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A Good Summer Read?

Posted by Cliff on from the fine-novels-for-the-summer-vacation dept.

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."

22 of 1,485 comments (clear)

  1. Gibson.... by objekt404 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I just picked up 'Pattern Recognition' & it is definitely a decent read (so far)

    --
    "Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun."
    1. Re:Gibson.... by fingerbear · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I liked Pattern Recognition, too, but I have a question -- did reading that book affect your shopping patterns?

      I read it a few months ago and STILL think of Cayce Pollard every time I'm in a clothing store. And every time I remove a label from the stuff I buy.

      I think she's my new idol.

  2. Ender's Game by mr100percent · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ender's Game. Not sure about the sequels though. You may want the crossover(quasi-sequel) Ender's Shadow after that.

  3. Fantasy? by DreadSpoon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you like fantasy at all, I'd recommned Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series, Terry Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" series (which is all but a blatant ripoff of Jordan's work, mind), or any of the Forgotten Realms mini-series (RA Salvatore is the best writer of FR books, imo).

    If you like humour (yes, the British version of it ;-), and can at least tolerate fantasy, you _must_ read Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" books. Absolutely must.

    I'd also recommend Asian folklore; those stories are surprisingly good, considering the plots seem like they were thought up by someone using the peace pipe... ;-)

  4. Dune by DarkSkiesAhead · · Score: 5, Insightful


    I have to recommend the old sci-fi classic, Dune. It did a marvelous job of creating a strange yet self-consistent world. Gread read. The other books in the series are sometimes dry and uninteresting, but still worth it.

  5. Cuckoo's Egg by cvanaver · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Read something that will FUCK with your head by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    and leave you feeling dirty.
    Like Naked Lunch

  7. Re:How about... by Cire · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Damn right. Read Down and out in Paris and London by George Orwell. One of the best books I've read in a long time.


    Cire

  8. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. Reading by cje · · Score: 5, Interesting
    A lot of times in the summer, I'm too busy with other things to spend a lot of time reading major novels, but in the time that I do get to read, I like to tear into collections of short stories, things that you can get through in an abbreviated sitting. Some of the stuff I read last summer:
    • The complete works of H.P. Lovecraft (Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!)
    • The Complete Sherlock Holmes: Stories and Novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
    • Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Tales and Poems (the tales, mostly; I'm not big on poetry)
    Not exactly sci-fi geek hacker stuff, of course, but I've read through most of Stephenson and Gibson's stuff and found that I like classic mystery/suspense as well. If it's hard sci-fi you're looking for, check out a book called The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, if you haven't already. It's old (circa 1950s or 1960s IIRC) but a great read. And then there's the classics like Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama or 2001 series.
    --
    We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
  10. Just one? by signe · · Score: 5, Informative


    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..."
  11. Vinge of course by fuzzeli · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think that Vernor Vinge is an essential geek read, most especially the loosely-related and absolutely fantastic pair, "A Fire Upon the Deep" and "A Deepness in the Sky". And the Motie Books, "The Mote in God's Eye" and "The Gripping Hand" by Niven and Pournelle, are a great first contact story. Also, anything by Robert Forward (especially Dragon's Egg and Starquake) is guaranteed to by intellectually fascinating and horribly written.

  12. Note on Ayn Rand by cr0z01d · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  13. Things that I like after 40 years of reading SciFi by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  14. Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy by Seek_1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    .. 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.

  15. Re:How about... by ldspartan · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  16. Good Read by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    try neal stephenson's: cryptonomicon
    good read, great plot, and the tech stuff isnt too shabby either.

    bonus treat: perl source for the cryptographic alogrithm described [and used in the story] called solitaire [the algo, courtesy of bruce schneier of counterpane and "practical cryptography" book] presented at the back of the book...

  17. I hope this is fair use: by cje · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It's (Lord of the Rings) not that it's a hard read, it's that it moves way too slowly. IIRC, there's a good page about Treebeard when we first meet him. A simple, "he looks like an aging cypress tree with a face" would work pretty well.

    In the preface to the unabridged version of "The Stand", Stephen King (truly an American icon) writes:
    As it happens, I think that in really good stories, the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts. If that were not so, the following would be a perfectly acceptable version of "Handsel and Gretel":
    Hansel and Gretel were two children with a nice father and a nice mother. The nice mother died, and the father married a bitch. The bitch wanted the kids out of the way so she'd have more money to spend on herself. She bullied her spineless, soft-headed hubby into taking Handsel and Gretel into the woods and killing them. The kids' father relented at the last moment, allowing them to live so they could starve to death in the woods instead of dying quickly and mercifully at the blade of his knife. While they were wandering around, they found a house made out of candy. It was owned by a witch who was into cannibalism. She locked them up and told them when they were good and fat, she was going to eat them. But the kids got the best of her. Hansel shoved her into her own oven. They found the witch's treasure, and they must have found a map, too, because they eventually arrived home again. When they got there, Dad gave the bitch the boot and they lived happily ever after. The End.
    I don't know what you think, but for me, that version's a loser. The story is there, but it's not elegant. It's like a Cadillac with the chrome stripped off and the paint sanded down to dull metal. It goes somewhere, but it ain't, you know, boss.
    LOTR is certainly not short on words, but taking all of the pages that describe the world of Middle-Earth and boiling them down to single Cliffs Notes-style sentences would kill the narrative. There are portions where Tolkien goes overboard (i.e., some of the details of Middle-Earth's history and the lineages of his characters) but on the whole, I thought that LOTR was pretty well-paced.

    I mean, the trilogy isn't a Michael Crichton airport reader or a Thomas Harris psycho thriller. It's an epic journey through a world of splendor and grandeur. The guy invented his own languages for Middle-Earth, dude. :-) Rushing through Tolkien's world would not have done it justice.
    --
    We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
  18. Ender's Law by sakusha · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have postulated a new law, entitled "Ender's Law"

    "Every time the subject of science fiction is raised on Slashdot, Ender's Game will be mentioned in the first 10 messages."

    I think Slashcode needs an Ender filter, just like it has a First Post filter.

  19. For the love of God, don't start the Wheel of Time by hprotagonist0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  20. Required Slashdot reading list. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    1) Bill Gates: Portrait of Evil
    2) New Guide to learning Hindi
    3) Linus Torvalds: Savior of the Multiverse
    4) How Things Work In Soviet Russia
    5) Why employers are evil, and why I still insist of working for them
    6) The Theory of How to Date Women
    7) Physical Exercise: Tips On How To Avoid It
    8) How To Get Used To Bathing
    9) Hottest IT Jobs/Trends In India
    10) The Essential Goat.sx Reference
    11) Creating Beowulf Clusters From Anything

  21. What?? by NamShubCMX · · Score: 5, Insightful
    What???

    No one suggested Hitchikers guide to the galaxy (a trilogy iun 5 parts) yet!!??

    --
    We've always been at war with Eurasia.