Ask HN: What are you looking forward to reading in 2023? Curious to hear what books are on everyone's reading lists for the coming year. For work, learning, curiosity, pleasure, or otherwise. Also would love to know why you're interested in the book as well! |
I created a blog just today to record my notes and thoughts on some of what I read, at https://chitramdasgupta.bearblog.dev/
I can't concentrate on a book by the time I'm done working. It's probably been a decade now since I read a book.
A friend suggested trying to read 3 days into a 1 week vacation. I couldn’t.
And from that moment I realized it was a muscle like anything else. Consuming media that requires active participation and work, that you are not rewarded for (professional learning) takes practice.
I come home tired most days but I still manage to crank out time to read.
Maybe it won’t work for you the way it worked for me, but give it a try. You might be surprised.
Some nights I cant fall asleep quick so I finish books that way.
Trying to read just before trying to go to sleep never worked for me, my brain shuts off completely as soon as I lie and bed with w book after 2200, yet if just stay up I don't sleep before 00:00.
Also, it helps to read something by people who can write. For example I never thought I'd read business related books, yet after it being mentioned so often here on HN I read the innovator's dilemma, loved it! His style of clear paragraphs and constant examples really works well for me.
Becoming a super nerd is unnatural.
A good workout can be done in 30 minutes, though I prefer about 90 total (core/weights, rowing, running in the non-winter seasons, about 30 minutes of each). Dinner, about 30 minutes to cook and 30 minutes to eat, another 15 max to clean (mostly done while I'm cooking so really usually just 1 minute to put plates in the dishwasher). So that's 2.75, leaving me with 5.25 hours for spending time with my wife, wasting time on HN, reading, or working on side projects.
And that's just the weekdays. Weekends I get 9 hours back since I'm not commuting and working, though some of that goes to yard and house work so realistically call it 7 extra free hours as an average.
Fantastic Fungi, Paul Stamets - Because I watched the Netflix documentary
The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli - Because someone here mentioned it and it peaked my interest
Cloud Hidden, Alan Watts - Because I hord Alan Watts quotes and need to finally read one of his works completely
The Molecule of More, Lieberman & Long - Came across it at a book store and looked interesting
Pleasure
The Go-Giver, Burg & Mann - Been on my list for a while but can't remember why.
- The Constraints-Led Approach (CLA) Principles for Sports Coaching and Practice Design - CLA is the the best sports coaching (and also quite nerdy) philosophy I've found so far. Unlike SDT it's mostly concerned about motor skill acquisition science.
- Collection of books on figure skating starting from 1880 - aside from purely historical value, they have incredible knowledge on how to perform figures (that's where name "figure skating" came from) - the art almost extinct nowadays. It's a foundation of this sport, but as international federation removed them from competitions, nobody learns or teaches it anymore, so we literally loosing the roots of the most important skill in figure skating (US and Canada are doing better than everyone else, you can still learn and pass tests in figures, but that's quite unique cases).
The early signs of a company difficulties and financial fraud. (french)
Financial fraud handbook. (Joseph T. Wells)
You see the pattern.
Why ? I don't know. I'm kind of fascinated by that. The first time I had any interest of stock market related things was for "The smartest guys in the room" (Enron scandal) long before I read anything about stock markets itself.
I just recently said to someone : "I don't understand why someone would engage in a Ponzi scheme when it's mathematicaly a sure thing, in a finite world with a finite money supply, the scheme will collapse and he will get caught". He responded : "Because he hopes he will get away with it"...
His response of course adds up to my curiosity, because my question states first he can't mathematicaly get away with it. There is definitively a logic of thinking I don't get. But I'm kind of dumb when it's about people.
That being said both my parents had a kind of personnal take about reality and truthfulness... Differences betweens what people say or write about financial matters and financial reality tend to disappear within a relatively short period of time, as reality always catches up in that case.
This explains maybe that.
Entertainment: Babel - An Arcane History by RF Kuang, Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick, and my usual re-read of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Non-fiction: Code (second edition), The Myth of Normal by Gabor & Daniel Mate
Petzold is a hero, this talk (2014) is on that same 'back to basics' wavelength and it's just brilliant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srWQdTGlnVg
At the same time I'm looking forward to complimenting it with another go at Silvanus P. Thompson's Calculus Made Easy so I can hopefully get a better understanding of the models described in the fortran book. (Been working through Khan Academy material in the meantime as a prelude...)
I've also got the latest installments in Sammy Harkham's Crickets series and Sam Sharpe & Peach S Goodrich's Viewotron series on deck which I've been saving as a treat. They're both published so infrequently I wanted to save them for some time can sprawl into my reading.
"Who's your people?": Cumulative identity among the Salyersville Indian population of Kentucky's Appalachia and the midwest muckfields, 1677--2000" by Carlson, Richard Allen, Jr., Ph.D., Michigan State University, 2003, 711 pages; AAT 3115947
Unsong by Scott Alexander. Yes, the famous blogger with original takes on society, politics, and philosophy. Will his solid reasoning and surprising conclusions carry over into a long writing form?
Glasshouse by Charles Stross. No other reason than it's been recommended as a series here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33146896 , and I'm done with the previous entries.
The Kalevala by the Finns. One of the four ancient epics. Even if a bit of a slog, it's a refreshing change from modern reads. https://sacred-texts.com/neu/kveng/kvrune15.htm
Type-Driven Development with Idris by Edwin Brady - Idris seems different enough from the mainstream that learning it might prove eye-opening. Or spoil me for coding in normal languages forever. A bit of a gamble, this one.
I bought 4A and 4B yesterday. I'll first dip into them at random, purely for pleasure. Then pick a couple of sections to work through more seriously.
I never paid attention to these things before but after I lost my father a couple of years ago I have made it my personal avenue to walk in his footsteps in everything I do. He loved these books, the literature and often took out references from them for many lessons in life. Not just that, he remembers every character, every line, every verse and every poem from those things. He was a true genius.
I wanted to experience these epics as he did while he read them, and to make everything he loved a part of my life. I miss you daddy.
All of Lee Kwan Yew’s books.
The Ancient City
Some Spanish literary classics, in Spanish. (I’m at newspaper reading level, not great, and still trying to improve.)
Always with Honor, by Pyotr Wrangel
Lots of great tech books I have on preorder from No Starch Press.
- Pale Fire, Nabokov
- Speaker for the Dead - I thought the first book was just ok, but praise for the sequel made me interested
- House Of Leaves
- Godel Escher Bach
I've been making my way through all of her other works for the past few years. I've read the Xenogenesis trilogy two or three times. Her works speak to me about the human condition in ways very few authors have been able to.
Kindred is her last remaining work I know of that that I have not read. I've been purposefully saving it for last and it feels like now is the time.
From a work perspective I just finished creative selection which was excellent.
https://www.amazon.com/Edmund-Morriss-Theodore-Roosevelt-Tri...
Curiosity/Knowledge: - Peter Zeihan (author) - Atomic Habits - Turn the Ship Around
Work: - Domain Modeling Made Functional by Scott Wlaschin - Designing Data Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppman
Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez, because I enjoyed Delta-V, Daemon & Freedom. Which reminds of Kill Decision, which I haven't read so far.
Others: TBD
The Haskell Wikibook.
More Ursula K. Le Guin.
