Ask HN: End of Year Book Recommendations
Top 1 or top 1-3 book you read this year (2025) that you would recommend to the HN community? Note: book itself doesn't need to have been published in 2025. 1. Why Machines Learn - Anil Ananthaswamy Fantastic exposition of machine learning. The author does an amazing job of bringing a technical subject down to an easily readable level. 2. The Joy of Abstraction - Eugenia Cheng Similar to the above review. I never thought Category Theory could be made so easily readable! 3. A Little History of Philosophy - Nigel Warburton Small, compact book. A quick interesting jaunnt through the history of philosophy. Entertaining and educational! I've always meant to read more of the Little History series. I love Gombrich's original! Not read this year but: 1. Sebastian Junger - Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging You should be able to get the Dover edition of The World as Will and Representation from Alibris for not much more than the cost of shipping. Cambridge University Press is or was bringing out a new edition of his works. 1. Differential Privacy (2025) by Simson Garfinkel A readable but thorough introduction to differential privacy. 2. Tales of the Weird: An Uncanny Introduction (2023) A collection of short stories from the British Library to introduce the many flavors of weird fiction. 3. An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise (1980) by John R. Pierce A fun survey of information theory with great anecdotes about Bell Labs in mid-century. See my full list here: https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-books-2025/ quite an interesting list of books for 2025. I’ll have to get some of these to read. Especially the Information theory one above and the one you mentioned in your review. 1. Die Wand (1963, Germany). The Wall. Marlen Haushofer. An excellent novel, simple, yet moving. Why do we live and what is our connection to nature? 2. Fifth Business (1970, Canada). Robertson Davies. I've read thousands of novels, so I'm always glad to read something new and unpredictable, but still based on the best premise: interesting characters. 3. Sostiene Pereira (1994, Italy). Pereira Maintains. Antonio Tabucchi. My favorite book this year. A deep and smart and tense plunge into the Portuguese life of a few decades ago. Italian literature has so many gems. Couple of books from this year: - A short stay in hell (sci-fi): A modern take on Library of Babel. Pretty dark. Quick read. - The Burried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. Nominally fantasy, but not really. Great, like his other books. - Small things like these (fiction). Set in 1900s Ireland, atmospheric. I learned about Magdalene laundries from this book. - Parable of the Sawer by Octavia E. Butler, science fiction. Collapse of society, survival etc. Pretty bleak. - Lonely Kind of War (biography). Author was a forward air controller during the Vietnam war. His job was to direct air strikes from jets and bombers on enemy positions and then confirm the kills. Interesting and depressing. Journeys of the Mind by Peter Brown, a memoir of his life, chiefly as a historian of late antiquity. It is very long, the sole reason that I won't be giving it as a Christmas present. The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paukofsky, also very long. Empire of AI by Karen Hao.
The whole world is going crazy for AI. This book brings the story of what actually goes on within those companies. Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb The "Sun Eater" series (7 books) by C. Ruocchio have the final book published this year. Dune vibe/A bit of Warhammer. "Simplicity" by Dave Thomas is in the same vein of "The Pragmatic Programmer". Worth a quick read. "Tidy First?" by Kent Beck is another one that's worth a quick read. 1. Inside the Black Box Introduction to quantitative finance and to learn what strategies are used by firms who are supposed to beat the market. 2. Advances in Financial Machine Learning Deep dive into ML techniques if you want to start making money from data and math. Man’s Search For Meaning (Frankl), The Color Purple (Walker), Orbital (Harvey) Not specifically for the HN community but these are the only books I read this year that I would recommend without qualification. Stasi: The Untold Story Of The East German Secret Police https://search.worldcat.org/title/39256274 This book going into extreme detail about the East German surveillance state. People tend to hyperfocus on the Nazis due to a morbid fascination with bodycounts, but the GDR was closer in time in both history and comopositions. They had faxes, computers, and many other technologies that made them similar to us, and I worry we forget the lessons of that regime. I read his book during a middle school in school suspension and it was a formative read. Another good book is "Eichman in Jerusalem", which details the trial of one of the architects of the Holocaust and his claims he was "just following orders... the book examines the "banality of evil". https://search.worldcat.org/title/385389 Finally, to lighten things up, my most recent new favorite book that's fiction was Convenience Store Woman, about a woman who's been working at a 7/11 for 18 years. I read it during COVID and it's stuck with me as a favorite. > Another good book is "Eichman in Jerusalem" I've read at least two articles authored by historians that thought this book was full of factual errors and misunderstandings. One of them had studied Eichmann's life and correspondance, and found that he was far from the character that Hannah Arendt depicted. IIRC, the other article tried to explain her bias; I remember she hated Jerusalem and despised most people she met in Israel. It may be good read, but don't expect the book to be fair or truthful. >I've read at least two articles authored by historians that thought this book was full of factual errors and misunderstandings. Feel free to provide these citations if you dislike the book >It may be good read, but don't expect the book to be fair or truthful. It's creative nonfiction -- a literary telling of a factual event. And no one is required to be "fair" to anyone, especially Nazis. Some things don't have "both sides". - The Writer - James Patterson - Terminal Man - Michael Crichton - The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss This year I quite enjoyed: - The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman
Modern take on King Arthur, very fun, wild ride. - The Courage to Be Disliked, Ichiro Kishimi
Philosophy as a dialogue between teacher and student, lots to think about. Caves of Steel, Forever War, Childhood’s End Childhood’s End was not bad, but it didn’t leave an impression on me. I thought that it was dated (the Spanish watching a bullfight when the aliens came, oh c’mon!). What did you like the most about it?
2. Christian and Barbara Joy O'Brien - The Genius of The Few (get it from goldenageproject.org.uk, not amazon) I read it some years ago but I remember it being a good read - for men. It also mentions how older societies handled post-war PTSD. So it got stuck in my head, despite only reading it once. Author was also a guest on Joe Rogan few times.
I have no time yet but want to buy Schopenhauer's works. So it might be of interest to some as well. Great addition for anyone interested in Anunnaki and Sitchin's work. This takes a different angle but comes to the same/similar conclusions as Sitchin in more straightforward and less bombastic way as the authors were strictly fact-driven and held off any personal opinions or anything they could not prove. And I find that this is the only work not written by armchair warriors, second to Sitchin.