Ask HN: What are your favorite books? I'm bored

I just finished Masters Of Doom (http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cultu...). I read it almost non-stop. I highly recommand it to anyone who has gone through the early days of ID Software games Wolf3D / Doom.

Anything by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

If you're interested in ycombinator, how about this one "The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups" ( http://www.amazon.com/Launch-Pad-Combinator-Exclusive-Startu... )

Read a kids book, seriously — http://www.rotub.me/blog/kids-books.html

Qur'an by God Almighty.

Arthur C. Clarke - Rendezvous with Rama is one of the most imaginative and inspiring books I've ever read.

I'm currently reading "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter

Quantum Thief trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi.

A Song of Ice and Fire and I don't even like fantasy.

The Millenium series by Stieg Larsson are very good as well.

Buddhism: Not Always So, and anything else by Shunryu Suzuki, What Buddha Taught, by Rahula

Smarter: A Mathematical Bridge by Stephen Hewson, it will make you grok the real structure of mathematics even if you're starting with fairly basic undergraduate level math, and it will make it immensely easier to tackle new areas of mathematics.

Pattern recognition and machine learning by Bishop

Popular: Coders at Work, Founders at Work, Behind the Cloud

"Perfume" by Patrick Suskind, and the movie is great as well. The main character is a horrible person but so is everyone else. Possibly the funniest nihilist book ever written.

Also interesting to those of us with no sense of smell.

Catch-22. In a similar vibe (but a fair bit shorter), Slaughterhouse 5. Both cover the hell of war by examining its absurdity. Catch-22 is also the funniest book you'll ever read.

If you're into engineering books, the best I've read is Skunk Works (Ben R Rich). It's an account of the work of Lockheed's legendary skunk works division - behind the U2 spy plane, stealth fighter and the blackbird sr-17.

- Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance was a real eye-opener to me.

- Last year, I read both Das Kapital by Karl Marx and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes.

- Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Note that these are classic works (Zen is the newest, from 1974), but they haven't lost their relevance yet. Zen is a journey in your mind, disguised as a journey by motorcycle by a father and his son. Das Kapital and GToEIM offer deeper insight in why our economy works the way it does, and I especially liked the contrast between the two books. Walden is difficult to classify. It changed the way I look at things, but I can't say exactly how. Sometimes I encounter a situation and a quote or scene from the book pops up in my head. Highly recommended!

Buddhism (and better living): Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Siddhartha (by Hermann Hesse), The Way of Zen (by Alan Watts - I learned a lot about meditation and satori).

Also: Think and Grow Rich (by Napoleon Hill, the original self-improvement book)

Just got done reading Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, most if it was pretty insightful, especially the stories in the beginning. The executive management parts I skimmed over in the middle and some parts were really irrelevant for early stage companies but overall it was a good read and informative.

Peter Thiel's book Zero To One is on pre-order, but you can pre-order and then get a pre-print edition mailed to you. It's based around the class notes in his Stanford startup class. I don't agree with everything but it's a very good perspective. It really helped me get out of the perspective of shitty ideas and to think bigger.

Edit: Ops, got Marc and Ben confused. ;)

I binge-read Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. If you're looking for something religious-y, start with the brilliant Small Gods.

Ishmael

(from Wikipedia) Ishmael is a 1992 philosophical novel by Daniel Quinn. It examines the mythological thinking at the heart of modern civilization, its effect on ethics, and how this relates to sustainability and societal collapse on the global scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_%28novel%29

Every year or so I repost this. Hopefully you'll find something interesting in here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078221

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Hacker News stories which contains plenty of book recommendations (sorted by points, labeled by topic):

Science Fiction: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2978027

Computer Science: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3595599

General: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1752139

Design: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3276986

Computer Science: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636275

Developing mental models and increasing cognition: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3277457

Quant finance: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3177815

General: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=663662

General (non software): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1226736

Math: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=665029

General: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=875686

Entrepreneur: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2928211

Statistics: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902074

Philosophy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1503137

General: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865350

Math for beginners: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=755043

Military strategy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=456275

General: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797070

Investing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248469

"I want to start a web company": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1567456

Insanely Simple The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success by Ken Segall is quite good

Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (9 vols. , English) https://db.tt/3sGQNzs1

Someone made a website listing books which are often recommended on HN: www.hn-books.com

I just finished reading The Martian recently, inspired to write a review: http://www.alphadevx.com/a/453-Review-of-The-Martian

Currently reading Flash Boys by Michael Lewis, which is about High Frequency Trading in Wall Street which is interesting for the technology involved.

Favorite book of all time is Frank Herbert's Dune, the six books are great in fact.

I like understanding where I am located in space and time, that is why I love reading about science & science fiction ; it is indirectly related to religion in the sense that it makes you think about your world, about yourself.

Buddhism / Religion / ... :

- Siddartha - Hermann Hesse

- The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

Science:

- A brief history of time - Stephen Hawking (space, time)

- The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins (evolution)

- Le cerveau intime - Marc Jeannerod (in french only)

Science-fiction:

- The Road - Cormack Mc Carthy

- City - Clifford D. Simack

- Time is the simplest thing - Clifford D. Simack

- Ringworld - Larry Niven

"The Coming of the Third Reich" from Richard J. Evans

I read it recently and it did changed the way I look at the politics and government now. It made me fully understand that things like separation/accumulation of powers are really important. As in when activists of all kinds complained about such set-ups before, I treated it only abstract theoretical problems. Not anymore, I see the point now. The Third Reich did not happen overnight as it seemed from high school version of it, it was made possible by thousands tiny steps by varying parties.

There were other things to learn from that book too, but the above was the most important. It is a first part of a trilogy and whole of it is worth reading. That first part was the most eye opening to me through.

Disturbing the Universe, by Freeman Dyson. http://www.amazon.com/Disturbing-Universe-Foundation-Science...