What's the Best Book You Read This Year? 338
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?
Best book I reread. (Score:4, Insightful)
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The Gene: an intimate history by Sidhartha Mukherjee
Childe Cycle Books (Score:2)
Picked up Dorsai! from a bookshelf and kept going through the other four books from there.
Definitely, the books I enjoyed re-reading the most this year.
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A good choice.
Now continue with "Way of the Pilgrim" by Dickson.
I just finished "The Saga of Shadows" by Kevin Anderson, which is a continuation of "The Saga of the Seven Suns".
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> 1984
I didn't need to read it, the UK is modelled after it.
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You're nothing if not original.
Try "Brave New World" (Score:5, Insightful)
1984 argues that humanity is destroyed by totalitarianism; Brave New World by Aldous Huxley [goodreads.com] argues that human individualism creates the conditions for totalitarian rule.
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A Tale of Two Cities (Score:3)
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How do you know a book is "good" before you read it?
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How do you know a book is "good" before you read it?
Ask your librarian what is most requested to be banned.
the Brian Wilson autobiography (Score:2)
train-of-thought, but a good book
Life-changing. (Score:5, Interesting)
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 ... (Score:2)
Cuckoo's Egg. Cliff Stoll. It's excellent. Here's a link to the book on Amazon [amazon.co.uk]. If you're a sysadmin you should read this. It's set in the era of mainframe unix and you'll know why the editor wars exist after reading. You'll also gain an idea of just how hard it is tracking someone when they have weaved their way through different links to get onto your system. Although factual, Cliff Stoll does a good job of telling the story with some good humour.
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The PBS series NOVA did a reenactment in an episode. The real people "played" themselves so there's some pretty stilted acting. And his girlfriend was a real sweetie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
A bit of history (Score:3)
"The Brilliant Disaster" by Jim Rasenberger is a fascinating account of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The Dark Forest (Score:4, Informative)
The Dark Forest.
I love the Cixin Liu books... refreshing sci-fi.
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The Dark Forest.
I love the Cixin Liu books... refreshing sci-fi.
Second this. The translation can be a little clunky, but it's old-school hard sci-fi with a Chinese viewpoint. (For example, the importance of political officers in the military is taken as a given, but all of the characters think it's sort of weird that the Americans have chaplains instead.)
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+1. It's the best of the best, published in 2016.. third in a trilogy, so you need to read the other two first. They are also fantastic, but the third turned out to be my favorite. Should be strong candidates for the annual science fiction awards.
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+1. It's the best of the best, published in 2016.. third in a trilogy, so you need to read the other two first. They are also fantastic, but the third turned out to be my favorite. Should be strong candidates for the annual science fiction awards.
Dark Forest is second in the trilogy [wikipedia.org]. The third is Death's End [wikipedia.org].
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You are right, PvtVoid! Ok, well: Death's End is "the best of the best..." what I wrote above. All three books are fantastic, and surprisingly different from one another - even though they are related, and have several characters that persist throughout. Just read them all - they are science fiction at its best.
Adam Smith (Score:2)
IPv6 books (Score:2, Funny)
1. IPv6 Essentials
2. Planning for IPv6
3. IPv6 for Beginners
4. Real World IPv6
5. DNS and BIND on IPv6
6. IPv6 Address Planning
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If you need that many books to understand IPv6, it's no wonder it hasn't been more widely adopted. "IPv6 for Beginners" should be a leaflet, not a book.
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Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (Score:3)
Re:Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, he was a good leader. Problem is that much of the history about him has been transmitted by the Muslims, who in his day, were some of his biggest enemies. Incidentally, the Mongols, unlike the Muslims, were tolerant of religious minorities everywhere they went. Which explains that while much of west and central Asia was Islamized, all those places were not permanently converted to Tengrism (the native religion of the Mongols) despite the Mongols conquering and ransacking cities like Samarqand, Qonyeurgench, Herat, Baghdad, Aleppo, et al. While the Mongols did massacre cities, they did it to people who resisted them, but did not try stamping out their culture/religion. Which explains how 3 Mongol dynasties - the Chagtai, Ilkhanate and Golden Horde (unfortunately) became Islamized some 100 years later.
One of the great achievements of the Mongols was stamping out the Assassin cult in Iran, which terrorized people. Also, when they started, they sent envoys to Khwarezm, and the sultan of that sultanate executed the envoy and sent his head back to Genghiz Khan on a platter. This happened 2 or 3 times, following which Genghiz Khan spent a year preparing for war and then started his invasion of Khwarezm which culminated in the ransacking of the above cities and expanding the Mongol empire into Khwarezm and the Abbasid Caliphate
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"With the Old Breed" by Eugene Sledge (Score:3)
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.
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Silo (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Absolutely, an amazing series.
Between Hugh Howey and Cixin Liu, I've read some really good sci-fi this year, and that hasn't happened in a while.
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Overrated trash with a go nowhere plot. But that's just my opinion.
FreeSWITCH 1.6 Cookbook (Score:2)
I went from dicking around with Event Sockets for about a week to getting an ESL perl script going in a day. Now I'm refactoring it by referring to other ideas elsewhere in the same book. Money well spent.
Next year. (Score:2)
There's a bunch of new Niiven. (Score:2)
Achilles was not what you thought it was, lol.
Not really (Score:2)
Please share just one title name in the comments section (and if you would like, rest in parenthesis).
You must be new here. Attempting to tell people how you want them to post won't work on Slashdot. At all.
Best book I read this year was an old one, "Dangerous Visions", edited by Harlan Ellison. And Knuth's TAoCP, Volume 4 Fascicle 6, was also the best one. So was Hitchen's "god is not Great".
None of the books that came out in 2016 that I read were even good enough to reach a top-500. Most new books these days are utter crap, with a quality akin to paint-by-numbers.
Utilitarian vs. literature (Score:3)
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...
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The Stoics (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Becky Chambers (Score:2)
Becky Chambers "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" and it's sequel, "Closed & Common Orbit" come to mind. They're sci-fi with good plot and intrigue, but without being overly dark and heavy, as is the case with so much sci-fi and fantasy of late...
American Ulysses (Score:3)
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... [amazon.com]
This fellow named L. Ron Hubbard... (Score:2)
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WTF?
The movie was an improvement. _Incredibly_ bad book.
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The Meaning of Human Existence (Score:3)
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.
John Steinbeck (Score:2)
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+1 Grapes of Wrath is the shit.
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Cuckservatives (Score:2)
Cuckservatives: How "Conservatives" Betrayed America [goodreads.com]
Love it or hate it, the alt-right is growing in influence and most of us would be wise to learn more about what they think and what they want.
The Face of Battle (Score:3)
All The Flashman Memoirs (Score:2)
By George McDonald Fraser. Nothing better. I reread them every few years, just to refresh my Victorian era history :-)
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They never learn (Score:4, Informative)
11/22/63 (Score:5, Informative)
Light read, yes, but a surprisingly engaging novel.
Leatherman's Handbook II - Larry Townsend (Score:2)
Leatherman's Handbook II - Larry Townsend
ISBN-13: 978-1881684206
http://amzn.to/2i8uVZP [amzn.to]
Next up is:
The Complete leatherboy Handbook - Vincent L. Andrews
ISBN-13: 978-0985900410
http://amzn.to/2i0qbY1 [amzn.to]
Altered Carbon (Score:2)
Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan.
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
Neal Stephenson continues to amaze (Score:2)
Although the SevenEves was a disappointment, REAMDE was not bad, and Anathem [wikipedia.org] was outright amazing...
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SevenEves would have been better if it was half as long. Stephenson is a great writer, though, and I understand if he can't help himself on that!
I agree than Anathem was incredibly good. A long book that you should really read twice to get everything.
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SevenEves would have been better if it was half as long.
This is what happens when an author gets too famous or popular and no longer listens to his editor, and the publisher can't threaten him.
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Ugh...Anathem is garbage. I honestly don't understand how anyone could like it, and I've read most of his works.
Starting Out with Java: From Control Structures... (Score:3)
Starting Out with Java: From Control Structures through Objects 6th edition [pearsonhighered.com] 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.
How To Win Friends And Influence People. (Score:2)
https://www.amazon.com/How-Win... [amazon.com]
It taught me that anyone who says otherwise is a cuntwad and a Trump-U alumnus.
couple series (Score:2)
Suddenly more relevant... (Score:2)
Command and Control - Eric Schlosser
https://www.amazon.com/Command... [amazon.com]
The Rules of the Game (Score:2)
The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command - and extended look at the evolution of tactical and communications doctrine from Trafalgar to Jutland, and it's effects on the Battle of Jutland.
OS/2 Warp Version 4 Certification Handbook (Score:2)
Does it count if you wrote the book? (Score:3)
I had my first science fiction novel [ghostthiefnovel.com] published this year and, while I love reading books, actually writing and publishing one has been an amazing process. (Now working on Book #2.)
Insighful answers (Score:2)
Mechanical Failure (Score:2)
Pebble in the Sky - Asimov (Score:2)
I went through the entire Robot/Empire/Foundation series and found Pebble in the Sky the best - but you have to read it first
A World Made By Hand series (Score:2)
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You sound like one of a characters in a Douglas Adams' book.
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What are these "parties"??
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Damn jebbies made us read it Jr year.
I can honestly say, I've slept on just about every page. Cheated my way through Jr year catholic brainwashing. Wasn't doing anything for me, I hadn't gotten the early years of the slow grift.
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Help me Jeebuz!
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I'm sure there must be an apostrophe one side of the s, what with Dr Dawkins not being an ignorant fat cunt and all that.
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You know Trump didn't actually write that, right?
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You're right. The amount of pandering in that book is off the charts.
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Finished At the Sign of Triumph last night. Enjoyed the story, but Weber has added significant numbers of typos to the already problematical abuses of the letters "y"
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That really is a comical book. I liked his story about breaking in to the General's safe.
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