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What's the Best Book You Read This Year?
The year is almost over. It's time we asked you about the books you read over the past few months. Which ones -- new or old -- were your favourite? Please share just one title name in the comments section (and if you would like, rest in parenthesis). Also, which books are you looking forward to reading in the coming weeks?
1984
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
I only read good books, but Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" impressed me this year. Are there any good books left after the death of Terry Pratchett and Jack Vance? Luckily that Gaiman is still alive.
Daring Greatly - Brene Brown
Not just the best book I read this year, but one of the best I have read in my life.
"The Brilliant Disaster" by Jim Rasenberger is a fascinating account of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The Dark Forest.
I love the Cixin Liu books... refreshing sci-fi.
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World changed my view of Mongolia......Genghis Khan was actually kind of a good leader (which makes sense, since people were willing to follow him), and the book kind of changed how I saw history. That is, it helped me understand the broad trends and why things happened, all across the world, in the first half of the last millennium. Things aren't isolated, and the Mongols were the catalyst for communication throughout the world (including spreading plague, probably).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Had this waiting to be read since i saw "The Pacific". Terrific book on what it was like to be a Pacific island hopping Marine rifleman in WWII.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Hugh Howey's Silo post-apocalyptic series is really worth reading. I read the first part, Wool, in a few days : it's about people living in a one hundred forty-four stories silo buried in the ground and the reason why they survive like that. Very good.
This year's books:
1. Werner Munter 3x3 Lawinen (in German). A book on estimating the probability of an avalanche and how to reduce the avalanche risk while skiing)
2. Yanis Varoufakis, And the weak suffer what they must? (in English). A book on the recent/ongoing European economic crisis. Very eye-opening. It strengthened my pessimism on the topic, although the book itself ends in a rather optimistic tone. It confirmed my suspicion that the former greek finance minister was more of an academic and less of a competent politician.
3. Charles Bukowski, Post office. Finished it in a day. There are very few books that can be read so easily and be so multy faceted and insightful at the same time.
I would be inclined to vote for Post Office, but the book on avalanches is already proving itself quite useful...
Definitely The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Enchiridion by Epictetus, and various writings by Seneca the Younger. Anybody in the quest for philosophical insight would be well served by giving the Stoics a shot. Kind of a western analytical version of Zen Buddhism.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
I'll tell you what, somebody left this book at my house back in April and I threw it in my pack on a road trip from Connecticut to Houston, Texas. Bored with motel TV, I started reading it sitting next to an empty pool not far from Gettysburg, PA and continued a bit every night. I had some Bo Crowder-looking dude give me the fisheye in a Waffle House in Tennessee when he saw what I was reading, and a Civil War buff in Virginia sat down and talked to me for like an hour in a diner since he had read the book and loved it.
I'm not usually a Civil War history guy, and political biographies have never been my thing, but this dude... I highly recommend this book. I bet your local library has like a dozen copies, so you'll be able to read it for free right now.
https://www.amazon.com/America...
You are welcome on my lawn.
By E. O. Wilson, the myrmecologist/evolutionary biologist, explaining the evolutionary origins of humanity and the inherent conflict between self-promoting and group-benefiting pressures that make us what we are. Fascinating reading filled with tidbits about the variety of life on Earth, finishing with a rebuttal of scientific dogma that demonstrates the vibrant process of science. This book changed my view of the world.
The chapters in The Meaning of Human Existence are collected from earlier writings, giving the book a choppy feel. A longer, more detailed, less anthropocentric, but (at least to me) equally fascinating treatment of the material by the same author is The Social Conquest of Earth.
1984 argues that humanity is destroyed by totalitarianism; Brave New World by Aldous Huxley argues that human individualism creates the conditions for totalitarian rule.
Alternative Right.
Reading the Face of Battle by John Keegan. A study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. Only on the intro right now, but any book that spends the first 100 pages solely on the historiography of battlefield accounts has to be good.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
That's on my list once I'm done w/ 1-6. Also, I plan to marry that woman
The Mythical Man Month. Most people follow the antithesis of this book.
Light read, yes, but a surprisingly engaging novel.
Starting Out with Java: From Control Structures through Objects 6th edition by Tony Gaddis.
I feel like this book more than any other is the one that really took me into the world of computer science in a clear, methodical, easy-to-follow way and has opened my mind to whole new realms of thinking. Another great book is "Starting out with Python" which is very similar, and I'm finding that reading them both together is helping me even more in understanding how different languages approach different things.
Some may find the methodical approach to perhaps be tedious as some points, but it is exactly this kind of gradual building chapter after chapter that gives you a strong sense of deliberate progression and certainty about your increasing knowledge that is so necessary when undertaking the monumental task of learning computer science.
I had my first science fiction novel published this year and, while I love reading books, actually writing and publishing one has been an amazing process. (Now working on Book #2.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I've read the Bible over a two-year period several times. It is a lot of reading, and not easy to absorb. However, I have to say that each time I got a lot of new insights and ideas from it. It complements the tons of technical and sci-fi reading that I do otherwise. Understanding the relationship between the Old and the New Testament is key, I think, and explains a lot of the ethical issues. I found two things interesting with regard to that - first, Jesus really gives an amazing ethical basis in the Sermon on the Mount, and I am so glad that a huge part of our Western civilization is built on its premises. And second, Jesus' message in the end does not seem to be about the new ethical rules, but rather about how to deal with the fact that we're all breaking them. Fascinating reading, but from the discussion here it seems it is definitely not for everyone.
You're in for a treat. His entire catalogue is great.Even his early dimestore novel scifi trash is well done scifi trash.
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."