

Ask HN: Best books you read in 2013 - dudurocha

My favorites were Decisive, by the Heath brothers, Little brother, by Cory Doctorow and I listened to the Graveyardbook, by Neil Gaiman.
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mindcrime
Non-fiction:

 _On Intelligence_ \- Jeff Hawkins

 _How To Create A Mind_ \- Ray Kurzweil

 _The Language Instinct_ \- Steven Pinker

 _The Origin of Wealth_ \- Eric Beinhocker

 _The Signal and the Noise_ \- Nate Silver

 _The Money Culture_ \- Michael Lewis

 _Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations_ \- David Warsh

 _Smart Machines: IBM 's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing_ \- John E.
Kelly III and Steve Hamm

 _The Idea Factory_ \- Jon Gertner

 _Winning The Knowledge Transfer Race_ \- Michael J. English and William H.
Baker

 _Wellsprings of Knowledge_ \- Dorothy Leonard-Barton

 _If Only We Knew What We Know_ \- Carla O'dell and C. Jackson Grayson

Started, but haven't finished yet:

 _The Discipline of Market Leaders_ \- Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema

 _Marketing Warfare_ \- Jack Trout and Al Ries

 _Naked Statistics_ \- Charles Wheelan

 _Wiki Management_ \- Rod Collins

 _Antifragile_ \- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

 _Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal_ \- Ayn Rand

Fiction:

 _NOS4A2_ \- Joe Hill

The first four books in the _Sandman_ series by Neil Gaiman

 _Innocence_ \- Dean Koontz

 _Deeply Odd_ \- Dean Koontz

 _Doctor Sleep_ \- Stephen King

 _The Black List_ \- Brad Thor

Most of _The New Lovecraft Circle_ \- an anthology of Lovecraft mythos stories
by contemporary writers

And started re-reading Asimov's _Foundation_ last night. I've read the
original trilogy before, but this time I intend to read all seven books. But
I'm starting with Foundation and going to the end, before going back to the
prequels.

~~~
p1esk
How would you compare 'On Intelligence' with 'How to Create a Mind'?

~~~
mindcrime
Good question. I felt like there was some significant overlap between the two,
and I think that's borne out by commentary from other people who have read
both. I think a few people have even accused Kurzweil of borrowing a little
too freely from Hawkins' HTM idea. But, to my mind, they complement each other
well. Between the two, you get a strong dose of case for thinking of the human
mind's primary algorithm being some form of pattern-matching.

For anybody who is interested in AI topics, and who hasn't read either or both
of those, I'd really recommend reading both.

------
argimenes
'Graph Databases' by Ian Robinson, Jim Webber, and Emil Eifrem

'Hackers and Painters' by Paul Graham

'Virtual Reality' by Howard Rheingold

'Stack Computers: The New Wave' by Philip Koopman

'Thinking Forth' by Leo Brodie

'WIMP Programming for All on Acorn RISC Computers' by Lee Calcraft and Alan
Wrigley

'Frank Herbert' by Timothy O'Reilly

'Modern Painters: volume 1' by John Ruskin

'Aratra Pentelici' by John Ruskin

'The Art and Craft of Drawing' by Vernon Blake

'The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci' by Dmitri Merezhkovsky ('romance' in the
old sense of 'biographical novel')

'Prehistoric Avebury' by Aubrey Burl

'A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Walter M. Miller

------
cabbeer
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison Slaughterhouse-5 by
Kurt Vonnegut 1984 by George Orwell To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee The
Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie My Antonia by Willa Cather (1918) On the
Road by Jack Kerouac The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson Mccullers The
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934) Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora
Neale Hurston To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf Ulysses by James Joyce

~~~
waqasx
you read all this in 2013? I call bullshit.

~~~
p1esk
Why? 20 books, 500 pages each on average, that's 10k pages. Divide by 300
days, that's about 30 pages a day. Certainly doable for fiction.

~~~
waqasx
its not the question of "is it possible?", its just that these are always
listed amongst the 'top 100 books of all time' and each needs more than just
'reading time' you cannot read Ulysses and 1984 the same month, physically you
can, but that would be useless.

~~~
p1esk
Why would it be useless? Do you imply that top 100 books are harder to read?

~~~
waqasx
top 100 books deserve more time.

~~~
p1esk
Actually, the better the book is, the faster I read it.

------
akg_67
Non-tech books, I read and liked in 2013:

Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini

$100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau

Anything Your Want by Derek Sivers

The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar

Are You a Stock or a Bond? by Moshe Milevsky

The Most Important Thing by Howard Marks

Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

------
sfrechtling
In no particular order:

The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati

True Grit, Charles Portis

Thoughts, Marcus Aurelius

Its not all about me, Robin Dreeke

The unwinding, George Packer

Lives of the Laureates, William Breit

AntiFragile, Nassum Taleb

------
lmm
Loup Garous, which the internet tells me is by Natsuhiko Kyogoku. The only
dystopia I've read which was both legitimately scary and utterly plausible.

