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."

Fantasy?

[DreadSpoon]

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... ;-)

How about...

[ath0mic]

...something not "scifi-geek-hacker" for a change? It's a big world out there.

Robert Anton Wilson

[barkingcorndog]

Good stuff to read before starting your first job. Check out the Illuminatus! trilogy.

Dune

[DarkSkiesAhead]

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.

Read something that will FUCK with your head

[Anonymous Coward]

and leave you feeling dirty.
Like Naked Lunch

Re:Ender's Game

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree. Ender's Game is the best book I have read in a long time. And from what i can remember, Ender's Shadow (about Bean) would be the book i would recommend to read next, before the 'true' sequels.

Re:Fantasy?

[Vann_v2]

I read Robert Jordan when I was in middle school and loved it. "I'm a big boy!" I thought. Then, years later, I realized that he couldn't really write well , or at least didn't write well, and only the first book was worth reading.

Who wants to spend the time reading 7, or however many there are now, 1000+ page books whose plot is plainly drawn out as long as possible for seemingly no other reason that to extend the series? I don't, but I suppose this is a good way to kill time during the summer.

Cryptonomicon

[loudmouth]

IMnvHO it's better than Snowcrash, even

not scifi...

[tobes]

but you could check out the classics like Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, Illuminatis Trilogy, anything by Rand...those all seem to appeal to geek sensibilities.

Re:How about...

[Cire]

Damn right. Read Down and out in Paris and London [amazon.com] by George Orwell [k-1.com]. One of the best books I've read in a long time.

Cire

good read

[bark]

How about the complete works of Shakespeare?

Nothing beats a nice assortment of Elizabethan plays.

Some must-read modern classics for geeks

[privacyt]

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams -- a hilarious take on Sci-Fi, the Hitchhiker's Guide has been read by many of the most influential hackers. (I'm using that term in its good sense.)

Then there's that little sci fi novel by George Orwell called 1984 -- which is important for geeks who want to be informed citizens

Vinge of course

[fuzzeli]

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.

Re:Fantasy?

[critter_hunter]

As far as Forgotten Realms is concerned, I think RA Salvatore is the only really good writer. I haven't read all of FR, so maybe I was just unlucky, but everything else I read was crap

Death Gate cycle, by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, is damn good fantasy (especially the 4 first books). The Dragonlance trilogies are good, too, and so is Rose Of The Prophet apparently, although I haven't read that.

Ì saw someone recommend Connelly - I must concur, although that's no summer read. If you buy all the Connellies this week, you'll have finished reading them before summer starts. They're page turners - heck, I read Blood Work in one sitting. I started reading before going to bed - didn't sleep all night :)

Don't be a categorisist-- read!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, you're already a qualified geek, so why don't you try to broaden your perspective a bit and read something else, like Wittgenstein. Seriously, as a former fresh graduate: take advantage of the time to see what else is out there... don't pigeon-hole yourself- read something random.

-spmd

Re:Ender's Game

[ceejayoz]

Difficult to read as in the "oh God when will it end?" reaction that some people have (ex. my roommate).

Enjoy the Ender series :-)

Re:How about...

[Wyatt Earp]

Heaven and Hell - about Led Zeppelin

The Culture books by Iain Banks - I would start with Player of Games or Use of Weapons

The Bear Went over the Mountain - Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan

Cartoon History of the Universe series Volumes 1-3

Re:Ender's Game

[stubblehead]

Definitely Ender's Game. I would recommend the first sequel, Speaker for the Dead (added a lot of interesting new items), but not so much the last one, Xenocide (boring, too much irrelevant side story). But even if you don't read those sequels, I again recommend Ender's Shadow, then Shadow of the Hegemon, and finally, Shadow Puppets (this last one is kinda quick and not as good but worth the 'closure' of a trilogy... or is it?...)

For some reason, Card is amazing in his firsts - EG and ES. But I feel he squeezes the story out too tightly in sequels, and then just stomps the crap out of the rinds for complete trilogies. However, like these previous posters, as highly as I would recommend the Hobbit in fantasy, Ender's Game is a book that will stick with you for ages. I read it at around 15 years old by recommendation of a teacher (who wasn't a fan of SciFi until EG) and I devoured it in a few days. Great plot, terrific characters (that warrant extensions), and fluid writing. I don't know how Card fares in fantasy but he's more than worthy of his Nebula and Hugo awards.

Re:Just one?

[Midnight Warrior]

Cryptonomicron is historical fiction focusing around the age of Alan Turing (WorldWarII) and really centers around encryption. This is a read-several-times-and-still-see-something-neat book. Also, shortly after this book came out, SeaLand [sealandgov.com], the country, started making news again. No accident I think as this book kind of gave a "business plan" to the island.

Diamond Age is another read-several-times book that focuses around where nano-tech can go. It remembers that not all technologies are controlled. Stephenson also amplifies where electronic paper/organic LEDs can go - finally we have an author telling us something beneficial from technology instead of always calling new technology evil.

Re:Gullivers Travels

[privacyt]

Free on PG and it's about time we, as a collective, got a little more broad in our selections.

I couldn't agree more. Gulliver's Travels raises many fascinating philosophical questions, in the form of a historical satire. (Jonathan Swift intended the book as a complex satire on 18th century morals and thought.) Ah, if only Swift were alive today, imagine what he would write on things like:
- the university system in the US
- the crazy US government and its Total Information Awareness, War on Drugs/Terror/Whatever, Iraqi Freedom(TM), etc. - all the outsourcing of tech jobs.
- Kind-hearted Micro$oft and the RIAA. Amazon's nice, well-deserved patents.

The possibilities for Gullver Travels Version 2003 are endless!

Re:Fantasy?

[WowTIP]

Jordan's first five or six books are good reading, but then the series start to stall. Not much happens. I have a like-dislike relationship with Goodkind's books. On one hand they are very captivating, on the other they are pretty naive.

Now, my suggestions.

Fantasy:
George RR Martin - A song of fire and ice [iblist.org] (series)
Stephen Donaldson - The chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever [iblist.org] (two series, one listed)
Tad Wiliams - Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn [iblist.org] (series)
Stephen Erikson - A tale of the Malazan book of the fallen [iblist.org] (series)

Science fiction:
Stephen Donaldson - The Gap series [iblist.org]
Peter F Hamilton - Night's Dawn Trilogy [iblist.org]
Greg Egan - Diaspora [iblist.org]

And all the classic; Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, etc.

A word of warning. Both series by Stephen Donaldson contain main characters whose actions at times might seem offensive/disturbing to many.

I hope this is fair use:

[cje]

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.

I don't know about geeks or hacking but...

[DrLudicrous]

I highly recommend the Dark Tower series, starting with The Gunslinger, by Stephen King. It kinda sorta falls into the class of sci-fi, but it is also a fantasy type of book. So maybe not your exact genre, but if you like that type of book you would probably like this one.

Re:How about...

[simeonbeta2]

Ok. How about books that have some philosophical meat on which to chew. Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged spring to mind. (Parenthetically, while I wouldn't say I'm an "objectivist", I just read Atlas Shrugged for the first time. I was recently perusing the hof when I saw this interview [slashdot.org] with Ralph Nader. Read his answer to question 3. Nader is a deeply immoral man.)

Back to the question. You could just try a different genre than scifi/techno-thriller. How about crime noir (Raymond Chandler's books) or some serious historical writing (try reading Shelby Foote's series on the Civil War).

I realise that this may not be exactly what you are looking for, but geek encompasses a lot more than specifically technical or fantasy/sci-fi writing. Part of being a geek is the ability to immerse deeply in and think critically about the task at hand. Philosophy, history, culture, ethics, theology... Good literature that grapples with deep questions is always worth exploring.

Re:Ender's Game

[Brian_Ellenberger]

Ender's Game is awesome. What is cool about it is that it appeals to so many different aspects of geekdom. There are the philosophical aspects of human society and the choices it made in the war and with Ender. There is the difficulty that Ender went through being singled out and gifted. There is the coolness of the 3d battle rooms and wargames. And there is the prediction of an influencial global network that seems apart of everyday life.

I never got a chance yet to read "Speaker for the Dead", the first sequel to Ender's Game. However, it has gotten all of the critical praise that Ender's Game did. It too won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. In fact, Orson Scott Card claimed that he wrote Ender's Game as merely a prelude to "Speaker for the Dead" and never imagined it would do so well.

Brian Ellenberger

No, he is not dead

[teslatug]

Not really SciFi per se, but how about some Stephen King for a change. I love the way he describes settings. It creates a very vivid picture in your mind and you can lose yourself in the story for quite a few hours. Some of his books that I would really recommend are the Dark Tower books:

Soon to be re-released:
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three
The Dark Tower: The Waste Lands
The Dark Tower: Wizard & Glass

Not yet released:
The Dark Tower: Wolves of the Calla (November 2003)
The Dark Tower: Song of Susannah (Summer 2004)
The Dark Tower: The Dark Tower (November 2004)

"House of Leaves"...

[dosh8er]

...by Mark Danielewski has been a good book thus far. (only 2/3 the way through). Not quite horror, not quite sci-fi, but a big mix of genre. Check out what people on amazon [amazon.com] had to say about it.

Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves.

It has a surreal depth of a real story, with the phony footnotes and references. The author set the entire plot so well, I had to track down some of the places mentioned to make sure this was indeed fiction.

My favorite reads

[dchamp]

Roger Zelazny - "Lord of Light". I've seen others mention the Amber series, which I found tedious and self-indulgent on par with Hubbard, but "Lord of Light" was a great book, mixing the Hindu gods with science fiction. "Roadmarks" is pretty interesting too.

David Brin - the "Uplift" series, starting with "Sundiver". Great stuff.

Gregory Benford - great hard science fiction. Timescape is my favorite - you'll never think about time travel quite the same after reading this... I need to read more of his work!

Guy Gavriel Kay - Very good Tolkien inspired fantasy. He's the writer who helped finish the Simarilion (sp?). His style and quality are on par with Tolkien, but he doesn't steal any of the Tolkien mythology, instead he created his own.

Brian W. Aldiss - a very prolific science fiction author, and winner of many awards, but a lot of people have never heard of him. There's a book (based on a short story) called either "Hothouse" or "The Long Afternoon of the Earth" depending on where it was printed. Also, for a very tongue-in-cheek book, try "The 80 Minute Hour - A Space Opera". OK, maybe it's just wierd. But it was fun to read.

You mention you've read "Neuromancer" by Gibson. Have you read "Count Zero Override"? Just about all of the big Gibson fans I know consider this to be his best work, and I agree.

Re:Ender's Game

[child_of_mercy]

8 years old for me...

but did you understand it?

Interestingly (alarmingly?) I find its irrevocably coloured my moral awareness.

Now i don't thinki thats a bad thing, but i wouldn't from where I stand would I?

Re:This isn't in your requested genre...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, as a hack screenwriter-cum-philosopher, her narsicistic views come across to me as a bitter reaction to her brutal encounter with Hitler's demented vision of a unified Europe. Not only that, she seriously looked up to the robber-barons of her days as heros... not exactly a geek-philo if you ask me.

Short Story Recommendations??

[cerebrum]

How about a book for short stories? Some of us don't have that much time ...

Re:I hope this is fair use:

[James Lewis]

That is true, but I enjoyed The Hobbit much more than I did The Lord of The Rings. Part of it was my dislike for the never changing character of Frodo, but the other part was that it bordered on tedious. While I still enjoyed it, I believe there is a happy medium that you have to reach concerning detail. Part of the elequence of good writing is describing enough of the world so that a person can visualize it well, but not so much that it becomes restrictive and boring to read. The Hobbit most certainly achieved a high level of elequence in that respect, while The Lord of The Rings did not.

Re:Hyperion

[Lux]

Good writers borrow, great writers steal, and Hyperion is, hands down, the best sci-fi I've ever read. Keats, Beowulf, Shakespeare, Chaucer, The Bible, and the list goes on. Simmons takes some of the best bits of them all and weaves them into a world all his own. And it's not just the theft that's good: the setting is rich, and the characters are richer. It's simply a joy to read.

You can read the series on several levels, too. I read the first two books as a sort of attempt at finishing the plot of Keats' poem Hyperion in an alternate setting. The first book, like the unfinished manuscript indtroduces a lot while finishing little, and I think you can map entities and groups in the books into the world of the poem, reaching meaningful conclusions about where Simmons would have liked the poem to go.

Still, after the first book, the second is kind of a dissapointment. The whole rest of the series feels like it exists only to tie up the loose ends left by the first book, and develop and explore the universe. These are not bad aims, there's plenty left to develop and enjoy, but they fail to live up to the first, let alone manage to outdo it. That said, I still read and enjoyed each of them very much.

Re:Fantasy?

[Moofie]

I found GRRM to be like Goodkind, only not a wacko objectivist. And grittier. Kills characters left right and center. I'm eager for his next book, but Goodkind has fallen off my "must buy!" list. When he fell, he hit Robert Jordan and broke the guy's leg. So if the next book is even later and less focused, sorry fanboys, it's my fault.

Oooh! Harry Harrison's Hammer and Cross series was fun, too.

Re:art of deception

[NeilRyan]

On the other hand, Kevin Mitnick's "The Art of Deception" is THE most important book available concerning Information Security - period. It has its flaws, sure - it often seems endlessly repetitive (First you Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, then you Tell 'em, then you Tell 'em what you told 'em...). But that's due to the fundamental problem Mitnick faces: How do you get people to understand something that's blindingly obvious to yourself? To call the book "Passwords for dummies" misses the point. The point that Mitnick's dealing with is the fact that the World (the Real World) doesn't see a password as a key to a lock, the Real World sees a password as yet another On/Off switch (and a "needlessly complicated" one, at that).

And that "Hey, it's only an On/Off pushbutton, what's the big deal" attitude is THE biggest problem in the Information Security world. A thing that Kevin documents - beautifully, and fascinatingly. His proposed solutions don't "satisfy" (I expect he needs to give more thought to the question of "How do we keep them out?"), but boy - _nobody_ documents the fundamental Security problem so well!

Worth a read, if you're interested in Security.

Ishmael by Dan Quinn

[hoover]

While not exactly fitting into the "Hacker Sci/Fi" category, both "Ishmael" and "The Story of B" by Dan Quinn [ishmael.org] have profoundly changed the way I view the world and humanity's place in it. It probably won't take you a month (I read "Ish" in a day because I simply could not put it down ;-), but you can spend the rest of your free time reading Dan's other excellent books.

There is no better preparation for corporate life than going there, knowing what it's all about that fscked our culture up so badly (and I'm on about the global taker culture, not our "precious" east vs. west subdivisions and so on).

Enjoy & good luck with your new job!

Uwe

Re:Dune (what about Miles Teg?)

[bmac]

I don't agree with "dry and uninteresting", but Miles Teg getting his in book 5 (Heretics of Dune, I believe) is one of my all-time favorite sections in any book. As well, the book is as much about the fact that the development of the humans centers upon *awareness* is in itself worth the wordage, IMO.

Peace & Blessings,
bmac

What??

[NamShubCMX]

What???

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

Re:Note on Ayn Rand

[cr0z01d]

Are you upset at communism, or are you upset at oppressive, totalitarian communist regimes? Unfortunately, I do not feel that the book adequetely explains why communism is so bad. It does explain how ludicrous it is to equate equality with the abolishment of a system based on meritocracy (e.g., authorship as a meritocracy), that is to say, artifically give everyone an equal voice when some have no desire to speak or have shamelessly derivative voices. I agree with this aspect of egoism / objectivism. However, Ayn Rand quite incorrectly associates this extreme behavior with communism (though it no less applies to democracy), and continues, equating charity and altruism with the destruction of creative effort.

This is counter to my life experience, I would not be half who I am if were nobody to have cared about me. I can see how Rand, having lived through the Bolshevik revolution, thought differently. Her fault lies in incorrectly associating the ostensible goals and the methods of Russian communism. The methods are deplorable, obviously -- but the goals, which she attacks with equal if not greater vehemence, are merely to secure a better standard of living for all humans.

This is the focus of her literary assaults. It is denial of our interdependence; a rejection of human kindness.

Re:For the love of God, don't start the Wheel of T

[zaphod110676]

This is my take on Jordan as well. The WoT got stale. I put it down in the middle of book 7 and haven't picked it up since. Every now and again I feel the urge to pickup where I left off but then I slap myself not wanting to commit to a series that looks as if it will go on for most of the rest of my life and never actually get anywhere. Describing it as a vortex that is difficult to escape is accuarate in my view

Re:Gullivers Travels

[joeykiller]

Your points are good, except I wasn't talking about Bowling for Columbine but his book "Stupid White Men".

You don't answer an important question, though: Why didn't Swift choose the bulldozer tactics of Michael Moore in his days, if Moores bulldozer style is easier to write?

Swift chose what you call the intrinsically more difficult genre of metaphorical fiction, just not because he wanted to do so, but because he had to: In Swifts England there were no first amendment or equivalent, and the idea of free speech weren't very evolved.

Therefore, as a critic of a regime or a system, you had to choose more subtle ways of expressing them than the bulldozer tacticts of a Michael Moore. This wasn't a English problem per se, this was a problem troughout Europe.

The bonus, of course, were the great books of Swift and others. But if the people of those days could choose, I think they'd appreciate it if the system allowed the more bullish styles of a Michael Moore.

Still, "Gulliver's travels" is a joy to read!

Re:Note on Ayn Rand

[Dolly_Llama]

...and a dogmatic obsession with Ayn Rand's objectivism

Considering Ayn Rand herself wrote them, is it really possible that they could demonstrate a dogmatic obession? Isn't that sort of intrinsic?