Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?
I got asked recently, and I think it's an excellent question.
What's the "best" book you've ever read? By "best", in means whatever you mean.
I got asked recently, and I think it's an excellent question.
What's the "best" book you've ever read? By "best", in means whatever you mean.
Taking “best” to mean, “About to be banished to a small, rocky island in the North Atlantic, can pack one book”: Ulysses, and it’s not particularly close.
The book is fractally intricate and intellectually puzzling in the best sense—something new and special to notice every time you pick it up.
But it also wears like old leather, and I find myself returning to favorite chapters simply to sink indulgently into the characters, dialog, and setting.
Anybody who says no one has actually read Ulysses is unknowingly half-right: You can certainly get to a point where you’ll never finish reading it.
Non-fiction: The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by James Hornfischer. US Navy destroyers, escort carriers and destroyer escorts face off against Japanese cruisers and battleships. The Japanese had many times the firepower of the US, yet incredibly brave US sailors and airmen attacked anyway. Incredible story of courage under terrible conditions and odds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Stand_of_the_Tin_Can_...
Fiction:
Project Hail Mary is very enjoyable, don't read spoilers and you'll enjoy it even more.
The Discworld City Watch series of books, starting with "Guards! Guards!" The characters are hilarious, there's so much humour yet still enough space for meaningful prose. Terry Pratchett was taken from us too soon.
Edited to add: non-fiction "Most Secret War" by Dr R V Jones. Funny, easily digestible short chapters, wonderful account of the author's work in WW2. "(the author's) appointment to the Intelligence Section of Britain's Air Ministry in 1939 led to some of the most astonishing scientific and technological breakthroughs of the Second World War."
Fiction - [Trouble on] Triton by Samuel Delaney. It just has so many relevant big ideas told in a very subdued way via a not very likeable but appropriate character.
The truth is, if you ask me this 100 times, you'll probably get 100 different answers, because it's impossible to really pick just one (well two, separating by fiction/non-fiction). But for today I'll go with:
Fiction: Neuromancer
Non-fiction: The Selfish Gene
Came to say The Selfish Gene for nonfiction. Changed the way I thought about things.
Haven't read The Selfish Gene, but reading the summary it looks like it touches on some very similar themes as Stephen Pinker's How The Mind Works, which I thought was also a great book. Gave me a good intuitive understanding of how the human neural system evolved, and I found so much of the book to be prescient and timely in our current "AI era".
Godel Escher Bach is the best book I've read. Very interesting topics and the sheer creativity of the writing is amazing.
+1
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
It’s kind of cliche for a white male nerd of a certain age, but it has stuck with me. How imaginative the book is, the huge mix of characters and stories in the book, and the style of writing are incredible. The pace of interesting ideas is very fast and engrossing, and the language used to describe things is complex but not overly so.
Henry George’s Progress & Poverty conducted what can only be described as a coup on my worldview, and I am not alone in that experience.
It is an incredible argument that will just utterly transform how you understand a walk down the street.
If you’ve been seeing references to the Land Value Tax (LVT) here on HN, this is the book that originated the concept. Like most conceptual breakthroughs, it didn’t emerge solely from George with no related ideas in the vicinity, but this is definitely “the book” behind it.
One of the previous posts mentioned that it changes for them frequently, and I'm pretty much the same way. But for right now:
Fiction: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Non-Fiction: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
To be clear, both are fiction, it’s just that one is fantasy and the other is set in modern reality.
For me, it's The Grapes of Wrath. Simultaneously raised my bar for what I consider good writing and made me much more empathetic to the plight of those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder through no fault of their own. As relevant today as when it was written.
'Bashō, dichter zonder dak' with the subtitle 'Haiku en poëtische reisverhalen' by professor Willy Vande Walle, a Belgian Japanologist. It's a translation of Basho's travel diaries with a lot of contextual information, kind of like Martin Gardner's 'The Annotated Alice', if you've read that one. It's an amazing intellectual tour de force by one of the foremost experts in his field, and it helps that the original works are of very high quality of well.
Unfortunately I don't know if there's an English equivalent, and considering how awful of a language Dutch is to learn it may be easier to learn Japanese, read the originals, and look up all the references yourself.
Introducing Lacan: A Graphic Guide, by Darian Leader and illustrated by Judy Groves.
Freudian theory really was just a way to psychoanalyze Freud and his complexes.
Lacan jettisoned the weirdly specific Freudian stuff and had a more general template, with a focus on the relationship between language and the subconcious.
Fiction: Independent People by Halldór Laxness or Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Non-Fiction: The Feynman lectures on Physics.
For nonfiction I think about Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood by David Simon (and Ed Burns for The Corner) a lot. They are very funny and very sad and really changed how I see the world. So I cheated, two books.
"The book of joy" by the Dalai Lama and Desmund Tutu (they were lifelong friends)
Nonfiction: "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" by Taleb has had the biggest influence on me.
Fiction: I dunno but maybe "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson.
Anything from Sagan: Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God could convert the Pope to agnosticism.
Stephen Ray Gould: Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin: will both challenge every preconceived notion you've had, link seemingly impossibly unrelated phenomenon together using similar models and patterns, and leave with a much more intuitive understanding about complexity, randomness, and chaotic systems.
A Briefer History of Time: For those who truly would like to exalt their personal God of the Gaps to the small unit.
Sagan’s Demon Haunted World was probably the reason I ended up going into the sciences!
My favourite fiction is Ready Player One. Great story and very nerdy!
Unless youve just read a handful of books in your life it is impossible to give a good answer to the question.
Books are not oranges.
"Books are not oranges."
As an aside, what do you mean by this? I would have an even harder time giving and answer to the best orange I've eaten.
The Hobbit. My brother read it to me when I was just starting to read. When he was done I asked him to read it again. he said no and I learned to read in earnest. I was often shooed out of the adult section of the library. I have read lots of books by now.
It's also impossible to give a bad answer, what are you worried about? Go for it.
I got to thinking -- a handful of books is approximately one book.
And who ranks their oranges?
Depends on the books of course but the old pulp paperbacks were such you could hold 5 to 10 maybe. Today a tablet could hold 1000s (? how many I don't know ?)
The Once and Future King by T.H. White. Fantasy fiction.
The absolute best for me: The Malazan book of the fallen.
Book 1 is really hard to get into and doesn't reward as much. But if you stick with it, as early as the end of Book 2, you'll know what you're in for.
Non-fiction: Pale Blue Dot. Fiction: The Diamond Age.
There are always better books than the ones I read, and there will never be the best. I’ve tried selecting a few that I can remember at all times, the most interesting book to me, and I’ve listed them on my website at https://brajeshwar.com/#books
If I had to return and re-read, I’d re-read “Leonardo da Vinci.”
There are too many…
But I’ll pick The Psychology of Money. There are few books that have so drastically changed my view of reality and affected my behavior.
(Bonus because I couldn’t help myself: Getting things done, Man’s search for meaning, Surrounded by idiots)
Dungeon Crawler Carl (series)
Sinusoidal Circuit Analysis
The Boy's Second book of Electronics by Alfred Morgan(1957) introduced me to electronics in the 1970s, and lead to a technical mindset and lifestyle.
The Engineers Notebook by Forest Mims really taught me the basics of electronics.
What do you care what other people think by Richard Feynman(1988) introduced me to the idea that nobody is really as much of an expert as you might think.
1632 By Eric Flint, and the subsequent series, got me thinking about the nature of civilization and all the things that go into making it.
There are a lot of books in this world, and they all helped author who I am.
"the way things work", the book with all the woolly mammoths in it. Learned a lot from it
Grew up with the original "The Way Things Work" [1] (found out later it was an English translation of the German book, "Wie Funktioniert Das").
[1] https://archive.org/details/waythingswork0000unse_p9x7/
That is the literal pillar; physically and figuratively the foundation, of my knowledge corpus; aptly the bottom book in my corner-turned-library.
I spent hours as a kid, slowly parsing, contextualizing, researching every iota and minutiae of that book.
I had an encyclopedia just to help supplement that book.
Didnt recogize the english title before i read this comment and it immediately clicked. The copy i have is from the late 80s and even then it was a bit dated, but it didnt matter. Awesome book. Now 35 years later my kids and I sometimes spend hours looking through the same book. Even more dated now, but that probably makes it even more amazing for them and now they know how a tape recorder works \o/
Nonfiction: Thinking, Fast & Slow
Fiction: Project Hail Mary
John McPhee's "The Curve of Binding Energy".
I am That - talks with Nisargadatta Maharaj. Best for me.
The best book I've ever read is perhaps "cheating" because it's "The Next Whole Earth Catalog" and, as the name says, it's a catalog of (mostly) books.
(You can see it for yourself in all it's glory here: https://www.wholeearth.info/p/the-next-whole-earth-catalog-f... )
Other than that I'd have to say the Tao Te Ching.
(The best fiction book I've read is almost certainly "The Book of the New Sun" by Gene Wolfe. It's in the league of Tolkien and Dune.)
One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.
Breakfast of Champions by Vonnegut. Like others could change any day you ask. Social commentary is probably at the top followed by well researched recent historical works.
To each their own. Mine likely 3 body problems: dark forest book
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. When you are young, it is a remarkable book to read.
This book is one I re-read religiously, but the first time was as a young adult and I agree with you, remarkable. It seems to have a correcting effect on my psyche when I stray too far into anxiety and burnout.
> I think it's an excellent question.
Because?
The best book I've partially read is the New Testament. The best book I've actually read is Taleb's Antifragile.
I think this is as meaningful as the question "what's the best food you've ever eaten?", which is to say, it's not a very meaningful question.
Sure, but for the rest of us it might suggest a food we had not yet tried.