Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?
Any great books you cannot wait to read next year? Maybe something you wish to learn? Curious about all kinds of great book suggestions for 2020. Thank you for sharing! (And I wish you all a great, educational new year)
334 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadAlso hope to get some good recommendations here :)
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30659.Meditations?ac=1&f...
[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242472.The_Black_Swan?ac...
[3]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23463279-designing-data-...
If you have the time/inclination and haven’t already I’d also suggest reading Epictetus and Seneca first.
NB: My favorite of all the available Aurelius translations so far is Martin Hammond (Penguin Classics)
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/marcus-aurelius/meditation...
[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/epictetus/the-enchiridion/...
[3] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/seneca/dialogues/aubrey-st...
Thank you - in the future I will clarify.
e.g. Parts seemed quite obsessed with death - which is in part a stoic thing - but also just because at time of writing he was already old & his health was failing.
It might be good to spread out reading it over a long time. Read until you find something that clicks with you. Repeat after a few weeks.
You might also want to look into the works of Epictetus, Seneca and Cicero.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Lifespan-Why-Age-Dont-Have-ebook/dp/B...
One of the best books I read in 2019. :)
I see a lack of leadership -- like a Mandela of the environment. I don't call telling people what to do or spreading facts, figures, doom, and gloom leadership. Nor do I see anyone of renown trying to live by values that would lead us to sustainability and sharing how they create joy, community, and connection. Even Greta promotes panic.
I believe we crave leadership so we can act on our values and overcome the jaded cynicism, shame, guilt, and pointing fingers. We want to take responsibility, to pick up other people's trash, to fly less when we see the compassion and empathy in it, when we can feel the meaning and purpose those who went to jail for other people's freedom did in the US civil rights struggle half a century ago or fighting Hitler a generation before.
My podcast Leadership and the Environment http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast, and my experience acting, have taught me a lot.
25% of people are going to hit 0 again. 1-2 is huge for most people
- "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" by David Graeber
- "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief" by Lawrence Wright
- "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves" by Matt Ridley
- "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life" by William Finnegan
"A people's history of the United States" by Howard Zinn
there's factual information in there, but a lot of it is a bit exaggerated and from a very... shall we say, not-rigorous perspective, even if you largely believe in the thrust of what's being said and the facts aren't really up for dispute.
I agree. Perhaps when the book came out in the 80s, and there was far less access to "information", this book was probably great from a "history isn't always as it seems" perspective. Today we are far more conscious of the "elite narrative" of history. Now I think you'd be better served by perusing the table of contents and finding various sources on the subject matter that interests you.
It's well written, and Zinn is great. Just feels a bit dated.
I plan to re-read Descent and The Restoration Game, at the least.
Haven’t made yet a list of new stuff to read, I’ll pick stuff is it comes.
1) Creativity Inc
2) Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
3) Start With Why
4) Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love
5) The Hard Thing about Hard Thing: Building a Business When There are No Easy Answers
I only managed to finish ~50% of my planned reading in 2019
I have been trying fasting on and off for about 6 months and I can see results, but I have not bothered to check the theory behind it at all.
If anybody would like to recommend some books on nutrition, body aging and general health regarding food, bring it!
The review of Fung's "The Obesity Code" on Red Pen Reviews [2] details some serious flaws in the scientific claims in the book related to calories, insulin, and fasting, and their relation to obesity and fat loss.
Relating to nutrition/health/longevity, they aren't books, but I've found the podcasts, blogs, YouTube videos, and even tweets by Rhonda Patrick (FoundMyFitness), Peter Attia (The Drive), Stephan Guyenet, and Chris Masterjohn quite enlightening.
[1] https://peterattiamd.com/jasonfung/ [2] https://www.redpenreviews.org/reviews/the-obesity-code-unloc...
General
====
- Master & Margarita (w reader's guide)
- Why we sleep
- The righteous mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion
- The wisdom of insecurity
- The denial of death
- The three body problem (friend's advice: slow burn, stick with it)
- The dubliners
- The devils (Dostoyevski)
- The name of the rose
- Enten-Oller (Kierkegaard)
- Zero to one (Peter Thiel, recommended reading as palantir new joiner - not fantastic but has some thought provoking ideas; i.e. which very important truth would very few people agree with you on?)
Economy/finance
===
- Basic economics (Thomas Sowell)
- How an economy grows and why it crashes
- Know the city
Math
===
- Coffee time in Memphis
- Real analysis (mathematics textbook)
- Problems from the book (Halfway through this one, and I found it really enjoyable, even with only a CS bachelors)
If anyone has read any and has feedback/notes, I'm looking forward to hearing them!
It's much more rewarding this way than how I went through half of the book in the past ignoring a lot of things I was ignorant of, but it's a way slower process.
It's an experience I'm thoroughly enjoying, but some of the characters described seem to me like they couldn't be real people, but this might just be that my way of thinking as someone living now clashes so heavily with how actual monks in the 14th century thought about the world. I'm giving the author the benefit of the doubt on this for now, as, again, I'm very ignorant on this topic and he was an actual academic in the broader field we're discussing.
Could you elaborate? I'd like to hear what you find dissonant.
Master and Margarita: Very recommendable.
Three body problem: Got bored.
Enten-Eller: Delightful.
Basic economics (Sowell): Very recommendable.
How an economy grows and why it crashes: Childish and grossly simplifying. I read this one while taking a year's of economics on top of my CS. My impression is that some economists have a bad habit of not stating their basic scholastic assumptions. Sowell and Krugman are, in my opinion, not unbiased, but able to inform you at a level where you don't feel like they're also trying to brainwash you.
As for the remainder, I've taken a few notes for myself, so thanks. :-)
Since you seem to have similar taste (or people you respect?), what other books/authors have you enjoyed/would recommend? I am a big fan of Hesse, despite his works being very unrelated to anything on my list.
I've read "Why we sleep" on your list—I average about 20 non fiction a year. It made me think about my own sleeping habits, although I believe there is a blog post out there that claims there is little scientific evidence to back up some of the medical claims made in the book, I still found it beneficial and thought provoking. The history and theory around sleep and it's role in human evolution I found particularly interesting.
You might find this useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850
I was about to read the book based on a colleague's recommendation, but the blog post and a separate article in my local newspaper debunking few of the claims made me decide against it.
I was not raised Catholic and was a bit lost reading through some of it because I had no idea who some of the characters were or what the references meant. Made for some fun conversations with my girlfriend who read it first and was familiar with all those names and their historical context.
It was a fun book to read though. Got a bit boring for a while but the ending is great so I'm glad I stuck with it.
Specifically, it’s written for a Soviet audience at a time when the censor was hard to get past. So the only way you could publish controversial thoughts or critiques about society was to couch it in metaphor, sarcasm, and double entendres, in a way that requires a lot of cleverness and courage on the author’s behalf. Master and Margarita is considered to be one of the peaks of this genre, because the story it tells manages to have an interesting plot and narration style, even if it’s just there to prop up the incessant jabs at contemporary soviet elites and norms.
It’s sort of like reading a comedy in another language, that’s been translated to English, but all the jokes are region specific, satirical slant rhymes that are explained in the footnotes. It’s very good, but hard to enjoy in its, originally intended, viscerally funny delivery.
And the second and third books got even better. Especially the third one was mind-blowing beyond description at that time for me. I was sad when I finished them all because I didn't know when I would have a similar experience on another book/series.
The wisdom of insecurity: very very good if you are at all interested in the matters it explores
Zero to one: the whole genre of business wisdom books is crap IMHO, but at least this one is short
Basic economics (Thomas Sowell): total must read
- Database Internals (https://www.databass.dev/)
We (Y. Zamyatin)
The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper (C. Petzold)
Endurance (A. Lansing)
Economics: The User's Guide (H. Chang)
Oblomov (I. Goncharov)
After that I intend to primarily focus on additional books about communication: written and verbal including listening skills
- On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche
- Simulcra and Simulations, Jean Baudrillard
- The Ruling Class, Gaetano Mosca
- Finish off the Enchiridion and Shobogenzo
For work:
- Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte
- Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Among the jewels you’ll find in such a reading are things like the seed of Nietzsche’s thought being placed, imo, in The Birth of Tragedy, with the line:
> It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified
Other Nietzsche related recommendations: Pre-Nietzsche: Plato, Schopenhauer Post-Nietzsche: Camus - maybe?
I've thought about reading Schopenhauer as I understand he's a great complement to Nietzsche's work - I'll see where I get to with Nietzsche first. Camus is somewhat related as an absurdist compared to Nietzsche/Schopenhauer's existentialism, but a bit more optimistic about the possibility of meaning.
I'm tempted to dig into Plato as the problem of universals is a philosophical topic that I value greatly, and his theory of forms is basically its origin story.
I enjoyed Camus due to it being an attempt to move beyond Nietzsche and offer something more digestible, but I never moved past the Nietzsche/Plato combo for my personal philosophies (with a heavy dash of stoicism)
Re forms: I find that Plato’s forms are one of the most used mental models I engage with - especially working with software.
I'm roughly familiar with Camus' ideas as presented in the Myth of Sisyphus, and I like the idea that one can make the fight against suffering the source of meaning - it resonates with my understanding of the role of dukkha in the four noble truths in Buddhism. I personally use a mix of Zen Buddhism and stoicism, which seems very similar to you.
The main mental models I use day-to-day are those derived from systems theory, and I believe that patterns of emergence and recursion described by systems theory are the underlying mechanism that brings about abstract properties. I believe I have a copy of "The Human Use of Human Beings" by Norbert Wiener on the way for Christmas, which is meant to be a great book on the topic of cybernetics which is essentially a sub-category of systems theory.
Do you have good recommendations for Zen Buddhism and systems theories?
I have touched on both, but never got deep enough to know what are the main works I should be working off of.
Yeah that makes total sense. How do you respond to a meaningless universe? By imagining up our own meaning and putting value in that.
> I think that is something that resonated with me - that _my_ philosophy does not need to be yours, but that we can still find some common ground to survive with one another.
Yeah I totally agree, and I think we could benefit from more people who viewed our existence in that way.
> Do you have good recommendations for Zen Buddhism and systems theories?
Unfortunately I'm not generally that bookish - a lot of the knowledge I have on these subjects, I've picked up from thinking and practicing the ideas within, odd sources on the internet and in conversations rather than reading books. However, I can recommend Alan Watts' "The Way of Zen" and Donella Meadows' "Thinking in Systems", which I have read and both of which are fantastic.
Unfortunately sometimes systems theorists get caught up in the fine grained details such as "stock and flow" and "causal loop" diagrams and specific types of loop structure, which happens in Donella Meadows' book - the wiki page for complex systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system) is a good entry point for the high level concerns in systems theory.
[edit] I'm also told that Godel Escher Bach is an interesting book for approaching systems concepts like self-reference and emergence in a more esoteric, example-driven way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835208
https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Ethics-Peter-Singer/dp/0521...
What makes you think I want to read this book at all? Or that I'm reading Nietzsche for practical ethical advice? I have no idea who would do such a thing.
I am consistently puzzled what people seek when they read Nietzsche, or what of value they take away from his writings.
And how does one decide that question? Presumably in response to a model of how the world is.
> I am consistently puzzled what people seek when they read Nietzsche, or what of value they take away from his writings.
I'm sorry that you aren't able to benefit from his writing.
Tldr: yes I think Rand is a poor moral philosopher too.
I started during a long train trip recently and found that I really enjoyed the tone of the first few chapters.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_Record_(autobiogra...