Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022? Is there a book, paper, report or article etc. that really stood out? |
Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022? Is there a book, paper, report or article etc. that really stood out? |
- Children of Time
- Children of Ruin (the sequel)
"The Body Keeps the Score" - Bessel Van Der Kok. tl;dr on this one is: the DSM V is woefully inadequate.
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Termination Shock - Neal Stephenson
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
Shards of Earth - Adrian Tchaikovsky
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
Gnomon - Nick Harkaway
The Gone Away World - Nick Harkaway
The Apollo Murders - Chris Hadfield
Nonfiction
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Mindf*ck - Chris Wylie
1776 - David McCullough
Apollo 8 - Jeffrey Kluger
Best paper, easily:
The biography went really deep into his art and pointed out what made it so special. As someone who knows nothing about art, this gave me a wonderful new perspective both on Da Vinci and on art in general.
An amazing nonfiction book that at times reads like science-fiction. A grand overview of various existential risks humanity faces and what we can do to decrease the chances. As it stands, the author estimates humanity's survival chances to be 5/6 per 100 years, given today's state of things. This is equivalent to playing a Russian roulette - not something we can maintain for the long term. So now is one of the most important times in history of humanity: preventing our not-unlikely total destruction.
There are some beautiful aspects of the book that will always stay with me. The Grand Inquisitor monologue is captivating, Alyosha is a deeply interesting character, Mitya's stories of gallivanting on a troika through Russia, and everything that is Grushenka...
But as a whole, I can't say I understood it. I didn't understand how these characters came together, or how the ending tied these (albeit interesting!) stories together.
Karamazov was the first Dostoevsky book I read. When it came to The Idiot, I was shocked by how different the writing style felt. It flowed more, the dialogue drove a lot of the narrative, and it generally was just a lot less dense.
I'm hardly an English Major let alone a scholar of Russian Lit so I'm sure the thoughts here are pedestrian.
"Do hard things" - title is self- explanatory, real growth happens under pressure.
"The Snowball" - this is such an important book - not just great financial advice, but also filled with life advice from the sage of Omaha. It's over 1000 pages long, but it's so honest.
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
I've also been listening to a lot of audiobooks and was really impressed by Rosamund Pike's reading of The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan (Book 2 of the Wheel of Time series) for Audible; enough that I'm waiting to listen to Book 3 to when her reading of it is released next summer.
This year's batch included _The Fifth Elephant_ and later _Night Watch_, and they're really fantastic. The pinnacle of the series? I have about ten books left to find out.
Also _The Loom Of Life_ (in Dutch, its Dutch title translates to "Why are there so many species") and it was a nice dense introduction to biodiversity and ecology.
And others less worth mentioning.
7 Habits of highly successful people How to win friends and influence people.
Both books seem to be used in thousands of newer books, borrowing the same themes.
They read like fiction and gave me a whole new appreciation for how Russia works, plus international politics and investing.
He has a very opinionated style, so if it doesn't work for, you'll hate it. At the same time, I've found it extremely insightful about human nature and it forced my to face some parts of myself that I wasn't aware of and didn't like.
Very much love-or-hate read, but worth trying. Just maybe check out his old blog first to see if his style is bearable for you.
Also, 2 new Cormac McCarthy novels just came out and I re-read the boarderlands trilogy and blood meridian this year to prep myself. I can’t recommend these enough, even tho it was my second time reading
A small sci-fi novel where a fantastic premise is explored. The most interesting part is the description of the role of the different characters in relation to the mystery (which is not explained in the book). See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/22/owls-of-the-ea...
"The Need to be Whole", from Wendell Berry, is deeply thought-provoking in a sort of spiritual-political way, though far too long for how much it has to say, and questionable at times.
I won't spoil it -- Wikipedia has a synopsis if you want -- other than to say it's end-of-times dystopia. But from 1957. It's delightful.
My friend Tim:
> Just finished On the Beach. Simple and profound. Just need some Zoloft and I will be great. Thanks for the recommendation.
"Nevil Shute was displeased with the final cut of the film, feeling that too many changes had been made at the expense of the story's integrity. After initial collaboration with Kramer, it was obvious that Shute's concerns were not being addressed; subsequently, he provided minimal assistance to the production. Gregory Peck agreed with Shute but, in the end, producer/director Stanley Kramer's ideas won out. Shute felt that [SPOILER REMOVED] ruined a central element of the novel, that is, [SPOILER REMOVED]."
So I'm not going to bother. I'll leave the book's memory as it is.
Memoir from the leader of the White Army during the Bolshevik revolution. Sparked an interest in Russian history for me.
- Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
The novel explores aging, careers, and relationships. As I plod further into middle age, I felt like it was written for me.
Amor Towles is a brilliant writer. I enjoyed all three of his novels:
- A Gentleman in Moscow - Rules of Civility - The Lincoln Highway
It's really 3 books, 5000+ pages, not a quick read but worth the effort.
Leaving out the of makes it sound like a much more interesting book, IMO ;)
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut was that book for me this year. It's an odd blend of fact and fiction covering a handful of 20th century physics and math discoveries. Alexander Grothendieck, Einstein, Schrödinger and Heisenberg all appear.
Pretty scary book about Russia circa 1930-1940
Fascinating execution on a fun sci fi idea: intergalactic prison from the inside. Delightful and creative character development and a cathartic conclusion!
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177502/ra...
The book recommends radical changes to how we deal with private property, voting, immigration, large stock investors, AI stuff, and more. It felt like an honest overview of various economic policies across the past (pointing out how radical many changes were) and a set of reasonable proposals for how to improve our currently-broken system.
What Is a Minor Literature? by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari.
I often felt like they were describing me to myself as I was reading... Highly recommend if you deal with perpetual dissatisfaction with your performance or achievements and would like to learn how to accept yourself for who you are and live a "lighter" existence.
as for my own entries…
- Lapvonia by Moshfegh and Hollow by Catling are both sort of magical-realism set in medieval European villages, which would normally be considered "fantasy" but I assure you are very much not fantasy novels as any normal reader would consider. They are rather stories about the medieval setting set from the perspective of how people a thousand years ago understood and perceived their real world.
- and also on that medieval-tales motif, The Mere Wife by Headley is a contemporary retelling of Beowulf (the hero is a cop named Ben Wolff), great fun and well-styled.
- Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Beaton is winning tons of awards and deservedly so.
- Termination Shock and Ministry for the Future are stabs at possible approaches for solving climate change by very prominent SF writers, which miss the mark for various reasons, but worth a look as they're the dominant themes for the next few years of science fiction.
Before I sign up: does it do 'people who liked this book also liked...' ? And/or are the recommendations based on previous books I put in there myself ok?
Edit: realised OP said `thing' not `things' so I deleted some books.
Absolutely astounding, the best book I've read in my life. Gene Wolfe has become my favorite author ever. Each time I reread the book I discover a million things I didn't notice before.
"Good Inside" on becoming a better parent was also great and taught me a lot.
"Every Tool's a Hammer" on becoming a better maker.
"Crafting Interpreters" on learning about and building compilers.
All were really great reads.
Cultural/anthropological journalism tends to fall into a handful of traps (fawning over "exotic" cultures, or dismissing them as backwards), and this is one of a small handful of books that avoid those errors. I highly recommend it to anybody who's interested in medical anthropology, or more generally to anyone looking to understand (a tiny fragment of) the immigrant experience in the US.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12609.The_Spirit_Catches...
Non-Fiction: The Bright Ages - Matthew Gabriele. Very nuanced well written popular history of the medieval period
Journalism: Not from this year but I read it this year the first time: Largely photographic piece about the drug war in the Phillipines: (warning, very disturbing/gory) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/07/world/asia/ro...
If anyone can recommended some other "beginner" books for learning genetics I would really appreciate it.
Time love memory: influence of genes on time keeping, mating, neurobiology.
Last Night in Montreal, by the same author, is also great, and totally different from the above three.
Really looking forward to reading The Glass Hotel as well! Emily St. John Mandel may be my new favorite author.
That said, I've really come around on him lately. His predictions are broadly accurate, and it's very refreshing to see a version of the world that rises above political noisemaking.
"Crossroads" Jonathan Franzen
"Agassi" Andre Agassi - I don't normally read sports memoirs, but this one came highly recommended by a woman author that I have read recently so I gave it a try. As a tennis fan who pretty much alway routed for the other player when he played (except when he played Pete Sampras), I found the book totally engaging. Highly recommended.
Agassi, though he's careful to give Sampras his due as an opponent, has some very interesting observations about him as a person in the book.
> The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Non fiction: Probably "Becoming Trader Joe" really shows how business decisions are path very situational and path dependent. i.e. the whole store brand schtick of Trader Joe's started because of alcohol regulations
Attached, The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find--and Keep-- Love: Why do people ghost, lovebomb or keep long term relationships. There are a few reddit groups that are incomprehensible if you have not read this, afterwards you see things differently. Not a happy book regardless of the title. Thais Gibson therapist on youtube that also suffered personally has good content.
The body keeps the score: Read this second, it describes the physical effects of various mental health related events. People swear by this again and again.
Complex PTSD, from surviving to thriving: If you need to read this you are at the point that you have figured out that something has gone very wrong with you or someone close tou you. Thr chapter on cptsd emergency is very chacteristic. Also read the respective reddit threads.
The topics above are very to the point and the situations they describe affect in a subtle way a lot of people. The first also assist in understanding parent children relationships.
Enjoy this piece and some of the themes in it, weird DTC brands, authenticity, manufacturing culture. It seems to make sense of the current moment we live in.
It helps that Napoleon lived one of the most extraordinary lives in human history.
Key takeaway, in the saucy words of the great man himself: "Fortune is a woman. The more she does for me, the more I will require of her."
- Stylized Facts in the Social Sciences by Daniel Hirschman
- 1177 B.C. by Eric Cline
It's something I had been thinking about for a while but didn't have the knowledge required to put it into words. I end up linking it a bit.
It introduced me to a new topic, which is analyzing social situations and apply problem solving skills to them. Something that never occurred to me for some reason. I now realize there are smart people working and having interesting thoughts and conclusions in this topic. So much more to explore. (Open to recomindations too!)
The book also seems to give more useful information about how to handle difficult social situations. I was pretty down on work and becoming cynical (still am though hah!) The advice I often get is stuff like be agreeable, don't rock the boat, dont say anything with passion ("corp speak"), to get ahead and get what you want. This feels bad to me. Often it appears in corporations the only people that are getting ahead are those types of yes people. I feel like this book gave me the tools to have differing opinions and express them successfully.
I also liked the book shows that a lot of these difficult conversations are actually in your control. Most people seem to have terrible communication skills I'm learning. Often I would write off a bad conversation as the other person just being an asshole or difficult or something. after reading this it seems like it is possible to handle a lot of these a lot better.
Disjointed thoughts off the top of my head, but I found the book pretty enlightening. Id recommend it if you struggle with expressing your opinions in emotional conversations.
I read it once and took some notes. Haven't looked back on either the source nor my notes (until now!), but the book came to me at a time when I was dealing with a lot of inner-organizational bureaucracy on a small-scale, but was utterly frustrating.
The book gave me new frameworks, and was reco'd to me from someone within the org who I was confiding in on the top-level. But ultimately, the frameworks weren't enough to change necessary structures – because those in power and with influence didn't want to change their attitudes, goals, and approaches.
As "negative" as that sounds, the book helped in part for me to understand the four major buckets for how decisions get made:
• command, from on high to everyone below you who must carry out the orders
• consult, to invite input but still one leadership board/ leader makes the final call
• vote, where majority decides what'll happen after being presented with options
• consensus, where a decision is made only after everyone agrees
These frameworks helped me to understand that whatever was causing obstructions/ friction, was because people in power were presenting things as if they were based on consultations leading to majority votes, but ultimately, there was a lot of game-playing from the top leaders who wanted to use those tactics as cover to ultimately have their own way.
Helped me to accept that things were the way they were, and there was no need to exert unnecessary energy. And from then on, to discern first and foremost what the decision-making dynamics are in any group endeavor, be it small-teams or entire orgs, and to go from there.
Very cool stuff, for me at least.
> I read it once and took some notes.
Curious to know how you go about taking notes for the books you read.
That is why I love consulting. The managers that hire me often express themselves to be as critical as possible on the current way of working or possible problems. This does not allow me to be blunt, because I still need to convince people of another way. But at least I do not have to pretend and worry about my position.
I put your book on my reading list.
I was (and still am) obsessed with productivity. But I more and more my tasks had felt like something I needed to get done, to afterwards finally be able to relax and profit from them. But this time never came and I just got busier.
The book does a great job at explaining how much of our daily grind is based on a refusal to accept our finitude. And once we accept our finitude, we can get a lot more done in a happier way.
One of the biggest learnings from this book so far, is that a certain level of anxiety is inevitable. Especially when you're doing work that is meaningful to you.
Being able to accept that anxiety and still continue is what makes all the difference.
I _strongly_ suggest searching out the modern Robin Buss translation (Penguin books sell it in the Uk) rather than the public domain version as the text is far clearer and several large redactions are replaced.
I think most of these kinds of things tend to lack mass appeal, but they're out there, and when you find one that tickles your fancy it can be pretty addictive!
https://pages.lip6.fr/Marek.Zawirski/papers/RR-7687.pdf
CRDTs get a lot of hype on HN, 95% of the time it's for collaborative editing. But they're much more than some JS library to build an app around - they're a formalism of distributed systems that are strongly eventually consistent. What this means is if the mathematical properties [0] of CRDTs hold, there's no conflicts, no rollbacks, no user intervention - provided the same data is received by every node (in any order, mind you), they will all be in an identical state without a consensus.
For me this is massive, and I'm convinced this has big industrial applications, ie distributed systems in domains where the source of truth is most naturally modelled as append only events. In this scenario, the whole database is a single CRDT.
Also - and I hope I'm not outing myself as a pleb here - but each time I re-read it I discover new things, stuff I might have glossed over, didn't fully understand, or didn't appreciate before.
So yeah, have to hand it to this paper. It's really broadened my horizons.
[0] way less scary than you think. If you're comfortable with first year abstract algebra, operations, sets, relations etc you'll be fine.
They are conflict-free only because they hide conflicts by forcing a consistent order on concurrent updates. How do they do it? By using logical clocks to version events. A logical clock is not magic. It orders concurrent events arbitrarily. Is this correct? In practice, probably not, meaning that more recent updates can be lost in favor of less recent updates. What does 'recent' mean? For a user it means latest in physical time. Just because the system doesn't know any better than to arbitrarily order a pair of events (that appear concurrent), doesn't mean the user doesn't know which event comes first. This is why not everything is implemented as a CRDT and conflicts will always exist in use cases where updates must never be lost.
But why? These ideas are elegant but usually not practical. Performance usually ends up forcing us back to ole faithful (mutability).
I discovered and read Blake Crouch this year
- Dark Matter
- Recursion
- Upgrade
- Pines
I also discovered and read
- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
- Gravity by Tess Gerritsen
- A Man by, At the End of the Matinee Keiichiro Hirano
It's between Recursion and Project Hail Mary for me. I am leaning more towards Recursion.
Non-fiction
I discovered and read the following this year
- Deep Work by Cal Newport
- The Millionaire Fastlane by M.J. DeMarco
- Zero to One by Peter Thiel
- How to Start a Business Without any Money by Rachel Bridge
- Creative Gene by Hideo Kojima
- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
- The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
- Show Your Work, Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon
- Press Reset by Jason Schreier
I would say Deep Work and Steve Jobs had the biggest impact on me.
Programming
I am learning Elixir using Elixir In Action by Sasa Juric.
Favorite Fiction: Pale Fire. Just pure astonishment. Left me speechless with how he made the language sing.
Also great (in no particular order):
- The Sewing Girl's Tale (non-fiction)
- The Odyssey (poem)
- Tropic of Cancer (novel)
- Tenth of December (short story collection).
- Endurance (non-fiction)
- The Billion Dollar Spy (non-fiction)
- Agent Sonya (non-fiction)
- Agent Running in the Field (novel)
- Little Dorrit (novel)
To be honest, I love most of the stuff I read this year. Only a handful of books I didn't like enough to read through.
Came across this book randomly on Twitter and picked it up. The book is broken into 26 essays about significant pieces of code (defined vaguely), ranging from the Morris Worm to Pagerank to the popup window and the 1x1 invisible gif and how these shaped the modern tech landscape. Lovely read overall, and really shows how pieces of code you work on today can end up having long lasting impact on how society perceives technology as a whole. Best of all, it's not a heavy read, but offers a lot of concise info that can send you down wormholes of wikipedia.
Paper: Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service [2]
Database systems have always been a passion of mine, and the paper from AWS about how DynamoDB works internally is an incredible look into what makes a NoSQL DB platform capable of serving 89 million requests per second _(this is in the intro)_ which is incredible scale. Always good to see how engineering decisions shape products, and it's been interesting to see Dynamo take shape over the last decade _(though I recommend most folks to stay away from it because of it's mad pricing)_
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60254955-you-are-not-exp...
The premise is great, the characters are fun, the plot will keep you engaged.
A noir detective story about a murder that happens in the space between two cities which are in superposition. That is, they share the same geographic space, but citizens are forced to live in only one of the cities by a seemingly omnipotent power called Breach that maintains the borders of the two cities.
Kraken is the hunt for a giant squid after it vanished from a London museum.
Un Lun Dun is a young adult story of two friends who end up in a whimsical version of London.
I was first drawn to TC&TC because I was told Disco Elysium draws from it, and boy howdy was that right. Something is so wonderful about a crime procedural in an entirely fantastic universe.
It is kind of a stereotype though of tech dudes to be into stoicism, but whatever, this book really just puts me in such a good frame of mind any time I open it.
I like this book but completely disagree with your stereotype. In fact, I find the tech dude stereotype to lack perspective, resort easily to anger and personalization, stew in thought, and accuse others for their suffering.
Marcus wrestles with being a man, montaign wrestles with being a human.
It's inspiring one my current side-projects; a molecular and protein modeler/simulation.
I'm super happy to see someone else appreciates it :-)
I find it a good way to explore authors I haven't read anything by as well.
Aside from that:
"The New Right" by Michael Malice
"The Storm Before the Storm" by Mike Duncan
"The Anglo-American Establishment" by Carroll Quigley
"Numbers Don't Lie" by Vaclav Smil
Books that weren't good:
"A Short History of Man" by Hans-Herman Hopper
"The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil
"After Evangelicalism" by David P. Gushee
The whole Solar Cycle (The Book of the New Sun, Urth of The New Sun, The Book of The Long Sun, The Book of The Short Sun), Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, There Are Doors, The Sorcerer's House ... .
Wolfe is a genius.
Before that I also finished Malazan.
I have just started The Book of the New Sun and am hopeful it will be a better experience.
An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it. Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn't share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams...
But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can't record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you're at war? Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day
Definitely in the running!
I'd also recommend "The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work": https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-en.pdf
Though curious why a book describing unsafe rust made rust click for you?
I liken it to paint a tree, full of leaves which obscure its branches. I might never paint the branches, but understanding how the branches are shaped will help me draw a better tree.
This was in tandem with reading the Rust book, being active in the IRC, and writing programs to learn! The Rustonomicon just happened to have what I needed.
I think hackernews could aggregate some of these types of repetitive questions and topics better?
The Sword in the Stone is probably my favorite Disney movie so I was delighted to discover the movie was based on a book which was even better.
He also wrote The Goshawk which I can recommend.
- Count Belisarius by Robert Graves
- The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
- The Expanse (all of them)
- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
And the best books on software development were:
- Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach by Mark Richards and Neal Ford
- Multithreaded JavaScript by Thomas Hunter II and Bryan English
- The Programmer's Brain by Felienne Hermans
Of course Cloud Atlas is well-known and a good read.
Utopia Avenue, his latest work about a fictional band in the 1960s, is a very pleasant and frankly fun read too, although different from the others. In typical Mitchell fashion, it does loosely connect to his other works and that weird über-narrative he is building. I'm looking forward to see what he'll end up doing with that.
* Matthew Klein & Michael Pettis - Trade Wars Are Class Wars
* Bruno Latour - We Have Never Been Modern
* Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (had never read it before, probably book of the year for me)
and of course, Matt Levine's Money Stuff, which is good every year!
(minor spoilers) For example, one story describes bees that form a hivemind. Another describes how language would work with only colors. Another describes how society would evolve if knowledge was genetically inherited.
How to Fight a Hydra by Josh Kaufman A heroes story about doing hard things.
Courage is Calling by Ryan Holiday I didn't actually finish this one. I just go back to it for about 20-30 minutes every time I need a boost. I save it for when I feel overwhelmed and it snaps me right out of it.
Clean Code, the Clean Coder, and Clean Architecture by Robert C Martin Amazing. I am better for reading these.
Venture Deals by Brad Feld Saved me a lot of time and heartache
The Metaverse by Matthew Ball The first real definition of the Metaverse I've ever heard. Loved it.
Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.
I don’t think it would have been on my list without others recommendations
Isaacson‘s book isn’t “wrong” per se, but it makes the wrong point, imho. There really have been two Steve Jobs it seems (but crucially, NOT in a Jekyll & Hyde way!), and Isaacson didn’t get that.
> The poetry felt like satire to me
The commentary is completely twisting the meaning of the poem, so there's a strong mismatch between what Shade wrote and whatever the hell Kinbote was thinking. If you try to understand the poem from the point of view of the story, it might seem that the poet was writing very weirdly about the story, when in fact, it was Kinbote who made up all the far-fetching links.
If you think of the poem as its own thing that is not related to the story told in the commentary, just simply a long poem, by Shade and about Shade, it will make much more sense.
Anyway, that's just my read. It's certainly a strange enough book that there are plenty of mixed ideas of how to read it.
I read both of these around the same time and loved them both.
I'll either write quotes from a book by hand or type it out on some word processor. But there are times I've typed out or written out entire chapters from a book. And one book I almost transcribed pretty much from end to end.
I think it's pretty inefficient. And I definitely don't recall perfectly. But it does help a lot of the info lodge in deeper than just active reading. Might just be a belief I hold, and I don't really recommend others to do it because it's definitely a lil kooky and time consuming.