Ask HN: Best non-business books to read on vacation
I'm forcing myself to take a vacation from my startup. Looking for some good stories to get lost in. No business books. Help me Hacker News, you're my only hope. Some suggstions on my end would be:
Ready player one - Ernest Cline
Mistborn trilogy - Brandon Sanderson
A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson
Dune - Frank Herbert i second these suggestions. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Sci-fi action-adventure involving AI, terraforming, and a man-made race of intelligent spiders. The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzō. Philosophy, history, and aesthetics in a 1906 treatise on tea. Try Murakami, Knausgård and Ursula Le Guin. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the end of the world is the most scifi Murakami. Wonderful stuff. Then read all his others.
Knausgård 'My Struggle' is a very compelling personal story (5 volumes!) where you get inside his head. Not a novel.
Ursula Le Guin - the Lathe of Heaven. More scifi. Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett. I’d start with the DEATH series (Mort is first book in that one) but a lot of folks like the City Watch. (Guards! Guards!). Lighthearted, hilarious, and some real insights into the human condition in a tongue in cheek way. Can’t go wrong, good vacation reads. M Some suggestions: Any of the "Laundry Files" novels by Charles Stross, or Glasshouse also by Stross. Permutation City by Greg Egan. Off To Be The Wizard by Scott Meyer. Any of the "Dresden Files" novels by Jim Butcher. The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. Neuromancer by William Gibson. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Neuromancer is horrible. One of the few books where I gave up midway through. My expectations were so high. I guess it's famous because it pioneered the genre. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I couldn't disagree more on Neuromancer. I've read it 3 or 4 times and - FSM willing - will read it a couple more before I die. It's definitely one of my all time favorites. I guess that's what makes these threads so interesting. Seeing just how radically different two people's respective opinions on the same book can be. I wanted to love that book. The only bigger sci fi disappointment to me is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the movie. The Bobiverse series I'm on book four of The Expanse series. They are long, but easy reads. I picked them up at the start of the month. Depending on how long your vacation is, you could start with the first three and probably have enough to last. It's a fun series. If you are a fan of the show I think you really should read the books. Even if you haven't watched the show I think most people will enjoy the books. They are page turners and I've stayed up way to late almost every night since I got them. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five has also faced censorship for its political message. Published in 1969, Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the most censored books in recent years. Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke The story follows the peaceful alien invasion of Earth by the mysterious Overlords, whose arrival begins decades of apparent utopia under indirect alien rule, at the cost of human identity and culture. I'd actually recommend almost anything by Vonnegut. Somehow I lost my collection of Vonnegut books in my last move, which makes me a bit sad because I had the Library of America editions and hadn't finished reading his later novels (a bunch of missing books, like someone left a box on a curb). Slaughterhouse-Five is a great read, and really gets to Vonnegut's style of writing. Player Piano is his earliest novel and reads very differently (a more conventional style), but the story and writing are fantastic. It's a world where machines can do most kinds of work, so the majority are unemployed except a few specialists (primarily management and engineering). Cat's Cradle is closer in style/tone to Slaughterhouse-Five. While dark, both of them are, it's another really good read. Mother Night is among my favorites, if not my favorite, of his writings. I need to read more of his books, his writing style is beautiful, very simple and clear yet so deep. Player Piano sounds interesting. If you tend to collect books (like I do), I can recommend the Library of America editions of his books. I think they have all his novels and most, if not all, his short stories in them. Those are the copies that disappeared in my last move. Will check it out. Thank you. I'm 57% ok f the way through Childhoods End. So far it's a great read. The pages turn themselves. The trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past by Cixin Liu: The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Death's End. I really liked this sci-fi trilogy, can't talk more about it without spoiling it. Enjoy your vacation! I had a really tough time with the Three Body Problem. The first chapter is so strong and then it goes downhill from there. It straddles subgenres, like the author thinks that all science fiction needs to be Hard SF, but has never actually read hard SF. You can leave things unexplained in speculative fiction, but if you're going to explain them, at least make the explanations sound plausible to a lay-person like me. Nevermind the fact that nothing in the story has to do with a 3-body system or the 3-body problem. It is referenced in name, but the author botches that too. The characters are so flat, you can't even call them 2-dimensional with the exception of the cop, who btw has the magic gift of always being able to outthink a roomful of scientists. The other characters are so interchangeable I had to take notes to remember who was who. I tell friends to avoid this book at all costs. When the big reveal came, I got so angry I threw the book on the floor, left the room and debated finishing it at all. The setup is so intriguing and the reveal is so hackneyed, unpredictable only because who would choose to write something so mundane? If you want non-business non-fiction, I've always enjoyed Robert Greene's books. They're short history snippets first and foremost, with some Aesop-like morals of the story. I liked One Man's Wilderness.