

Please recommend a book to read. List for 2015 - m1117

I want to make a list of books to read in 2015. Can you please recommend some that you think are most impactful or you like the most? Thanks
======
kr4
I plan to read this: "If Truth Be Told: A Monk's Memoir"
[http://www.amazon.in/If-Truth-Be-Told-
Memoir/dp/9351368068/](http://www.amazon.in/If-Truth-Be-Told-
Memoir/dp/9351368068/)

" In the 1990s, an eighteen-year-old headed to Australia to realize his
worldly dreams. With little money or support, he struggled to survive there.
Two years later, he was earning an annual income of $250,000; by the age of
twenty-six, he was a multimillionaire. Yet, worldly success was merely a way
station on a journey that began years ago. As an eight-year-old, he saw a
vision of God in a dream, an experience that left him with a sense of deep joy
and peace. The dream triggered off his desire to meet God, to see a
manifestation of the Divine. He practised astrology, intense meditation and
tantra, yet God was nowhere in sight. Deeply frustrated, he dived into
materialistic pursuits to distract himself from the restlessness within. After
years of living the good life, he found he could no longer ignore the old
restlessness; worldly pleasures just couldn’t fill the void within. He moved
back to India and finally did what he had always yearned to do: renounce the
world and become a monk. In the Himalayas, in terrifying silence and solitude,
Om Swami practised intense meditation. Death was always close as he confronted
starvation, the fierce elements and wild animals. Finally, his sadhana brought
him to the ultimate "

------
wallflower
From Ruby Rogues 184 RR

"JESSICA: Alright. So, I am going to echo one of Greg’s picks because it was
on my list but for a different reason. ‘Seeing like a State’ is an amazing
book. And I think it’s drastically changed the way I look at software, not for
the same reason as Greg talked about but because it shows why what we do is
hard. ‘Seeing like a State’ talks about all the subtleties of human systems
and human interactions at the local context level. It talks about all the
improvisation that everyone does on a day-to-day basis and how in real human
communities, we’re constantly changing the system to adjust to a slightly
different reality, to corner cases we hadn’t seen before but now we have. It’s
shifting and it’s not well-defined. And suddenly it makes complete sense that
the hardest part of software is figuring out what we want to do. That’s it.
It’s a great book."

[http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-
Condition/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-
Condition/dp/0300078153)

------
147
I just bought 4 books off of Amazon and got them today:

Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning. Highly recommended overview of
math by some HNers so I figured I would check it out.

Venture capitalists at work. I didn't realize there were more "at work" series
books other than coders and founders, so this one sounds right up my alley.

Information Rules, a book that's supposedly dated on economics and how it
applies to the internet world. Recommended on Chris Dixon's blog and looked
interesting. Thought I might get some new insights to bitcoin or something
with it.

And Walter Isaacson's new book, the innovators.

------
icpmacdo
I just started Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, it's interesting.

~~~
pizza
Another vote of confidence for GEB

------
pairing
I'm really enjoying 7 concurrency models in 7 weeks. I'm about 2/3 through it.
It has covered examples in Java, Clojure, and Elixir so far. As someone trying
to learn a functional language (Clojure), I've found it to be a great
introduction to the concurrency benefits of functional programming.

------
pizza
Books I imagine will have 'tremendous' (what a prior, lol) effect

Non-fiction;

Slavoj Zizek's _Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical
Materialism_

Evgeny Morozov's _To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological
Solutionism_

Fiction;

William Gibson's _Neuromancer_

Vernor Vinge's _A Deepness in the Sky (Zones of Thought)_

------
Tomte
Rapid Interpretation of EKG's.

Really. It's fascinating. You not only learn how to read EKG's (obviously,
after reading the book, you're still not qualified to argue with a seasoned
practitioner), but you also learn a lot about how the human heart works.

Much more accessible than I thought.

~~~
patzerhacker
Written by a confessed child pornographer as well!
[http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2001/12/07/fine-print-redux-
be...](http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2001/12/07/fine-print-redux-beneficent-
doctor-made-child-pornos/)

------
asad_ch
Any one book? Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan

Any one series? The Foundation series, Isaac Asimov

Other personal favourites include: The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho The Book of
Disquet, Fernando Pessoa The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexander Dumas Extremely
Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safron Foer Jonathan Livingston Seagull,
Richard Bach The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

------
brudgers
American Soccer Fans: _Love Thy Soccer_.

[http://www.lovethysoccer.com/](http://www.lovethysoccer.com/)

------
ivan_ah
NO BULLSHIT guide to MATH and PHYSICS --- a calculus and mechanics textbook
for adults; also covers high school math.

disclaimer: I'm the author

------
akulbe
The Personal MBA - Josh Kaufman The First 20 Hours - Josh Kaufman So Good They
Can't Ignore You - Cal Newport The 4-Hour Workweek - Tim Ferriss The 4-Hour
Body - Tim Ferriss Stop Acting Rich - Thomas J. Stanley James Altucher -
Choose Yourself

------
autokad
let me know if you guys find better replacements, but this is what I got on my
list:

O'Reilly - Scott Murray - Interactive Data Visualization for the Web

Data Visualization with D3.js Cookbook

A First Course in Probability

Rails AntiPatterns - Best Practice Ruby on Rails Refactoring

Bayesian Data Analysis Andrew Gelma

The Pragmatic Programmer

Code Complete

Bishop - Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

O'Reilly Mining The Social Web

~~~
m_ke
Probability Theory: The Logic of Science

[http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Theory-The-Logic-
Science/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Theory-The-Logic-
Science/dp/0521592712)

------
addydev
You can try "Steal like an Artist" if you are looking for a quick and easy
read.

------
mindcrime
_The Four Steps To The Epiphany_ \- Steve Blank

 _Neuromancer_ \- William Gibson

 _Predictable Revenue_ \- Aaron Ross, Marylou Tyler

 _The Fountainhead_ \- Ayn Rand

 _The Ultimate Question 2.0_ \- Fred Reichheld‎

 _The Singularity is Near_ \- Ray Kurzweil

 _Moonshot!_ \- John Sculley

 _Zero To One_ \- Peter Thiel

 _Republic_ \- Plato

 _Meditations_ \- Marcus Aurelius

 _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ \- George Orwell

 _Fahrenheit 451_ \- Ray Bradbury

 _The Mysterious Island_ \- Jules Verne

 _Discipline of Market Leaders_ \- Michael Treacy, Fred Wiersema

 _False Memory_ \- Dean Koontz

 _NOS4A2_ \- Joe Hill

 _Revival_ \- Stephen King

 _Barbarians At The Gate_ \- John Helyar and Bryan Burrough

 _Into Thin Air_ \- John Krakauer

 _How To Measure Anything_ \- Douglas Hubbard

and any collection of the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

------
emcarey
patti smith just kids

