Ask HN: What books are you reading right now?

16 points by sun123 ↗ HN
I'm reading two small books in parallel.

1. The old man and the Sea , by Hemmingway 2. The Last lecture by Randy

41 comments

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I'm trying to expand my horizons a bit, so I'm reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma". Amazing!
Coding Horror: The Book
1. A Lovecraft anthology 2. Programming Clojure (Stuart Halloway)

Both books make me dream.

1. 'Classical Mechanics' by Herbert Goldstein 2. 'Operational Amplifiers with Linear Integrated Circuits' by William Stanley 3. 'Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer' by Cyrus Mistry
I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas (Lewis Black)
1. Ulysses 2. The Dilbert Principle
Neuromancer by William Gibson.
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Very good book about the tech industry: "rework" by the 37 signals guys.

Other very good non-tech book I've read recently: Walk the Amazon.

I'm actually reading academic papers from ssrn.com about platforms, shorter than most books and usually just as much information/learning and often times more.

For fiction I'm reading stuff my friends write; currently The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There and David Drake's Hammers Slammers omnibus volumes.

Zen & The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance
"Another Day of Life" by Riszard Kapuscinski and "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Joshua Foer.
+1 It's a shame that Moonwalking with Einstein didn't get to the top. Great book.
For work: Quine's Word and Object; Dummett's Frege: Philosophy of Language; Plato's Republic; and paper after paper. (I am a philosophy graduate student.)

For pleasure: just started Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

1. Red Mars. Read a chapter and digest it. Packed top to bottom with all kinds of ideas.

2. Cyberspace: First Steps. From the early 90s, a collection of academic essays on the concept of cyberspace. Reading it as a kind of retrospective on where we were and where we thought we were going.

3. Rule 34. For fun.

Just started "The Connected Company" by Dave Gray.
Molly Fyde series from Hugh Howey. Loved his WOOL books, so giving this series a go. Like it a lot.

Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas - just started this, and enjoying it so far.

Can anyone recommend some good cypherpunk books, aside from Stephenson? Preferably fiction that communicates ideas revolving around anonymity, crypto, privacy?

I've been trying to read Cryptonomicon, but get turned off by the "hipstery" (for lack of a better word) informal writing style and can't get into it.

I would say “self-congratulatory” rather than “hipstery” — I’m reading this right now too, and although I find it fascinating (like I find reading about any cryptography fascinating), it often feels impenetrable without a cause to be, other than “aren’t these characters all such geniuses, I bet you can barely keep up.” Also, I get http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Shaftos_Gone_to_Sea stuck in my head for hours afterwords each time.
Nothing's been above my head, it's more like it takes him too many words to make a point or get the jist across. He gets too creative/clever. I would like it to be more straightforward. Then again, I mainly read non-fiction from journalists or government types.
Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad
Essays and aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer

John A. MacDonald: The young politician by Donald Creighton

Comedy of errors by Wm. Shakespeare

Paradise Lost by John Milton

The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker
Im finding it very enligthening, have anyone read it? care to share your opinions?
"The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America Its Name".

A really interesting history book. I'm now in a great part, about how knowledge of geography (and map projections) was disseminated in Europe through a network of scholars and humanists during the 15th century. There was this huge collaborative effort to reconstruct ancient texts and to bring them in line with (then) current knowledge.

"The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict" for myself and "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader"(Chronicles of Narnia Series) for my children.