Ask HN: What's your favorite book that nobody you know has heard of? |
Ask HN: What's your favorite book that nobody you know has heard of? |
A delightful read from my childhood that I still revisit about once a year when I've had a bit too much negativity from the news and socila media.
A Michael Crichton-esque thriller set on an island that's been cut off from the rest of the world for 1/2 a billion years and the crazy nitro fuelled funny car of an ecosystem that's there.
It's not a surprise philosophical treatise that'll revolutionize your cognition, just a bit of good fast fun.
As I searched for the author after reading this book by chance it seemed to me that he is quite famous - but nobody around me has ever heard of him. The book I recommend is a collection of short stories, most rooted in reality with a hint(or sometimes a container) of surreal.
A big part of the book is a story about two boys (and the sister of one of the boys) creating an incubator at home to hatch eggs. It is a fascinating read - how they use books to adjust heat, how they take turns watching their home made incubator, how they are so sleep deprived that one of the boys wears shoes on opposite foot...
Today's kids grow up with smartphones and ready made robot kits. But there is a lot of charm in making things with whatever stuff is around you at home.
Small book, small words, short sentences; will kick your butt.
Everyone has heard of Bletchley park and the Manhattan project, but Jones's book covers the game of genuinely deadly cat and mouse that was played throughout WW2 as each side learned and adapted to eachothers scientific intelligence. Radar, Sonar (ASDIC at the time), Magnetic mines, etc.
Its easy to think of it as an intellectual game of chess but it is telling that when the Allies bombed Peenemunde (Nazi area 51) they flew straight over the laboratories to bomb the houses of the scientists.
The TV adaptation is brilliant - thoughtful documentary production, not dumbed down, and most of the people were still alive when it was filmed.
Edit: for anyone reading the book look out for mentions of any members of the Cambridge five - Jones was shunned after the war so he is perhaps overly kind to Kim Philby. The same system that allowed the KGB to run wild wouldn't recruit Jones into intelligence work for being of the wrong sort (apparently - according Peter Wright)
Translation from the Romanian available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/AdventuresInImmediateUnreality
About Max Blecher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Blecher
This book is a masterpiece. Very few people have heard of it, and until roughly a decade ago, Blecher was almost completely unknown outside of Romania.
It's the autobiography of a Southern debutante in Louisiana who contracted Hansen's disease. She is sent to a leper colony and spends the next 20 years there.
Copies of the book are quite expensive on Amazon but I was able to obtain it as an interlibrary loan.
The Internet Archive also has it available for lending.
The Earth Abides, by George Stewart. Story is set in Berkeley, CA after a disease kills most life on earth, maybe a little too on the nose these days...
Paolo Bacigalupi's short stories (e.g. Pump Six), some of which he later turned into longer books.
Courtship Rite, by Don Kingsbury. Plot is kind of bland but the worldbuilding is fantastic, essentially an attempt to create a world where cannibalism isn't immediately though of as an ultimate evil, which leads to odd implications for society.
Ishmael - recommended on here but doesn't seem well known in the UK. Everyone I've recommended to has enjoyed
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Proof that politics hasn't changed much in 100 years
Jonathon Livingston Seagull - again well known on here, but not so much generally
Strangely, for someone so brilliant, he did not believe in global warming!!!
Another one I liked is "Tuxedo Park : A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II". This one isn't that rare but I haven't anyone mention it.
This is mediocre book with an absolutely jaw dropping concept at its core. It's worth reading for all involved with building technology.