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Posted by dan-bailey 14 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...
166 points | 412 commentspage 9
schmookeeg 4 hours ago|
I'm reading something a bit strange and wonderful: The mountain in the sea by Ray Naylor -- a fictional peek at octopus intelligence.

Question for some of y'all: Those who are listing 3 or more (sometimes way more!) books -- do you read them in parallel? I'm a dyed-in-the-wool serial book monogamist and can't fathom having like 8 or 10 storylines in my head at once.

No judgement, just curious and somewhat awed :)

tarr 3 hours ago||
I’ll read 5-10 books at a time, but it takes me 5-10x longer to finish them (obviously).

It’s sort of like watching many TV shows at once, I suppose? Watch an episode of each per week.

rootbear 3 hours ago||
I often have two books in progress, one fiction and one nonfiction. That’s a comfortable pace for me. I’m a slow reader.
Oanid 4 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.
mkovach 5 hours ago||
J.L. Austin: Philosopher & D-Day Intelligence Officer.

Austin worked for British Intelligence during World War II, running the Martians section and helping assess possible invasion sites for D-Day. After the war, as a philosopher of language, he helped bring ideas such as performative utterances and speech acts into the discussion.

A fascinating overlap between intelligence work and philosophy of language.

And because the Brewers are in the playoffs, "Catcher in the Wry" by Bob Uecker. Despite being a Cleveland fan, I have to admit the book is amazingly fun. Uecker was Uecker long before he became everybody's favorite baseball storyteller, and he was the Cleveland announcer in Major League.

Game_Ender 3 hours ago||
Peter F. Hamilton started on the Exodus series and now onto the Reality Dysfunction. He has a talent for taking 5-10 different story threads and weaving them together over a 1000 pages. Also because are so many characters you can actually kill a decent number off.
laweijfmvo 3 hours ago||
An Immense World. It’s not as jaw-dropping as I’d expected (yes, I know rattlesnakes can “see” heat), but it’s also not an easy/fun read either. So I’ll probably land at around 3/5 rating.
jadijadi 3 hours ago||
Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon (by Kim Zetter).

An indepth history of Stuxnet. A bit long but recommended. You can not find any other book which goes this much in describing a mallware (no code).

le-mark 4 hours ago||
“Player Piano” by Vonnegut, his first novel which was sci-fi and explores the consequences of total and complete automation on society. Quite prescient for the current era.

https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/player...

ChrisMarshallNY 7 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 7 hours ago|
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrett_P.I.
ChrisMarshallNY 7 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.

gorgoiler 5 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.*

NishanStepak 10 hours ago|
I am currently listening to VC An American History by Tom Nicholas, Audible 2019. I am reading Predictable Winners, A Handbook for Developing, Forecasting, and Launching New Products and Services, Stanford Business Books, 2025. I have cracked open, but not gotten very far in reading, The Rise And Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2026. The Jill Lepore book is very interesting.
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