Ask HN: What are your favorite books?

11 points by bourn ↗ HN

9 comments

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"An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth" by Chris Hadfield.

I've read many books on self-improvement, software, and start-ups, but nothing left an impression like this one.

Tolkien's ring trilogy, Eddison's Mistress of Mistress's, and Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls
Too many to mention. A list of books I've read more times than any others - many times each:

SARK's first 4-5 books, Robert Fulghum's books, Emerson's essays, Hazlitt's essays, Bertrand Russell's essays (e.g. Sceptical Essays, Unpopular Essays), GK Chesterton's essays and his book Heretics, Nietzsche's books, William James' essays, RL Stevenson's essays, La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, La Bruyere's Characters, Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, Ben Zander's The Art of Possibility...

Bhagavad-gita as it is 1972 ed
I recently read "Rules for Radicals" by Saul Alinksy, it's a book on how to go about politically organize communities. It's sort of like the underdog's machivellian Prince.

I recommend it. The story behind how I came across it is also pretty interesting.

All time favorites, books I re read every few years, they are more on the adventure/business/money making side:

Non fiction:

A Man For All Markets by Edward O. Thorp http://www.edwardothorp.com/books/a-man-for-all-markets/

More Money Than God by Sebastian Mallaby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Money_Than_God

Fiction:

The Asian Saga by James Clavell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asian_Saga

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita

It came up recently that that second site, and other similar ones, scrape only books in links to Amazon, sometimes other sellers. And the sites showing these lists are usually affiliated with Amazon, e.g. hackernewsbooks says:

"The website is sustained via referrals from Amazon book links. ... All links to Amazon, Safaribooks and O'Reilly get extracted once a week from Hacker News posts, make sure they are indeed books and then rank them based on how often they are mentioned and the karma of the user"