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Posted by dan-bailey 12 hours ago

Ask HN: What are you reading?

I'm plowing through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which is not particularly challenging as sci-fi/LitRPG goes, but entertaining enough. I'm also wrapping up Doctorow's _Enshittification_, and I'm looking for something a little meaty to keep the brain working...
122 points | 336 commentspage 6
analog31 2 hours ago|
Moby Dick. I'm further through then I've ever gotten before thanks to a long airplane ride.
Ancalagon 1 hour ago||
Finally getting around to reading the LOTR trilogy. I've read the Hobbit and the Silmarillion, just never got around to the main story.
gorgoiler 3 hours ago||
After my father died last year I’ve started going through his collection of popular-science paperbacks.

Done: QED, Richard Feynman. Lectures on explaining quantum electrodynamics but with no more math than geometry.

Currently: One Good Turn: A natural history of the screwdriver and the screw, Witold Rybczynski. The discourse goes into his references in depth. It has yielded an excellent list of museums to visit.

On deck: Impossibility: The limits science and the science of limits, John Barrow. A re-read for me. Barrow discusses what we can never know in a way that’s like P vs NP but for the physical world.*

arrowleaf 4 hours ago||
I'm reading Sagas of the Icelanders as prep for a trip there, but I can feel it pulling me down into a rabbithole of older Scandinavian medieval writing. I've already got an order placed for a saga that's not in this book, along with the Poetic Edda and Havamal to learn more about Norse mythology.
Oanid 2 hours ago||
Capital in the Twenty-First Century from a physical book, Science in a Demon Haunted World on my Xteink X4, and Why Nations Fail on my Kobo.
NDlurker 1 hour ago||
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. Pretty good world building. Haven't got too far into it yet.
moka_labs 1 hour ago||
Psychology of Money
ferguess_k 10 hours ago||
This is my 13th round to recommend "The Soul of a new Machine" as well as "Showstoppers".
Kon5ole 4 hours ago||
I liked those as well (I assume you meant "Show-Stopper!" about windows NT) and also remember "Dreaming in code" as a good one in the same-ish genre.
jppope 5 hours ago||
I read 3/4 of "The Soul of a new Machine" and thought it was good, but I sort of fizzled out. What makes you recommend it so highly (trying to understand if I should go back)
ChrisMarshallNY 5 hours ago||
Glen Cook's Garrett P.I. series[0]. It's a perennial fave (I've read it many times, in the past).

I'm reading Deadly Quicksilver Lies, right now.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/series/49491-garrett-files

gozzoo 5 hours ago|
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrett_P.I.
ChrisMarshallNY 4 hours ago||
That link is dicey. I'm not sure why, but it doesn't always land in the correct page. It usually ends up in a disambiguation page.

Goodreads is commercial, but it does a good job of describing books and series of books.

[UPDATE] Ah. Figured it out. It's the trailing period. I think HN removes it from the link.

shawn_w 2 hours ago|
Like half the people here I'm in the middle of Dungeon Crawler Carl.

Finished Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia yesterday, and also have been reading Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee mysteries - currently on The Haunted Monastery.

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