Resilient Parenting Prioritizing Connection Over Correction — Becky Kennedy // I would not recommend this book to anyone.

• Interior Chinatown — Charles Yu

• Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection — John Green

• Dark Matter — Blake Crouch

• Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things — Adam Grant

• Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D — Fabien Sanglard

• Jurassic Park — Michael Crichton

• Killing Commendatore — Haruki Murakami

• James — Percival Everett

• Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre — Max Brooks

• Last Argument of Kings — Joe Abercrombie

cbare• 7 months ago

My favorites that I read this year were:

- Playground by Richard Powers: the ocean reminds us that we, along with our obsessions and rivalries, are small - Orbital by Samantha Harvey: a book were not much happens, but a lot goes on below the surface - Hum by Helen Phillips: looks at an AI controlled near future through a different lens - Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow: sex, lies, and video games

vismit2000• 7 months ago

Bhagavad-gītā As It Is: https://vedabase.io/en/library/bg/ Beautiful translation and purports on one of the most widely read and revered text in India.

godzillafarts• 7 months ago

My favorites this year, be genre:

Sci-fi: Exiles by Mason Coile.

Fiction (Fantasy): The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman.

Fiction (post-apocalyptic / zombie): One Yellow Eye by Leigh Radford.

Non fiction: The Wager by David Grann.

thecodeboy• 7 months ago

Rome Before Rome by Philip Matyszak

locusofself2• 7 months ago

My favorite reads of 2025:

"Solenoid" - Mircea Carterescu"

"The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie" - Agota Kristof

"Septology" - Jon Fosse

gniv• 7 months ago

I searched in page for Cărtărescu and was disappointed to find no mention. And then I scroll and see your comment lol.

I read Theodoros this year (in Romanian) and I was really impressed. Best novel I've read in years. I'm currently reading Orbitor III. I bought Solenoid, but don't yet feel ready for it.

locusofself2• 7 months ago

Solenoid was definitely my favorite read in ages. I cannot wait to read more of his stuff

65• 7 months ago

Patternmaking for Menswear wad immensly helpful for teaching me how to create my own sewing patterns. But like anyone on HN, I draw my patterns with software I made.

shawn_w• 7 months ago

More books than I can easily recall or put down here.

Currently in the middle of a re-read of one of my favorites, Ken Kesey's Sometimes A Great Notion. Also the first Otherside Picnic light novel, after watching and loving the anime adaptation.

RexySaxMan2• 7 months ago

I read the entirety of Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen. I've been meaning to since I heard about it in college over a decade ago. With a new baby here and some extended parental leave, I ploughed through all 8000 pages or so and it was so, so worth it.

elric5• 7 months ago

You'll be pleased to know that there's another 20 or so books in the same universe, both by Steven Erikson and Ian Esslemont. Not all of them are as good as the Book of the Fallen, but most of them are pretty close, and some are even better.

disgruntledphd22• 7 months ago

The most recent ones, the witness books are definitely better. He's really matured as an author.

RexySaxMan2• 7 months ago

Oh yeah, I know! I'll get through them eventually.

YesBox2• 7 months ago

This year I've been diving into Game dev books and Harry Potter fan fiction. There's a lot of great reads out there. I assume having an entire world built for you removes a lot of the heavy lifting (as a writer).

GameDev:

- The Masters of Doom

- The Doom Guy

- Play Nice

- Press Reset

- Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

- Console Wars

- Ask Iwata

- Embed with Games

HP Fanfic:

- All The Young Dudes (by MsKingBean89) [student life of the Marauders]

- Grey Space (by noaacat) [Pre Hogwarts. Focuses on parental abuse. One scene I'll never forget (paraphrasing) is when another student at school notices Harry's bruises, slides up her sleeve, and implies she slipped too]

- Just started the Glasslight series (noaacat).

I also reread the entire Harry Potter series, and revisited a handful of Redwall books. I find it interesting how I loved RW as a kid/teen, was bored out of my mind with it in my 20s, and now I love it again.

tombert2• 7 months ago

Shareware Heroes is worth checking out, if you liked Masters of Doom.

YesBox2• 7 months ago

Thanks, haven’t heard of this one!

ImJasonH• 7 months ago

The Shining, by Steven King

It's one of my favorites of his, and I can see why he's miffed that Kubrick's adaptation gets all the praise when the source material is just as good.

There's nothing like a slow creeping horror descent into madness to make winter time feel cozy.

freakynit2• 7 months ago

Converted to webpage: https://hn-books-2025.pagey.site/

Thanks LLM's.

peterspath3• 7 months ago

does it automatically update?

freakynit2• 7 months ago

Not yet... I have updated it once. Keeping it auto-updated is a bit of headache.

tstrimple5• 7 months ago

I replied to the dead "What did you read in 2025" thread, so I'll just paste it here.

Usually I hit a book a week pretty reliably, but this past year has been particularly crazy according to my audible purchase history. There are around 80 titles that I've added in 2025 and I've completed the vast majority of them. Some stand outs for me:

Dungeon Crawler Carl - One of the few novels that I think it actually much better in audio format. The narrator is excellent and it's a fun adventure that never takes itself too seriously. I'm not into litrpg typically, but I really enjoyed the 7 novels in the series so far.

The Laundry Files - I've made it through seven of these books and I really like the mix of mundane government IT with supernatural horrors. Tropes come up like the government tracking paper clip usage, and then you'll get a mystical explanation that makes sense in world so suddenly tracking individual paper clip usage doesn't seem so ridiculous. Generally a fun series, but it seems to be moving towards a revolving cast that I'm less interested in continuing on with.

The Library at Mount Char - One of my favorite books this year. Quite dark and mysterious. I liked the payoff and character arcs. But really it's the well maintained atmosphere that pulls everything together.

There Is No Antimemetics Division - What might the science and research of literally unknowable things look like? Things your mind rejects or presences which can influence your mind to make themselves invisible and leaves no memories behind. Weird novel that doesn't hold your hand too much.

Heavy Weather - A sort of modern cyberpunk meets western novel. Storm chasers following a predicted F6 super tornado across the US south.

The Running Man - I'm not typically a King fan, but I do like some of his works. I have fond memories of the movie from childhood nostalgia so finally gave it a try. I do think it's one of his better works according to my tastes.

Mickey7 - I'm a sucker for time loops and death loops and adjacent novels. This was a short but fun book.

The Society of Unknowable Objects - Small group of people collect mysterious objects from around the world to keep humanity safe.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - Another one dealing with memory. What would it be like to be immortal, but everyone you interact with forgets about you minutes after you leave them.

Edge of Tomorrow - Time loops!

The Troop - Decent read if you like horror novels. One of the better horror novels I read for the year.

ilvez5• 7 months ago

We just re-watched some of those movies with my friends recently. You gave me some encouragement to go into those books now as well.

optymizer• 7 months ago

Mostly gamedev books:

* Blood, Sweat and Pixels

* Press Reset

* Play Nice

* Masters of Doom

* Color & Light

* Video Game Art

* 2d Graphics Programming for Games (in progress)

tombert2• 7 months ago

I got back into using e-readers so I read a lot more this year than usual.

- More than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

- Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman

- Hogg by Samuel R. Delany

- The first dozen Discworld books (in publication order) by Terry Pratchet

- The Wall by Mary Roberts Reinhart

- Columbine by Dave Cullen

- Garth Marenghi's TerrorTome

- Stray Bullets: Killers by David Lapham

- Stray Bullets: Sunshine and Roses by David Lapham

I might be missing a few.

JKCalhoun2• 7 months ago

I read a handful of short stories from Exhalation by Ted Chiang. I liked one of them in particular, the others were okay. It is nice to read short stories since you invest very little time in each—in case it turns out the author is not really what you're in to.

Begin the Begin: R.E.M.'s Early Years, Robert Dean Lurie. A band I read everything about. 1984 and the music that entered my life that year truly changed me. But I don't expect anyone that is not a fan of the early band would find it interesting.

Siddhartha, Herman Hesse. It has been recommended to me many times over the years—finally read it. As I mentioned in another comment, it's a good book that younger me might have found more profound. Older me was more or less just nodding my head, "Yep, you'll have to learn for yourself…", etc.

I've been working an analog computer so have read a bunch of old textbooks and such that I have found on archive.org and other places online.

I see quite a few books I purchased this year but have not read. (The Japanese have a word for me.) I should really try to read more next year.

__mharrison__2• 7 months ago

Which exhalation did you like? I just finished it last week.

andrei_says_2• 7 months ago

Blindsight.

Not an easy read but very rewarding in terms of sci-fi world building.

The three body problem series. Also sci-fi, recommended if you enjoy deeper reading.

kulikalov2• 7 months ago

Loved it too! Try echopraxia next.

andrei_says_2• 7 months ago

I did and was a bit disappointed as it didn’t seem to be as closely related as I wished it to be (aliens wise).

Waiting for the third book.

kulikalov2• 7 months ago

Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell

cloverich2• 7 months ago

Finally read Fukuyama's "Liberalism and its discontents" after reading his much larger the origin of political order previously. I enjoyed its dense, survey like nature; I particularly enjoyed his (actual) breakdown of critical theory which, after knowing only the propagandized takes on it, was refreshing.

In 2026, I hope to pivot slightly and finally read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. I thought recent authors like Fukuyama obviated the need to read such books, but flipping through its pages, they were so poetic and beautiful, I hope it operates like an antidote to too much dry / reductionist reading (of which tools like ChatGPT are accelerating, at least for me).

tsujamin2• 7 months ago

Cutting a long list short, the _best_ thing I read this year was W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.

It’s not a book where the world changes greatly or great things are done, but honestly that’s kind of nice: It’s a compelling story of a life, the characters were engrossing (one in particular stands out for how strongly _dislikeable_ they are) and the I loved the prose.

Also shoutout to Standard EBook’s excellent, public domain edition (and all their volunteers other work!): https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/w-somerset-maugham/of-huma...

ChrisMarshallNY• 7 months ago

I read escapist “junk.” Proud of it.

I re-read Dave Duncan’s A Man of His Word[0], and A Handful of Men series[1].

I followed up by re-reading The Great Game[2], by the same author.

I re-read the original 10 (+1) books of Chronicles of the Black Company[3], by Glen Cook, again, as he just released a couple of new books, after many years (and has 4 more, on the way). I also recently read Lies Weeping[4] (the latest one).

I just finished Tsalmoth[5], and I’m currently reading Lyorn[6], the latest book in Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/series/53081-a-man-of-his-word

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/series/40824-a-handful-of-men

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/series/42347-the-great-game

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Company

[4] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222376544-lies-weeping

[5] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60820532-tsalmoth

[6] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/127278352-lyorn

ffuxlpff4• 7 months ago

You should always read only books you enjoy.

Even if you think they're shallow you will realize the deeper stuff in that made you be interested in them you later. Your subconscious knows better.

tor825gl3• 7 months ago

I would say, there are exactly two reasons to read a book: because you enjoy it, and because you want to know what it says.

seizethecheese2• 7 months ago

According to Kindle I read 24 books.

The best were:

- The Eagle and the Hart, on Richard II and Henry IV

- In the Heart of the Sea, on a whale ship disaster that inspired moby dick

- The Siege, on a hostage taking at the Iranian embassy in London

Love narrative nonfiction.

romperstomper2• 7 months ago

The Lord of the Rings

iammiles• 7 months ago

I'm rereading the Lord of the Rings after about ~15 years since my last one. For this read through I've been thoroughly delighted by the interlude of poems and songs whereas before I'd just gloss over them. I wonder if this is an effect of getting older.

romperstomper2• 7 months ago

This time I read LotR in original for the first time and this was quite an effort for me as non-native English speaker. And yes - poems and songs have much more sens and much more beautiful in original if compared with translated ones.

vmilner2• 7 months ago

Definitely listen to the 1981 radio version if you like them.

Bilbo's Last Song scene here(spoiler warning for those who haven't read it as its at the end of the book).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIsHshR1Ig8

robdimarco• 7 months ago

I read 57 books this year, a mix between fiction and non-fiction

Top 5 fiction

- A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

- Trust by Hernan Diaz

- City of Thieves by David Benioff

- Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

- Widow Basquiat by by Jennifer Clement

Top 5 non-fiction

- Boom Town by Sam Anderson

- The Second Founding by Eric Foner

- The Club by Jonathan Clegg and Joshua Robinson

- The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel by Douglas Brunt

- The Spy and the Traitor by Ben McIntyre

seizethecheese2• 7 months ago

I second The Spy and the Traitor

ilvez5• 7 months ago

My top book this year was Joe Abercrombie "The Devils".

Also highlights were:

- Brandon Sanderson "Wind and Truth" & "Yumi and the Nightmare Painter"

- Indrek Hargla most of "Apothecary Melchior" series (didn't read all yet :)

- Jim Butcher "Brief Cases"

- James Islington "The Strength of the Few"

Rest of the stuff:

- I. Hargla "Süvahavva" series

- John Gwynne "Ruin" & "Wrath"

- nobody103 "Mother of Learning" I, II, III

- Daniel T. Jackson "Gatebound"

- Brandon Sanderson "Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England"

Re-reads (mostly on audio for dozing off, but then got hooked .. again):

- James S.A. Corey "Caliban's War" & "Cibola Burn"

- George RR Martin "Game of Thrones"

- Robin Hobb "Assassin's Apprentice"

tstrimple5• 7 months ago

You've got some great ones on here. I'm curious how you found some of them to be.

Jim Butcher "Brief Cases": I'm a huge fan of the Dresden series. I find it to be very enlightening as we watch an author grow with his primary character. The early books were particularly weak, but they grow and get better and better. However, I'm unfairly biased against short stories, so I avoid all the X.5 releases. Are these worth exploring as I'm waiting for the followup to Battleground?

Mother of Learning: I generally don't like litrpg or progression fantasy, but I'm a sucker for time loops. I enjoyed this series and craved more like it. Anything else you'd recommend in this genre?

I read the Fitz books... fuck... decades ago at this point. Is it worth revisiting in audiobook? I've been burned so many times by nostalgia that I'm reluctant to revisit old favorites.

zargon3• 7 months ago

I revisited Assassin's Apprentice recently, as an audiobook, having read the series 20 years ago. Personally, I will not be continuing. The best term I came across to describe it is "injustice porn" or "misery porn." Fitz and the other protagonists are stymied and beaten at every turn, through the entire series (I checked summaries to see if there would ever be any payoff in continuing). If you're in the mood for an extremely depressing read with no positive outcomes, this is the series for you. I have been in that place before, but I have no tolerance for that at this stage of my life.

ilvez5• 7 months ago

"Brief Cases" -- just give me more Dresden. I think my favourite series, I'm a simple guy :) Short stories themself are so and so. If you are into the series then these small stories are just like Saturday evening reading, so no big investment. Some of them stick and make you warm, some of them meh, thats ok.

"Mother of Learning" I picked up from my (ex-)colleague. Not in the time-travelling, but he told me that I would probably like Dungeon Crawler Carl. Haven't gotten to it yet. He's read more fantasy than me so he just suggested after we discussed about our preferences. This one I just wanted to read because he really was into :)

About Fitz -- read my other comment. I think whole Elderling series is worth it. It is the long game. Just being invested in characters and Robin Hobb can write characters. If you only think about Farseer trilogy, then I still think it's worth it, but maybe I'm just sucker for it. :-) (there are pacing issues for sure, but Hobb wrote it in 90s, in that sense it was ahead of time, forgive some of those small issues). Read it first I guess 20+ years ago or so..

buu709• 7 months ago

For something like Mother of Learning I'd recommend The Years of Apocalypse. Available on RoyalRoad (where Mother of Learning was also posted before being published). Bit of a slower burn, but builds to similar heights and not finished yet.

inatreecrown2• 7 months ago

Die Traumnovelle - Arthur Schnitzler

Winterplanet - Ursula K. LeGuin

walterburns• 7 months ago

On Writing Well, by William Zinsser. Hilarious, enlightening, affirming of everyone's need and ability to write well.

colechristensen2• 7 months ago

Things I really liked:

- The Murderbot Diaries (all of them)

- Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Count Zero (Sprawl Trilogy) – perfection

- Discworld series (almost all of them)

- Bobiverse serise (all of them)

- Old Man's War series

- Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir – Werner Herzog's autobiography

- The Songlines - Bruce Chatwin

- Kissinger: A Biography (approval of Kissinger not required)

- various collected works of Borges

- various works of Carl Jung

- Starship Troopers

- A Man Called Ove – made me cry

- A Stitch in Time – a star trek actor novelizing his headcannon of the character he played

- Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

- Mickey7

- Solaris

- Flowers for Algernon

- Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

- I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

Things I disliked:

- The Wheel of Time (I forget how many I got through)

- Eruption – a posthumous Michael Crichton book was really terrible

- The Book of the New Sun

- The Creative Act: A Way of Being – an artist trying and failing to talk about science

EvanAnderson5• 7 months ago

I'll throw out a recommendation for Neal Stephenson, if you're not already familiar. I like all of his stuff, personally, but the books "Zodiac"[0], "Interface"[1], and "The Cobweb"[2] (the latter two co-authored with his uncle) I think would be a slam-dunk for you, based on your list.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac_(novel)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_(novel)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cobweb_(novel)

colechristensen2• 7 months ago

I've got REAMDE and maybe Cryptonomicon? finished though quite a few years ago. I've had a couple of false starts with Anathem though I think I've been told it just gets started slowly.

I liked but didn't love the Stephenson I've read. Unlike William Gibson novels I've read, Stephenson is a solid 7 or 8 out of ten for me (maybe I should have added another category in my list). Your suggestions will probably make it on to my list.

TrustPatches• 7 months ago

A lot, but my favorites of the year:

- Children of Time

- Hyperion & The Fall of Hyperion

- Red Dragon & Silence of the Lambs

- Cat's Cradle

- The Book of the New Sun

iddan• 7 months ago

- My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner: A Family Memoir - Meir Shalev

- Four Meals - Meir Shalev

- Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Currently reading: Anna Karenina - Tolstoy, The Creative Act - Rick Rubin

mordechai9000• 7 months ago

My favorite fiction book I read this year is Berlin, a graphic novel by Jason Lutes.

constantinum• 7 months ago

- Permutation City — Greg Egan

- She Said — Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey

- Conclave — Robert Harris

- First You Write a Sentence — Joe Moran

- Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine — Gail Honeyman

- The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov

More books here -> https://pastebin.com/XVeacpHM

thesumofall• 7 months ago

My best reads this year:

Non-fiction:

- The Power Broker by Robert Caro

Fantasy:

- The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

Sci-fi:

- Sun Eater series by Christopher Ruocchio

- A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr

- Ra by qntm

- Jean le Flambeur series by Hannu Rajaniemi

- Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (didn’t like the subsequent books of the series so much)

Other novels:

- Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard

Dambalala• 7 months ago

. Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch. Urban fantasy with a great audiobook narrator (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith). Harry Potter meets Sherlock Holmes. Loved the computer history and London Library parts in False Value.

. Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones. Found the first book in a local phonebox library. Especially liked the probability computer in Conrad’s Fate.

. Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. Recommended by a barber after I mentioned the cartoon "Scavengers Reign". Annihilation is well worth reading.

. The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. Novel about memory, forgetting.

. Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman. Short novel imagining Einstein's dreams whilst he worked on his relativity theory.

KaiserPro3• 7 months ago

Rivers of London series

Whats nice about the first book is that its a love letter to london. Its not too serious, which a lot of fantasy can be. Its fun.

Its a light fantasy, in that most of the world is "normal" london, and the "silly bollocks" is threaded through reality, rather than the other way around.

At first Kobna kinda grated, but he now is to me, DCI grant, and a whole bunch of other characters.

port112• 7 months ago

I'm not influential enough but I'll share the recommendations I think will help people like me: struggling parents.

This year I've reread The Discontented Little Baby Book. If you're getting/have a newborn, this is the book I'd read. It's humane. No sleep training, no nonsense about babies. We went full ‘possum’ with our baby and I like how happy he became.

I've also read Ten Things I Wish You Knew About Your Child's Mental Health. To me this could be an instant classic. No fluff, lots of advice for parents. Prima.

There's plenty of literature on parenting, but so much of it is poorly written or poorly researched. Be careful out there. (And don't read PLS, yikes.)

---

I finally discovered Andy Weir, the Thursday Next series, and The 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear. I'm amazed it took me so long to get there. All excellent.

For some reason I decided to read all 7 Harry Potters in French. If you're learning French, it's a great idea, the French gets progressively harder so you can keep up!

Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life has been my companion for some weeks, but it's quite long.

I'm happy with all my reading this year, some 32 books, many in a foreign language. Given I've no time to read during the day, and can only get some pages in after the kid's in bed, it's not too shabby.

Oh, and we've read Stompysaurus, like, 90 times? Grawwwwr!

Happy reading!

homeonthemtn2• 7 months ago

For what it's worth, we're a handful of days out from our first so, thank you for that recommendation.

port112• 7 months ago

Congratulations! It’s a very challenging and bumpy ride but it makes life differently meaningful.

Discontented Little Baby is terrific. I was parenting out of fear, the typical stuff of staying indoors, sleep schedules, etc. The book has a really chill approach: just go live your life and bring the baby along. That’s how we wanted to parent, but somehow everyone around us got us into a place of fear.

Don’t make the kid nap in the dark, that hinders their cortisol/melatonin cycle development. Go have fun together!

Good luck, internet stranger :)

wojciii2• 7 months ago

I read a lot of sci-fi. Much of that is bad.

This is not the case.

Dennis Paul Himes: Raisinbread: The Story of Jennifer Choate and Her Role in the Crisis of 2262

After reading the above book (I didn't get much sleep) I e-mailed the author with the subject "Please take my money!" and asked him to write more books.

lencastre• 7 months ago

Fiction:

“There is no antimimetic division”,

“Project hail mary”,

“Permutation city”,

“White noise”,

and non-fiction:

“Measurement”,

“The sovereign child”,

“Don’t die”,

“The basic laws of human stupidity”,

…and I think I am forgetting something

peterspath3• 7 months ago

I read 52 books this year:

- Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger

- Discipline Equals Freedom by Jocko Willink

- Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink

- The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

- The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff

- When the Body Says No by Gabor Maté

- Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke

- The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer

- Standing Strong by John MacArthur

- The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

- We Who Wrestle with God by Jordan B. Peterson

- I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek

- The Holy Bible

- Son of Hamas by Mosab Hassan Yousef

- I Am Giorgia by Giorgia Meloni

- 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup

- The Two-Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren

- The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray

- The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray

- The War on the West by Douglas Murray

- Porn Generation by Ben Shapiro

- The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro

- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

- In Farleigh Field by Rhys Bowen

- Darkest Hour by Anthony McCarten

- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

- The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown

- Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

- Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming

- Moonraker by Ian Fleming

- Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming

- From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming

- Dr No by Ian Fleming

- Goldfinger by Ian Fleming

- For Your Eyes Only by Ian Fleming

- Thunderball by Ian Fleming

- The Spy Who Loved Me by Ian Fleming

- On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming

- You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming

- The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming

- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

- 1984 by George Orwell

- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

- The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

Next year I will read more books of the Russian writers on this list. I enjoyed those books very much.

After seeing this list, what books do you recommend for me?

Popeyes2• 7 months ago

James by Percival Everett

Five Decembers by James Kestrel

The Names by Florence Knapp

The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck

damethos• 7 months ago

- How big things get done

- The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

- The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition

- The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully

- Rework

Added them on my blog as well with a small review on each in case anyone is interested: https://www.alexanderlolis.com/my-2025-reads

beilabs2• 7 months ago

I really enjoyed Leaders Eat Last and Careless People.

2025 brought me to:

The Mom Test - Rob Fitzpatrick

Leaders Eat Last - Simon Sinek

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

The Time Machine - H.G. Wells

What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School - Mark McCormack

The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change - Adam Braun

Neuromancer - William Gibson

Blood of Elves - Andrzej Sapkowski

We Were Eight Years In Power - Ta-Nehisi Coates

Mort - Terry Pratchett

I’m Glad My Mom Died - Jennette McCurdy

The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger - Stephen King

American Gods - Neil Gaiman

The Boy’s in the Boat - Daniel James Brown

Can’t Hurt Me - David Goggins

Rocket Fuel: The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business - Gino Wickman

Source Code - Bill Gates

Mythos - Stephen Fry

Educated - Tara Westover

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World - John Wood

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism is a memoir - Sarah Wynn-Williams

Hail Mary - Andy Weir

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Phipip K. Dick

The Blade Itself - Joe Abercrombie

FunnyLookinHat• 7 months ago

I really enjoyed Leaving Microsoft to Change the World by John Wood. It's fairly obscure though - I was surprised to see it mentioned here.!

beilabs2• 7 months ago

Picked it up in a Nepalese book shop. Was a good read.

drunx3• 7 months ago

"Lonesome Dove"

And it's hard to convey how much I enjoyed it. I'm afraid to pick up any other novel of a similar kind as I'll be furiously comparing.

So after it I sterted reading hardcore Sci-fi: Vacuum Diagrams, to not let my mind draw any comparative thoughts:)

PaulRobinson• 7 months ago

I have recently been RTO'ed so I'm expecting to have a lot of time to read in coming months - yay for all transport between two points in London taking ~1 hour no matter what the actual physical distance - but in the last year I've been pretty busy with stressful projects and homelife, so feel lightly read compared to previous years.

Despite that, some recommendations:

First, remember that everybody's reading list is naturally capped. If it takes you a week to read a fiction book, and you're 30 years old, you have ~2,500 books left in your life. If you're closer to 50, it's more like ~1,500. And if it takes you a month to finish a book, you're at ~600 and ~350 respectively.

This means being picky is a necessity. Do not read books on "100 hundred books you must read before you die", style lists unless they all appeal to you. Do not try and cover the ground of every Nobel laureate unless you're a) a prolific reader, b) multi-lingual, and c) not easily bored. The same goes for any other prestigious prize, list, etc.

The most important thing is to read things you like reading. Don't read classics unless you like classics. Don't read sci-fi just because you work in tech unless you like sci-fi. I like a lot of contemporary "high brow" literature because I enjoy how people discover new ways to play with language to convey emotions. A lot of people find this incredibly dull, and that's fine.

You do you. You don't have time to read books somebody else says you "should" or "must" read.

One thing I think we can all agree on though is that almost all self-help books and airport style management or "popular science" books do not return the investment they demand. It's for you to decide how to interpret this, but please, read things that bring you a depth of joy not because they're popular or on a list or seem to be "everywhere".

For my style of reading, I like to get pointers from two magazines I subscribe to: The Literary Review [0] and Granta[1]. I am sure there are other sources for your preferred type of reading. Go support them. Be prepared to hand over cash to writers who publish a physical artefact, it's the only way they'll keep eating and doing that thing.

I would like to find time to add other magazines to my list (TLS, Paris Review, etc.), but I have limited time, these specific two tick boxes for me stylistically, have proven the test of time indicating quality, and even if I only find one or two books or authors a year out of them, have paid for themselves many times over. Further, I get a reasonable review of what's out there and can get a sense of what isn't for me, without reading it or feeling guilty about not reading it even though others tell me I "must".

As an aside, Lit Review's history reviews often are so good at covering the ground of the material the book covers, I feel like I've had a 1,000 word Cliff Notes version of the book in my hand and can decide to dig deeper if I want, but if not, I could understand a basic conversation about that topic if I needed to, and on occasion something I read has helped in a pub quiz.

One last point: try and break out of your echo chamber sometimes. It is easy to pick up and enjoy books that support one's own World view, but I like to challenge mine and keep it in check.

Reading the Communist Manifesto will not make you a Communist. Reading Mein Kampf will not convert you into a Nazi, because you have the perspective to rip it to shreds and see it for what it is.

Buying (OK, pirating, maybe you don't want to vote with your money in this category), books that heap praise on people you perhaps don't like or disagree with - Trump, Obama, Putin, Fidel Castro, Biden, Palosi, Blair, Thatcher, Pinochet, whoever... - these books will not make you those people or somebody who heaps praise on them. Develop the critical muscle to question things you read.

I say this because not only has this helped me navigate the news and political cycles of my life, but because it's helped me improve relationships with friends and family and even my reading of fiction.

Books really are the most marvellous things, and they all deserve more of our attention, even the bad ones.

[0] https://literaryreview.co.uk

[1] https://granta.com

pmdr• 7 months ago

Oppenheimer's biography and some Cormac McCarthy books.

t0bia_s• 7 months ago

The Road to Serfdom - Friedrich August von Hayek

Apology of Socrates - Plato

The Betrayal of the Intellectuals - Julien Benda

ramshanker• 7 months ago

This year: DirectX12 documentation. Lots of them. Harry Potter part 7 (again). Read Part 1 and 2 to kid.

torcete• 7 months ago

- 5 hours with Mario by Miguel Delibes.

- The three body problem saga.

- Cloud Atlas.

adidoit• 7 months ago

the ones that stood out were - Nostalgia for the Absolute by George Steiner - Digital Reversal by Andrew Mir - Vita Contemplativa by Byung-chul Han

ssenssei• 7 months ago

My favorite book this year has to be The Divine Farce, I haven't been gripped by a story like that in years. A short stay in hell falls in the same category. I'm still reading a book by Barbara Kingsolver: Demon Copperhead. It's really good and I like the story, but I have not finished it yet since I can't seem to find the time for it. Some other short stories like an inhabitant of Carcossa...

d4rkp4ttern2• 7 months ago

Read:

Thomas Mann’s Glass Bead game. Needed some patience to get through.

Benjamin Labatut/ When we cease to understand the world. (Fictionalized accounts of some scientists)

Bird/Sherwin: American Prometheus

Started but abandoned midway:

Stanlislaw Lem’s : His Master’s Voice Thomas Mann’s: Magic Mountain.

About reading habit: I find it useful to make it a point to read in bed at least 30 mins before sleeping.

yuchtman3• 7 months ago

Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse I assume?

If you want to try more Herman Hesse I preferred Demian & Siddharta far over Glass Bead game (read in German though, can't speak for translations).

d4rkp4ttern2• 7 months ago

Oops yes Hesse, right, I got my German authors crossed :) Sidhartha was beautiful so I wanted to try Glass Bead Game, and I agree, I liked the former much more. I’ll give Demian a try. Thanks for the rec.

miki123211• 7 months ago

"From GSM to LTE–Advanced Pro and 5G, An Introduction to Mobile Networks and Mobile Broadband" by Martin Sauter

This is the telecoms book I never knew I wanted. As the title suggests, it explains how the telecom world has evolved in great detail, with a particular focus on mobile technologies, although there's a chapter on SS7 and one on WiFi and Bluetooth. It stops short of packet layout descriptions, but it goes extremely deeply into the technologies it describes while still being understandable to somebody with little to no telecoms experience. This is the book that made me truly understand how that stuff really works.

sevensor• 7 months ago

Mary Renault. Fire From Heaven. I think she was ahead of the curve in recognizing that Alexander had monstrous qualities at a time when he was still seen as a kind of superhero.

Tolkein. The Silmarillion. I’ve bounced off this book a dozen times over decades, despite deeply enjoying The Hobbit and LoTR. This time I discovered that the best way to read it is backwards, tracing connections to characters you already know.

Stephenson. Anathem. I think I’ll skip the end next time. The first time I read it, I was confused; this time I understood exactly what was happening but I thought it was a bit pointless. Still worth it for the first 3/4 of the novel.

Lots of short stories. I was expecting to like Mark Twain better, but ours is a much more earnest era, and no match for his Gilded Age cynicism. What passes for cynicism today is Twain in his sunniest mood. At any rate, I appreciate Twain, but I enjoy EM Forster, Henry James, JG Ballard, William Gibson, and lots of others I’m forgetting at the moment.

DoingSomeThings• 7 months ago

Unexpected favorite read of the year: Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s popcorn fiction, but

Personal Growth: “15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership”. The encouragement to “feel all your feelings” is insanely difficult for me, but has sent me on a multi-month life arc to be more present to my body sensations.

Related: If you log your books in Goodreads, I built this web app to recommend future books based on reading history and reviews. Was fun for me and may resonate

https://goodreads-analyst.vercel.app/

fuzzfactor• 7 months ago

What did you read in 2025?

Between the lines, my friends, between the lines.

hyperman1• 7 months ago

I started reading books with a Hugo Award, most recent first. I would recommend it. They're very readable but still slightly non-standard enough to be interesting.

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

qkeast• 7 months ago

Some highlights from this year include:

- The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

- Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

- Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

- The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

- A Frog In The Fall (And Later On) by Linnea Sterte (A graphic novel)

Overall I'm at 65 books on the year—I maintain a reading list[1] on my personal site that has the rest.

[1] https://quinnkeast.com/reading

whatgoodisaroad• 7 months ago

i love Linnea Sterte books, stages of rot is also excellent

Kaibeezy• 7 months ago

Wolf Hall. Despite a sprinkling of linguistic and philosophical gems, I really struggled, then put it down for a couple of months, and couldn't bring myself to read anything else of any substance during that time. Thought it had destroyed some part of my brain. I finally had a long flight and determined to finish it, which I did. Then I sat in the heated pool on the roof of the TWA Hotel, with an icy wind whipping the rising steam, glad I was not Henry and don't have to deal with Anne, even though people are still mostly the same as they ever were, and grateful for the planes, phones and even Slack setting me free.

To quote Wolsey via Shakespeare:

  A peace above all earthly dignities,
  A still and quiet conscience

Cloudly2• 7 months ago

Just finished For Blood and Money - Nathan Vardi. Enjoyed the real world characters who drove the developments of cancer research forward and the messy business of pharma.

I enjoyed Ra - more than "There is not anti-mimetics division" which I felt lost itself in the second half.

I greatly enjoyed Anathem - though I have always been a sucker for Stephenson.

I found 2666 to be profound and tragic. Obviously the intention of the book - but given that the crime rate in my country is analogous to Mexico's - the pain of the femicide in the book and casual cover-ups felt tangible to me. I feel it is clear that is is incomplete due to the Author's death, but I don't think that takes away from the book.

In a similar vein, but in completely different genres I finally finished the wheel of time series which I started nearly 15 years ago. After getting to book 11 I pushed through the rest this year. Unfortunately I felt mostly underwhelmed. I think the Sanderson transition did not age as well as initially received. Maybe it's because I have read too much Sanderson before getting to him. His voice is noticeably different to Jordan's.

Finally I really enjoyed both the Wager and Pachinko.

I have started a slew of other books and not completed them but there are pending standouts. I am still halfway through Stalin by Monetfiore, and I enjoy returning when I can stomach the horrible history.

Honorable mention to Apple in China which I did not complete and might eventually. Don't think I will finish Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas though.

In the current growing pending pile I have 1493 - which I know I will enjoy, everything is tuberculosis and now it can be told. We shall see if I make any headway :)

giorgioz3• 7 months ago

I cannot find your book There is not anti-mimetics division... Are you sure it exists?

Cloudly2• 7 months ago

There Is No Antimemetics Division - qntm

CommenterPerson• 7 months ago

"The Emperor of All Maladies" by Siddartha Mukhejee.

He is a medical doctor, researcher .. plus writes great science / medical books. This one won a Pulitzer prize. Check out his other books "The song of the Cell" and "The Gene". The books take some work to read but every page is a treat.

dysoco• 7 months ago

I attempted to read this and it was very interesting and greatly written but I had to drop it. This was worse than a horror book, nothing scarier to me than to think about terminal illnesses.

Rendello• 7 months ago

[Data-Oriented Design – Richard Fabian]

DoD is an interesting design philosophy used in game engine design. This book was both quite concrete and quite abstract, so I walked away not exactly sure if I got the message, but the idea of modelling data closer to a SQL database for performance is interesting.

[Never Split the Difference – Chris Voss]

Nightly audiobook. There's a lot more information than it seems on first reading, I'm trying to internalize and practice it in daily life.

[Lost Connections – Johann Hari]

A book about depression, connection, and medication. It was quite good, though I learned later that the author has quite a bit of controversy.

[The Twentysomething Treatment – Meg Jay]

The book was good, her interviews on people's podcasts are even better.

[You Can't Win – Jack Black]

Awesome HN recommendation, an autobiography of an early 1900s criminal.

[The Starship and the Canoe – Kenneth Brower]

Another HN recommendation. A snapshot of the life of Freeman Dyson of project ORION and his son George, who built a giant fiberglass canoe and paddles the west coast of Canada and the States.

codingclaws• 7 months ago

Neuromancer - 2nd time I read it. Such a good book.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go - 2nd time I read it. Cool book. It's about a world with a big river where humans are reborn after they die on earth.

Use of Weapons - 2nd time I read it. One of the more popular Iain Banks Culture novels.

Dungeon Crawler Carl #1 - Loved it.

Matter - 2nd time I read it. This is another Banks Culture novel. This book is actually very good. Most of it takes places on a megastructure planet with different levels.

Assassin's Apprentice - I don't get the hype.

Memories of Ice - 3rd Malazan book. I thought the first quarter was lit.

Cursed Cocktails - Cozy fantasy, good book.

I log all my read books here [0].

[0] https://www.commentcastles.org/r/ireadthisbook

georgeecollins2• 7 months ago

Best novel of the year for me: Playworld by Adam Ross.

I read a lot of books for work, talk to people who read a lot of books, and that is my #1 recommendation. Also this year I enjoyed Demon Copperhead, Mobility, Land of Milk and Honey, Afterworld, The Terror. Many of those books aren't new, but I enjoyed them in 2025.

homeonthemtn2• 7 months ago

I didn't read fuck all. I mean I read all of 2 books, which was fine, but I'm offended at my low book count this year. I intend of changing that asap.

vmilner2• 7 months ago

'The Housekeeper and the Professor' by Yoko Ogawa

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

is a beautiful novel about a mathematician with a short term memory condition, that should appeal to HN readers.

jason2323• 7 months ago

As a huge fan of Top Gear and The Grand Tour, I read Mr Wilman’s Motoring Adventure. Really fun book giving an inside view of what it took to produce these shows

Simon_O_Rourke• 7 months ago

A lot more of Max Hastings than I would care to admit. But boy, can than man write a ripping yarn.

ksherlock• 7 months ago

well, audio books:

- Salem's Lot

- the Moon is a harsh mistress

- Stranger in a Strange land

- The Stand (1990 edition, which initially confused me since I read the 1980 edition long ago)

- The best short stories of Mark Twain

- Nightmares and Dreamscapes

- Liar's Poker

- The Big Short

- The intelligent investor (2009 revised edition -- my ears perked up when he casually mentioned microsoft vs microstrategy during the .com bomb)

- Flash boys

- Next

- Bonfire of the vanities

- Barbarians at the gate

- The man who solved the market

- The Fund

- The world according to Cunk

- The house of Morgan (currently 5 hours in and currently tired of the phrase "house of")

1000100_1000101• 7 months ago

The Locked Tomb series: - Gideon the Ninth - Harrow the Ninth - Nona the Ninth

Liked the first Locked Tomb, didn't really enjoy the remainder of the series.

The Witch King (from the Murderbot author), was alright.

The Time Travellers Almanac. Time Travellers Almanac was meh. A set of short stories, but many retreads of the same ideas we've seen over the decades. There was one good story, and one other interesting concept...

Road to Roswell and Crosstalk. Connie Willis' books were great, as usual.

Brzrkr. Keanu's book was meh.

The first five of the Kate Daniels Series: - Magic Bites - Magic Burns - Magic Strikes - Magic Bleeds - Magic Slays

Kate Daniels is doing an acceptable job filling in for Dresen's absence, though book 3 and 4 go a bit heavy on the romance side.

Pre-orders pending on the next Murderbot book (Platform Decay), and Dresden (Twelve Months)

sheunl• 7 months ago

Virtual Selling by Jeb Blout

ChristopherDrum• 7 months ago

I tried to read a mix of things, especially "classics I never got around to." I didn't meet my personal target of 30 books (got sidetracked writing my blog), but definitely read things that stuck with me.

Notable and beautiful

- "The Nickel Boys" by Colson Whitehead

- "Blind Sight" by Meg Howrey

- "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. LeGuin

Non-fiction

- "Workflow"

- "Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D"

- "Debugging: The 9 Indispensible Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems"

The rest (all first-time reads)

- "Absolution" by Jeff Vandermeer (I enjoyed it but it was kind of unnecessary)

- "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte (I don't get the fascination with it)

- "Strange Pictures" by Uketsu (odd)

- "Starship Troopers" by Heinlein

- "Rendezvous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke

- "Ubik" by Philip K. Dick

- "Mickey 7" by Edward Ashton

- "Fugitive Telemetry" and "System Collapse" by Martha Wells

- "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson (I was surprisingly into it)

- "Glass Houses" by Madeline Ashby

- "Cover Her Face" by P.D.James

- "The Crystal Shard" by R.A.Salvatore (I needed to see what Drizzt is all about)

- "James" by Percival Everett (maybe my biggest disappointment of the year)

- "Alien Clay" by Adrian Tchaikovsky

- "Some Desperate Glory" by Emily Tesh

- "Sea of Rust" by C. Robert Cargill

jharohit• 7 months ago

sharing a few books I recommended in my annual list (recommend reading!) https://rohitjha.com/blog/reading-highlights-2025/

Non Fiction:

- Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang (2025)

- How to Live an Extraordinary Life by Anthony Pompliano (2024)

Fiction:

- The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (1956)

- Consider Phlebas (Culture Series #1) by Iain M. Banks (1987)

- The Way of Kings (2010, Stormlight #1) & Words of Radiance (2014, Stormlight #2) by Brandon Sanderson

anotherevan2• 7 months ago

My reading is largely split between Sci-Fi and Australian crime fiction. So far this year I consumed 16 audiobooks and 68 ebooks. Given the Oz fiction would be a bit more unique to this audience, here are the highlights:

The Fall Between and Burning Mountain by Darcy Tindale recount the investigations of main character Rebecca Giles.

The Survivors by Jane Harper. Seriously, get any book or a shopping list written by Jane and you'll not be able to put it down.

Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth. Another author who's complete catalogue is well worth your time.

Black River and Broke Road by Matthew Spencer.

Unbury the Dead by Fiona Hardy.

Other authors worth noting are Margaret Hickey, Chris Hammer and Christian White.

On the sci-fi side of things, I found Infinite Archive by Mur Lafferty quite cozy. Also the Lady Astronauth Universe series by Mary Robinette Kowal, that starts with The Calculating Starts. Flybot by Dennis Taylor (of Bobbi-verse fame).

I was less enamoured with A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine than others are, and don't feel the need to tackle the second in the series.

I also revisited the John Cleaver horror series by Dan Wells that starts with the excellent I Am Not a Serial Killer.

I've just started Slow Gods by Claire North. I find her books a bit hit and miss for me but so far, so good. I absolutely love The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, and Touch was also quite good, but some of her others I could not finish or didn't event start as they were just not for me.

cykros• 7 months ago

Mastering Bitcoin, The Bitcoin Standard, Broken Money, and finished up a few other books I'd been in the middle of -- Against the Gods being most of interest here, as it was a good history of the discoveries of probability and how we think about risk management.

Also about halfway into Mastering the Lightning Network.

jpmoral• 7 months ago

Ukraine: the Forging of a Nation by Yaroslav Hrytsak, translated by Dominique Hoffman

Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It by Janina Ramirez

asim• 7 months ago

People read a lot of different things so I'm going to throw this one out there. I read the Quran. I read it continuously and it takes a while to finish but every time I read it I discover something new. People tend to discount a religious text as not for them but I think actually the translation or English narrative needs to fit the people and the times. Also the medium by which we read. I wrote an app to that effect to help me.

To anyone interested not just in reading it but asking it questions here's the app I wrote https://reminder.dev

kirubakaran• 7 months ago

Here's my list: https://kirubakaran.com/bookshelf/

I especially enjoyed "Seeing Like a State"

ILoveHorses• 7 months ago

I wanted to challenge myself in 2025 and alternate between fiction and non-fiction, so here are my highlights

- Crime and Punishment - Homo Deus - Catch 22 - Flash Boys - The Art of Strategy - Moby Dick (could only get halfway through though :() - The Great Gatsby - How to be Alone (couldn't get past 2 chapters)

Quinzel• 7 months ago

I read:

- The Courage to be Disliked. - Moral Tribes - Crazy like us - Careless People - Madness Made Me - The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion.

And a few that were on my 2025 list that I didn’t make it through, and are on my list for 2026 include: - Team of Rivals - Behave - Why Greatness cannot be planned.

Hopefully I’ll get through those three books before the end of Feb when I go back to Uni, and won’t have time to read for leisure for about 7 months.

rasulkireev• 7 months ago

FINISHED:

- Traction by Gabriel Weinberg (it's ok)

- A Skill Called Luck by Jakob Greenfeld (very good)

- Unf*ck Your Sales by Jakob Greenfeld (very good)

- Books by Alex West (very good)

- How to Live by Derek Sivers (very very good)

- Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown (really enjoyed it)

- The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (it's okay)

- The Narrow Road by Felix Dennis (it's okay)

- Oh Crap! Potty Training by Jamie Glowacki (success)

- Вишнёвый Сад Чехов Антон Павлович (did not like it at all)

- Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift (liked it)

- Hunt, Gather, Parent Michaeleen Doucleff (this book is a game changer, strong recommend for every parent)

- MAKE by Pieter Levels

- Main Street Millionaire by Codie Sanchez

- Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling

- The Sweaty Startup by Nick Huber

- The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury (did not like it at all)

- Чем Люди Живы Лев Николаевич Толстой (nice)

- 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall (pretty good)

- Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (eye opening)

- Growth Levers and How to Find Them by Matt Lerner (meh)

- Alexander Pushking Stories (very nice. crazy how he makes rhymes yet the whole thing makes sense)

IN_PROGRESS:

- War and Piece (I'm shocked at how much I'm liking it)

- Scaling Fast by Swizec Teller (really good, about to finish)

- Unreasonable Hospitality (it alright)

- Mom Test (it's good, but for some reason I keep failing to finish it)

- Marcus Aurelius Meditations (reading it slowly as inspiration strikes)

- Seneca Dialogues

- Ultimate Guide to Link Building by Garrett French

STARTED, BUT DID NOT FINISH (That's a big add list):

- Michel de Montaigne "Essays"

- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (feels to hard to tackle right now)

- Seeking Wisdom

- Product Led Growth

- Demand Side Sales

- Odyssey by Homer

- Full Stack Tao by Alex Kondov

- Logic for Programmers

- The Story of Philosophy

- The Story of Civilization Vol 1

- The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx

- Economic Facts and Fallacies Thomas Sowell

- The Beginning of Infinity David Deutsch

- Obviously Awesome by April Dunford

- SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome Mary Beard

- American Kingpin by Nick Bilton (it's good, just felt irrelevant, will revisit)

- Indexing Beyond the Basics by Tobias Petry (only read it when necessary)

- The Mind Illuminated by John Yates (can't keep meditations to stick)

Note:

- I keep notes on books I finished on my site, but need to bring it up to date: https://www.rasulkireev.com/book-notes/

osmyn• 7 months ago

Asked Gemini for a list of books recommended on this page multiple times:

Top Recommendations

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams: This was the most mentioned book on the page, with five different users discussing its "cautionary tale" regarding power and idealism.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir: A favorite for both readers and audiobook listeners, praised for its engaging story and high-quality narration.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman: Multiple users recommended this LitRPG series, particularly noting that the audiobook experience is exceptional.

Mother of Learning by nobody103: This time-loop progression fantasy appeared in several lists and was described as a "must-read" for fans of the genre.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller: A classic that continues to resonate, with several users discussing its humor and depiction of the human condition.

Other Notable Duplicates

Apple in China: Cited three times for its insights into the relationship between the tech giant and Chinese manufacturing.

Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb: Featured in both re-read lists and debates about its emotional intensity.

Permutation City by Greg Egan: Highly recommended by sci-fi fans for its "stimulating" concepts regarding digital consciousness.

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie: Mentioned by three users as a top new release for the year.

Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?

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