Ask HN: What books have been worth your time?
Curious to know which books you've read that genuinely felt worth the time and attention you gave them. Can be fiction, non-fiction, self-help, technical, philosophical, or anything else.
The only criteria: the book helped you in some meaningful way—changed your perspective, taught you something valuable, or simply stayed with you long after finishing it.
62 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadTaleb also wrote a forward to the recent edition of Cipolla's The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, which predates Taleb's books but is "Taleb-adjacent".
https://archive.org/details/soulofnewmachine0000kidd/page/n6...
I stumbled across this completely by accident while doing research for a history of science class I was designing years ago. It took... a while... to stop saying "but why does this matter!" every two seconds while reading it, but eventually I was able to open my mind to metaphysics as a discipline and get it into my head exactly what he was talking about, and why it was useful. After that, it was smooth sailing. I owe a lot to this book.
The point of Thomistic/Aristotelian metaphysics it not that it's useful for building things; it isn't, which is why the early moderns mostly abandoned it. But physics and the quantitative/mechanistic view of the world that it fosters is an abstraction from reality--an extremely useful and productive one, granted, but still an abstraction. It leaves things out that Thomistic metaphysics retains; and while Aristotelian science has been left in the dust, his metaphysics still has important things to say.
Modern philosophy embraced the mechanistic view of the world with Descartes, leading to a number of philosophical problems (the mind-body problem, the problem of other minds, how to account for qualia and consciousness, and so forth) that are amply accounted for in the older philosophy.
I'm not pasting the walltext full quote, but there's also in it mention of Perennis quaedam philosophia. The first one? Don't have the book in digital, for the full quote in Spanish, Google sent me here: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/Vico.2020.i34.03.
[1] New Essays on Human Understanding, 1704
(But holy crap, avoid the follow-up title, it redefines “off-the-rails” in comparison to the first book.)
"The Te of Piglet"... is not.
Second the Incerto series by Nassim Taleb
Though the best book is far and away Three Little Pigs which my now grown-ass-man child called “the wolf book” when requesting it at bedtime at the age of incredible. I highly recommend it — time spent with your child I mean,
But if you want an HNish book recommendation?…The Art of Computer Programming is well worth trying to read because it will be challenging for as long as you keep at it. Good luck.
The other day someone on here recommended The Philosopher's Toolkit, and I ordered a copy based on that recommendation. I've only started to dip into various parts, but I can already confirm that it is a good introductory compendium of the basics of philosophy, logic, and argumentation. In the same vein is Daniel Dennett's Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.
A personal favorite is Frances Yates's The Art of Memory (think: intersection of rhetoric, mnemonic systems, philosophical systems, and the occult during the Renaissance).
Matthew Butterick's Practical Typography and Typography for Lawyers. Bryan Garner's The Winning Brief.
Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis. Adler's How to Read a Book. Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
I could go on. Book posts are my favorite posts on HN, but they always lighten my wallet and at home I'm surrounded with ever-growing piles of great material.
This is especially important when reading philosophical or technical material, especially material from another era.
(Thoughtful comments appreciated with any downvotes. Thanks.)
Instead he chose the path of religious huckster, and western literature is all the lesser for it.
Instead he chose the path of religious charlatan, and western literature is all the lesser for it.
ps: The Church that Joseph Smith led now has 17.5 million members around the world and is a great thing in my life. My ancestors knew Joseph Smith and were convinced he was not a charlatan. They helped build schools and cities. Now there are programs like https://justserve.org to freely coordinate efforts between charitable organizations with volunteers in many locations; BYU Pathway Worldwide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYU_Pathway_Worldwide), which provides English instruction and accredited higher education far less expensively than traditional universities for those who could never afford it otherwise; extensive worldwide humanitarian efforts; https://familysearch.org for free genealogy tools, etc, etc. One can be happy about all the good that is being done.
Culture, gender identity, hive mind, all rolled up into one extremely dense universe with a rich history told through warfare and cutting remarks, humanising potentially inhuman central characters with a vague number of limbs.
It takes ten pages to get used to the dense yet clipped writing style, but once it clicks, you cannot put the book(s) down: the plot moves forward at breakneck speed.
- The Soul of a New Machine
- Showstoppers
- iWoz
- Athens and Jerusalem (Shestov)
I'm devouring many F & SFs (right now reading Arthur Clarke) but so far nothing really sticks. A lot of them are interesting but I'm keeping counting the pages I read. I used to burn candles reading them back in the day, but the magic was lost. I'm going to try out some recommendations I got on HN and see what happens.
Once the message is clear, they become a slog IMO. The author was smart in coming up with something catchy like "deep work" to mean, you get shit done and do some of your best work and learning when you have time set aside being distraction free.
Beside the obvious "deep work", its the ability to be bored, and shut down time.
> I read it, but like most self-help books - I felt like it could've been 1/4 the size. The book could've been 10-20 pages.
Have to agree. It can be summarized.
I'd love an update to cover elliptic curves and lattice based cryptography, and to update the at the time speculative section on quantum computing. But the majority of the book covers historical events and is still just as valid as it was then.
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 Christopher Clark The origin of WWI is a story that's been told repeatedly. This version is delightfully depressing. I can't quite describe the book. If you say X happening was the fault of everyone it's easy to imagine that's synonymous with saying it's no one's fault. That's not what's being argued - here it's that it's literally everyone's fault.
This book has stayed with me for years. It's a quiet, deeply reflective journey about self-discovery, the search for meaning. What resonated most was this idea that true understanding can't be taught—it must be lived and experienced.
It’s a short read, but one that invites you to slow down. Each time I return to it, I take away something new depending on where I am in life.
I suggested Siddhartha. Her friend picked War and Peace.
My credibility went waaaay up:)
(Siddhartha is very thin, like the book)