Ask HN: What Are You Reading?

I've gotten many great literary recommendations in random HN comments.

Wondering what the community at large is currently interested in!

5 points | by ImPleadThe5th 9 hours ago

8 comments

  • andyjohnson0 1 hour ago
    Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. As with some of his other work, the punctuation can be a challenge and the prose can sometimes border on the ponderous, but I'm enjoying it. Currently about half way through.
  • card_zero 3 hours ago
    I read The Whispering Mountain by Joan Aiken and was struck by similarities to Pratchett, for instance the part where the main character heroically defeats monsters in a wood by using knowledge gleaned from an old encyclopedia that he carries everywhere, and how he ſpeakſ like thiſ when reading aloud from it, and the part about underground camels in Wales. It references The Far-Distant Oxus at one point, which I want to read (a pony adventure story written in 1937 by teenagers).

    (I know the long s wasn't really used at the ends of words, that was just a hurried example.)

  • chairmansteve 2 hours ago
    Post Soviet Britain by Abby Innes. Excellent so far (70 pages in).

    Crossing the Unknown Sea by David Whyte. Also excellent. Nearly finished it.

  • ValtteriL 4 hours ago
    Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre (1923)
    • kratom_sandwich 1 hour ago
      How do you like it?
      • ValtteriL 48 minutes ago
        I'm 3/4 through it.

        It's been quite entertaining to read how he went from picking off bucket shops to going bust on Wall Street and how he proceeded from there. Old-fashioned writing that goes straight to the point.

        His art-like approach to speculation is refreshing after spending time on /r/quant. I cannot say if any of his high-level speculation wisdom hold water anymore, though.

        Would recommend!

  • chistev 4 hours ago
    On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy D. Snyder
  • shawn_w 6 hours ago
    Currently: Moby-Dick and Termination Shock. (That the former gets brought up a lot in the latter is a coincidence.)
  • SMAAART 8 hours ago
    Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters, by Jeremy Utley
  • jus3sixty 7 hours ago
    “How Can I Help” by Linda Hand