Not exactly a new release, but 'Dissolution' by C.J. Sansom was without a doubt the best book I read this year. [1]
That aside, I reread the Dan Brown 'Angels & Demons' and 'The Da Vinci code' novels, worked my way through 'To kill a Mockingbird' for the first time since high school and read the 'Catechism of the Catholic Church' - to better understand the religion my girlfriend is choosing.
In the same universe, Dreaming Void, Temporal Void and Evolutionary Void. I read the Temporal Void a year or two ago without reading the first and despite not completely understanding the story, loved it. Went back and read the whole series this year, and found it fantastic.
I found The Dreaming Void a few years ago while wandering a library desperately trying to find a good science fiction book to read - none of the suggestions I got from friends were there. I'm so glad that none of the suggestions were there.
Moonwalking with Einstein. Not particularly new but a pretty entertaining book on the Art of Memory. Not particularly useful (the book kind of says so itself) but insightful and methods of loci is still a marginally useful skill to have.
The best book I read this year was not a 2012 release, but HN participants should read it if they haven't already. That book is The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande,
which was mentioned favorably in several HN threads this year. (Thanks to the recommenders here who reminded me to read this book.) The Checklist Manifesto is practical, exciting, and thought-provoking in balance, and it will help you do your work better, whatever you do, and enjoy your family life better, whoever is in your family. It's a great read; don't miss it.
I just finished the book three days ago, really liked it, and thought, that there must be a site to collect programmers checklists for different tasks to have a similar collection as the aviation experts. Turns out, there is not...
Here's a list of books that I read this year and liked. My favorite was Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. The rest are all worth reading. I hesitated to put "The Joy of Clojure" on that list because it's too narrow, but it's one of the best programming books I've seen.
I'll second Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman for top book of 2012 and for top all time book like another commenter.
If you really want to expose the bias and structure of your consciousness, this the book to read. I would also pair this book with Incognito by David Eagleman (2012) to rehash some of the ideas of Kahneman and for a discussion of the implications of these ideas in morals and justice.
Also Connectome by Sebastian Seung (2012) gives a good outline of the structure of the brain, and an interesting discussion of how understanding that structure is a great scientific goal and some hypothetical implications of that understanding.
Really, I'd recommend reading anything to do with the emerging understanding of the brain because, without hyperbole, the better we understand the brain the better we understand the self.
Someone recommended this - at first I thought the title sounded too cheesy, but then again I already had plenty of (bad) management books, so I gave it a try:
I found this the worst book from those three, time after time he describes an idea that sounds somewhat interesting and then every single concrete example he gives seems completely wrong, the more so the more real-world experience I have in a topic he describes. For example he goes on and on about how "random tinkering" beats science when it comes to engineering - I would love to see an engineer that would agree with him on this. What he says about evolution seems completely misguided.
I'm only about 1/6th of the way through (listening in the car). I did have some disagreement on the specific examples, but they seemed to just be badly chosen examples (since he only really understands finance and some liberal arts, not engineering). So he's a bad writer, but not in a way which directly detracts from his philosophical argument. (and yes, the evolution parts sounded whacko too, but I think he was quoting someone else's beliefs, and had an argument that even if the explanation was wrong, it would still be a valid conclusion due to another argument)
Nice to hear your opinion, hearing some praise of the book I was wondering what similar-minded people think of it, I wish he just stayed closer to fields he is more familiar with, as you said.
I did really like Fooled by Randomness, so I'm a bit biased toward him. Once I finish listening to the whole Antifragile I'll probably write a review and maybe send it to him -- if it's just bad examples, coming up with some replacement examples which are actually valid seems like an improvement, and not too hard.
Why would you include examples if they aren't necessary to understand the argument, or arguments that aren't required to make your point? That sounds confusing and tedious.
Because he likes to hear himself talk (well, read his own words) and show off superficial tangential knowledge (or fairly deep tangential knowledge about some humanities things, especially classics and lebanese culture).
It's kind of grating, but works for an audiobook in the car, where I might lose a few seconds due to temporary attention increase on the road. He'll reliably spend 3-4 minutes saying the same thing with minor variations when 20 seconds would do.
I like Taleb's books. His ideas are far from novel -- especially to people who work with complex systems -- but his books are engaging. When I read them, I rarely find that I'm impressed by anything he said, yet I'm _always_ inspired to explore some tangent, which I think is very valuable. However, you have to take him with a grain of salt. The arrogance is a bit much.
I read the first book. The arrogance was a bit much, especially in a book where he's talking about the importance of randomness. But, like you, I did go off an explore about a lot of what he said. So it's a fun exercise.
There are a few great books which are too repetitive. "Black Swan" is one; he could have got all of that into a book a quarter the size and not lost much important. Another one is "Reckoning with Risk" by Gerd Giggerenzer - he takes many chapters to say people don't understand percentages, and you should really use "X people out of 10,000" when explaining risk to people.
Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back by Anna Anthropy
Some interesting ideas; the referenced tech is now dated. It's even easier to make games now then when this book was published.
I really liked Succeed by Halvorson, as well as Willpower by Baumeister and Tierney. The former covers research on setting goals, the latter covers research on being more disciplined. Both book are a great blend of interesting studies and practical advice.
Favorite novel, I think: Orthogonal by Greg Egan. First couple books in a trilogy are out. If you liked Egan in the 90s but mostly lost interest this millennium, like me, then take a look.
Yes to more technical, no to people, alas. Despite which, the conflicts and resolutions were pretty good. But the science fiction is brilliant.
(Incandescence also had some neat ideas, and I don't regret reading it -- it showed a reasonable way much of general relativity could be discovered before newtonian physics; but the people stuff irritated me. There was eventually an in-story explanation for the implausible characters, but it wasn't enough.)
On a similar note, my own choice is Egan's Diaspora. Most of the characters are sentient software, and it explores some of the implications of being able to fork oneself, or rewrite your software. On top of that the physics is, to the best of my mildly-educated knowledge, an extension of General Relativity consistent with what we already know; and part of it takes place in a six-dimensional spacetime.
The only other Egan I've read is his collection Luminosity, which was similarly impressive. I'm definitely going to check him out further.
Melville's Moby Dick, Crockford's Javascript: the good parts, Vonnegut's short stories, Defoe's Adventures and Piracies of captain Singleton (not about the design pattern), Amsterdam in the 70s. Not a single new release though.
Nassim Taleb's "Antifragile", Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov", Robert Greene's "48 Laws of Power" were some of the good books I read this year.
The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne. Probably my first favorite book, which I've read about 10 or 12 times in my life. Just re-read it again a few weeks ago. Never gets old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island
The three titles in The Newsflesh Trilogy by Mira Grant. I'm not normally real big on zombie stories, but this one was a breath of fresh air. Part zombies, part conspiracy story, and wildly entertaining.
http://miragrant.com/newsflesh.php
Living Low Carb - Jonny Bowden. Picked this up after I was diagnosed as diabetic, and needed to clean up my diet and lose some weight. Very detailed book, explains the endocrine cycle and the relationship between carbs, fat, insulin, etc. very well, and makes a compelling case for eliminating most carbs from one's diet. I've been following this approach for the last 2-3 months and feel pretty good about it. My weight is coming down, even though I'm not doing a lot more exercise (that part will come eventually, but for now I'm basically just doing on mountain bike ride of about 2 hours, on Saturdays).
http://www.amazon.com/Living-Low-Carb-Controlled-Carbohydrat...
The Startup Owner's Manual - Steve Blank and Bob Dorf. The successor to the famous The Four Steps to the Epiphany, this is the Bible of Customer Development.
http://www.stevenblank.com/startup_index_qty.html
Winning The Knowledge Transfer Race - kinda niche, but important to me, vis-a-vis Fogbeam Labs. Our space is (largely) knowledge management, and I got a ton of ideas from this book, in terms of how to articulate problems our customers might be facing, how some of the solutions map to capabilities we're working on, etc.
http://www.michaeljenglish.com/books/winning.html
Outthink The Competition - Kaihan Krippendorff. Definitely got me thinking about the value of strategy and strategic thinking. Contains a nice catalog of basic strategies one can employ. Inspired me pick up some other books on strategy and strategic thinking as well. I definitely recommend this one, unless you happen to be in a business that might compete with us at Fogbeam Labs, in which case, forget you ever heard of this.
http://www.kaihan.net/outthinkthe_competitionbook.html
Capability Cases: A Solution Envisioning Approach - Irene Polioff, Robert Coyne, Ralph Hodgson. An interesting book on matching business problems to technical solutions through something called a "capability case". Think of a "capability case" as something like a cross between a "use case" and an Alexanderian pattern, and a business "case" like you'd study in business school. Basically it's an approach to distilling the essence of a problem an organization might have, laying out the capabilities needed to address that problem, and demonstrating the business justification for the solution.
http://www.capabilitycases.org/
Definitely recommend the rest of the Laundry books. Also be sure to check out Stross's short story "A Colder War", which came before those, and is very much in the same overall theme, although substantially darker.
Will do! I have a handful of other Stross books waiting in a pile to be ready already, but not sure I have any more of the Laundry ones yet. I know I have several of his other traditional sci-fi works waiting, and I'll definitely get to the rest of the Laundry books eventually.
I can highly recommend "Accelerando". It's one of my all time favorite books. I've read it a half dozen times, and I'll probably read it again, just not right away.
I also liked his Eschaton series, "Singularity Sky", and "Iron Sunrise".
In spite of loving "Accelerando", I've never been able to get into his non-hard science fiction series, like the Laundry series, or Merchant Princes.
I wouldn't recommend Merchant Princes too much. They're fun, but they're long, and don't really finish. At some point, the plot sort of gets lost, and the series ends with way more questions than answers. It's a cool universe, and really interesting, but IMO not used so well.
Yeah, I've got that one, but haven't gotten to it yet. The only other Stross I've read was, Halting State. But I have Accelerando, The Jennifer Morgue, Singularity Sky, and a couple of others, in the queue waiting to be read.
"singularity sky" is not necessarily my favourite stross book, but it's the one that impressed me the most. one of the best treatments of FTL in a relativistic universe I've seen (as in "fine, have FTL, but you can't ignore the fact that it violates causality".)
OMG, I was going to put an Any Rand book on there as a joke and I see one seriously posted one here. If you like Rand books now, you probably newly "discovered" her and her books and philosophy. Strong probability you are around college age, plu or minus a few years. Circle back when you are wiser and compare what you think then to what you think now.
Nope, I'm 39 and discovered Rand some time ago. I only wish I had discovered her stuff when I was younger.
Also, just because you don't like Rand doesn't mean you should go around insulting people who happen to enjoy her work. It kinda makes you a dick. Reasonable people can disagree on things, you do realize this, right? If not, come back when you're a little wiser and maybe we can talk.
Yes, I agree that reasonable people can disagree. BTW, I used to like Rand, but then I became older and wiser. My experience is typical of many, not not all, of course. Same thing with Santa. I never actually believed in him, but many did when they were younger. Some still do. Most grew older and wiser (some not so much, same with religion, I guess). That's all. No need to get angry :) Anyway, like I said, "Circle back when you are wiser and compare what you think then to what you think now." If you are "normal," you will grow wiser with age, you do realize this, right? :)
226 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadThat aside, I reread the Dan Brown 'Angels & Demons' and 'The Da Vinci code' novels, worked my way through 'To kill a Mockingbird' for the first time since high school and read the 'Catechism of the Catholic Church' - to better understand the religion my girlfriend is choosing.
[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dissolution-Shardlake-C-J-Sansom/dp/...
http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/d...
which was mentioned favorably in several HN threads this year. (Thanks to the recommenders here who reminded me to read this book.) The Checklist Manifesto is practical, exciting, and thought-provoking in balance, and it will help you do your work better, whatever you do, and enjoy your family life better, whoever is in your family. It's a great read; don't miss it.
(free lite version: http://lite.launchlist.net/)
http://diegobasch.com/books
I also read Black Like Me, which seems to be required reading in the US, but I only recently became aware of it. Definitely worth a look.
If you really want to expose the bias and structure of your consciousness, this the book to read. I would also pair this book with Incognito by David Eagleman (2012) to rehash some of the ideas of Kahneman and for a discussion of the implications of these ideas in morals and justice.
Also Connectome by Sebastian Seung (2012) gives a good outline of the structure of the brain, and an interesting discussion of how understanding that structure is a great scientific goal and some hypothetical implications of that understanding.
Really, I'd recommend reading anything to do with the emerging understanding of the brain because, without hyperbole, the better we understand the brain the better we understand the self.
http://www.amazon.com/Its-Your-Ship-Management-Techniques/dp...
While not featuring any groundbreaking ideas, it's convincing and straight to the point.
It's essentially the culmination of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan.
It's kind of grating, but works for an audiobook in the car, where I might lose a few seconds due to temporary attention increase on the road. He'll reliably spend 3-4 minutes saying the same thing with minor variations when 20 seconds would do.
I read the first book. The arrogance was a bit much, especially in a book where he's talking about the importance of randomness. But, like you, I did go off an explore about a lot of what he said. So it's a fun exercise.
There are a few great books which are too repetitive. "Black Swan" is one; he could have got all of that into a book a quarter the size and not lost much important. Another one is "Reckoning with Risk" by Gerd Giggerenzer - he takes many chapters to say people don't understand percentages, and you should really use "X people out of 10,000" when explaining risk to people.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1936365537
Feeding Back: Conversations with Alternative Guitarists from Proto-Punk to Post-Rock by David Todd
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/161374059X
Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back by Anna Anthropy
Some interesting ideas; the referenced tech is now dated. It's even easier to make games now then when this book was published.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1609803728
I recently started 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 by Nick Montfort, et al http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262018462 (but also available as a free PDF)
Generative Design: Visualize, Program, and Create with Processing , by Hartmut Bohnacker, is under the Christmas tree. :) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1616890770/
Amazon links: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0452297710 and http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143122231
Thorough book notes: http://www.quora.com/Leo-Polovets/Exceptionally-long-book-no... and http://www.quora.com/Leo-Polovets/Exceptionally-long-book-no...
http://bigamericannight.com/the-road-to-somewhere
An important book to understand how we could tackle climate change, as well as how companies like Uber and Twine could be part of the solution.
1. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
2. Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman
3. Developing a Universal Religion by David Hockey
4. Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
(Incandescence also had some neat ideas, and I don't regret reading it -- it showed a reasonable way much of general relativity could be discovered before newtonian physics; but the people stuff irritated me. There was eventually an in-story explanation for the implausible characters, but it wasn't enough.)
The only other Egan I've read is his collection Luminosity, which was similarly impressive. I'm definitely going to check him out further.
"Liar's Poker" by Michael Lewis http://www.amazon.com/Liars-Poker-Michael-Lewis/dp/039333869...
"Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" by Edwin Lefevre http://www.amazon.com/Reminiscences-Stock-Operator-Commentar...
"The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods" by Hank Haney http://www.amazon.com/Big-Miss-Years-Coaching-Tiger/dp/03079...
"The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time" by Michael Craig http://www.amazon.com/Professor-Banker-Suicide-King-Richest/...
Simple, to the point and effective.
I think this is an amazing book for entrepreneurs.
Steve Blank, Bob Dorf: The startup owner's manual
"Programming Pearls" by Jon Bentley http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Pearls-Joe-Bentley/dp/8177...
The best? Probably Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, but I can't say all the other books (most non-fiction) weren't great
The three titles in The Newsflesh Trilogy by Mira Grant. I'm not normally real big on zombie stories, but this one was a breath of fresh air. Part zombies, part conspiracy story, and wildly entertaining. http://miragrant.com/newsflesh.php
Living Low Carb - Jonny Bowden. Picked this up after I was diagnosed as diabetic, and needed to clean up my diet and lose some weight. Very detailed book, explains the endocrine cycle and the relationship between carbs, fat, insulin, etc. very well, and makes a compelling case for eliminating most carbs from one's diet. I've been following this approach for the last 2-3 months and feel pretty good about it. My weight is coming down, even though I'm not doing a lot more exercise (that part will come eventually, but for now I'm basically just doing on mountain bike ride of about 2 hours, on Saturdays). http://www.amazon.com/Living-Low-Carb-Controlled-Carbohydrat...
The Startup Owner's Manual - Steve Blank and Bob Dorf. The successor to the famous The Four Steps to the Epiphany, this is the Bible of Customer Development. http://www.stevenblank.com/startup_index_qty.html
Winning The Knowledge Transfer Race - kinda niche, but important to me, vis-a-vis Fogbeam Labs. Our space is (largely) knowledge management, and I got a ton of ideas from this book, in terms of how to articulate problems our customers might be facing, how some of the solutions map to capabilities we're working on, etc. http://www.michaeljenglish.com/books/winning.html
Outthink The Competition - Kaihan Krippendorff. Definitely got me thinking about the value of strategy and strategic thinking. Contains a nice catalog of basic strategies one can employ. Inspired me pick up some other books on strategy and strategic thinking as well. I definitely recommend this one, unless you happen to be in a business that might compete with us at Fogbeam Labs, in which case, forget you ever heard of this. http://www.kaihan.net/outthinkthe_competitionbook.html
Capability Cases: A Solution Envisioning Approach - Irene Polioff, Robert Coyne, Ralph Hodgson. An interesting book on matching business problems to technical solutions through something called a "capability case". Think of a "capability case" as something like a cross between a "use case" and an Alexanderian pattern, and a business "case" like you'd study in business school. Basically it's an approach to distilling the essence of a problem an organization might have, laying out the capabilities needed to address that problem, and demonstrating the business justification for the solution. http://www.capabilitycases.org/
Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson. Just a fascinating story of a strangely interesting man. Lots of computer industry history embedded in here as well. http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/14516485...
Hackers - Steven Levy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer...
Artificial Life - Steven Levy. mikeash ↗ Definitely recommend the rest of the Laundry books. Also be sure to check out Stross's short story "A Colder War", which came before those, and is very much in the same overall theme, although substantially darker. mindcrime ↗ Will do! I have a handful of other Stross books waiting in a pile to be ready already, but not sure I have any more of the Laundry ones yet. I know I have several of his other traditional sci-fi works waiting, and I'll definitely get to the rest of the Laundry books eventually. inetsee ↗ I can highly recommend "Accelerando". It's one of my all time favorite books. I've read it a half dozen times, and I'll probably read it again, just not right away. mikeash ↗ I wouldn't recommend Merchant Princes too much. They're fun, but they're long, and don't really finish. At some point, the plot sort of gets lost, and the series ends with way more questions than answers. It's a cool universe, and really interesting, but IMO not used so well. mindcrime ↗ Yeah, I've got that one, but haven't gotten to it yet. The only other Stross I've read was, Halting State. But I have Accelerando, The Jennifer Morgue, Singularity Sky, and a couple of others, in the queue waiting to be read. zem ↗ "singularity sky" is not necessarily my favourite stross book, but it's the one that impressed me the most. one of the best treatments of FTL in a relativistic universe I've seen (as in "fine, have FTL, but you can't ignore the fact that it violates causality".) famo ↗ Ghost In The Wires was definitely my favourite read of 2012. I'm keen to read a few more in your list. Ta for posting! chris123 ↗ OMG, I was going to put an Any Rand book on there as a joke and I see one seriously posted one here. If you like Rand books now, you probably newly "discovered" her and her books and philosophy. Strong probability you are around college age, plu or minus a few years. Circle back when you are wiser and compare what you think then to what you think now. mindcrime ↗ Nope, I'm 39 and discovered Rand some time ago. I only wish I had discovered her stuff when I was younger. chris123 ↗ Yes, I agree that reasonable people can disagree. BTW, I used to like Rand, but then I became older and wiser. My experience is typical of many, not not all, of course. Same thing with Santa. I never actually believed in him, but many did when they were younger. Some still do. Most grew older and wiser (some not so much, same with religion, I guess). That's all. No need to get angry :) Anyway, like I said, "Circle back when you are wiser and compare what you think then to what you think now." If you are "normal," you will grow wiser with age, you do realize this, right? :)
I also liked his Eschaton series, "Singularity Sky", and "Iron Sunrise".
In spite of loving "Accelerando", I've never been able to get into his non-hard science fiction series, like the Laundry series, or Merchant Princes.
Also, just because you don't like Rand doesn't mean you should go around insulting people who happen to enjoy her work. It kinda makes you a dick. Reasonable people can disagree on things, you do realize this, right? If not, come back when you're a little wiser and maybe we can talk.