Ask HN: What was the best book you read in 2021?

12 points by ent101 ↗ HN

18 comments

[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 51.0 ms ] thread
"The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes
A Man and His Symbols by Jung and others.
Be Here Now by Ram Daas.
Augustus: A Novel, by John Edward Williams
How Emotions Are Made - Lisa Feldman Barrett
Fiction:

Attack Surface - Cory Doctorow

Non-Fiction:

Engineering General Intelligence Vol 2 - Ben Goertzel

Honorable Mention - Fiction

Daemon - Daniel Suarez

Freedom - Daniel Suarez

Billy Summers - Stephen King

Elsewhere - Dean Koontz

Honorable Mention - Non-Fiction:

We See It All - Jon Fasman

Integrating Rules and Connectionism for Robust Commonsense Reasoning - Ron Sun

Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks - James A. Anderson

The Soar Cognitive Architecture - John Laird

Love Daemon and Freedom, some of the few books I’ve read twice. Strong recommend
Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir
Honestly enjoyed this more than The Martian, which was already one of my favorite reads.
Already optioned to be a movie with Ryan Gosling to star. I do hope they keep true to the book.
Haven't finished it but reading: The Charisma Machine

About the One Laptop Per Child computers

Fiction I enjoyed reading:

- Sourdough/24hr library

- Nick Webb legacy fleet series

- Long way to a small angry planet

I finished reading the last book in Iain M. Banks The Culture series. Not perfect but the series overall turned out to be my favorite fiction across any medium.

Similar to a written version of Star Trek.

Oh, lord no. The Culture series is grand in scope and imagination.
I think I’m the only one who doesn’t like his Culture books. I think The Algebraist is amazing though.

Set in a different universe where physics works as we currently understand it to, but with beings that have had billions of years to perfect all the technology you can have in it. Much cooler than he lazy rich people in space of the culture series.

The Heart of Buddha's Teachings by Thich Nhat Han This is one of the life changing book!