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A Good Summer Read?
binaryhead asks: "Well, the semester has just ended, and I have graduated from school! :-) I start my full-time job in a month and want to read a good book in the mean time. Having read Snowcrash, Neuromancer, and most of the hacker biographies, I am trying to find a scifi-geek-hacker book that people like. I might try the new Kevin Mitnick book, but I wanted to see what Slashdot preferred. Thanks."
Ender's Game. Not sure about the sequels though. You may want the crossover(quasi-sequel) Ender's Shadow after that.
Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Cliff Stoll
Good documentary account of tracing international hackers from a sysadmin-like guy's point of view. A little dated now but well-written, humorous and very entertaining.
Slaughterhouse Five
Cat's Cradle
Player Piano
The Sirens of Titan
I enjoyed them 30 yrs ago as much as in the past few weeks. Unemployed and all. Don't forget 1984, The Doors of Perception and Fahrenheit 451. Enjoy.
One book in a month of nothing to do? Maybe one book a week, if you're slow!
Anyways, Cryptonomicon was a good read, if a little lengthy. In fact, anything by Stephenson that you haven't read (Zodiac and Diamond Age were great). Just ignore the complaints about endings and enjoy the rest of the story.
Asimov's Foundation series is a great choice as well. Not so much with the hacker angle (well, hacking of a different kind, surely) but very interesting.
If you want to go military geek sci-fi, David Weber's Honor Harrington series is excellent. You can get the first book, On Basilisk Station from the Baen Free Library. And if you buy the most recent book, War of Honor, in hardcover, you get a CD that has all the books in the series on it. Or you can just download the CD somewhere online.
Just a few suggestions. I have a ton of other things on my reading list, but that's a start.
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
I feel kind of obliged to point out that you need to be ready to read those books. They're full of hatred for communism, and a dogmatic obsession with Ayn Rand's objectivism. Be careful lest you get to involved with those books, take a moment to step aside and try to view them from a different context than they present. Very powerful work, but on another level it is propaganda and you should always remember that.
In addition, The Fountainhead has one of the ugliest scenes I have ever come across in any piece of literature. I'm referring to the scene involving Roarke and Dominique, which in my mind, seems more or less equivalent to rape, yet is not treated as such in the book.
I'm just trying to give adequate warning for those who don't know what to expect from the books, they are very powerful and well written.
Dune if you haven't already - the best.
City by Clifford Simak - classic.
Shockwave Rider - the first real computer/scifi cyberpunkish book. The term 'worm' comes from this book.
Naked Sun - Asimov - genesis of R. Daneel Olivaw, the character that Commander Data was based on.
Nine Princes in Amber - after Lord of the Rings my favorite fantasy book.
Left Hand of Darkness - IMHO the 2nd best scifi novel ever written after only Dune.
Ringworld by Larry Niven - extrodinary world building and imagination in hard scifi genre.
Gateway by Frederick Pohl - ditto.
Startide Rising, David Brin - wonderful novel set in world where man is lifting other species to intelligence. Terrific writing, and the sequels are excellent too.
.. by Douglas Adams. It's a classic and I finally got around to reading it.. plus the other four parts! ;)
And I have to say, it was the most fun I've had reading a book in a LOOONNNGGG time! It's a fairly quick read, but it's completely enjoyable. I highly recommend picking it up if you haven't already read it.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig. Buy it from Amazon.
The book is neither about Zen Buddhism or motorcycle maintenance. Its tremendously good, and thought provoking, particularly for those analytical minds out there. I can't recommend it enough.
I started reading Jordan's series in middle school, and I loved it. In fact, I would still love it if either a), it had ended 2000 pages ago, or b), the most recent books were as good as the first few.
The series is good up until the 5th or 6th book, at which point it stalls and dies a long, slow, painful death. I recently bought the 10th book out of the same vague sense of obligation that sent me to the theater for Star Wars: Episode II, and I wouldn't want anyone else to be sucked into that vortex.
On the other hand, if you want a good fantasy series, take a look at George R. R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" (starts with _A Game of Thrones_). Another multivolume, incomplete series, but he promises only 6 books, so maybe it'll work out. I also just recently read Neil Gaiman's _Neverwhere_, a dark-comedy urban fantasy (how's that for a sub-sub-genere?), which is excellent.
"A witty saying proves nothing." --Voltaire