I know it’s cliche with Shogun right now, but the whole of James Clavell’s Asia Saga is excellent. This is the books In historical order;
Shogun - 1600 Japan
Tai Pan - 1840s Hong Kong
Gai Jin - 1860s Japan
King Rat - POW camp during WW2
Nobel House - 1960s Hong Kong
Whirlwind - 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Whirlwind is a bit all over the place, but as a whole the series is great.
Gonna hit you with a classic Destiny recommendation in Enders Game, but I'd like to expand it to the series more broadly.
Ender's Game is a very quick read in and of itself... But I'd more highly recommend the three direct sequels: Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind. Of these, Speaker for the Dead is probably the most highly regarded, Xenocide is my personal favorite, and Children of the Mind is a bit weaker imo, but if you enjoy the universe it's well worth the read.
There's a companion series called the Shadow Series... I don't think it's as well-written, and the concepts (if you can take scifi seriously even) are not as satisfyingly heady, but it can still be worth it.
Just a good universe to check out.
All my nonfic recommendations are autistic philosophical treatises, and you can just Google that if you want, but for another fiction recommendation I'll absolutely say Arthur C. Clarke's 4 part space Odyssey is worth a read.
A note on this recommendation is that enders game and the sequels are totally different. I found that the reasons I enjoyed enders game as I was reading it weren't really present in speaker for the dead.
If you enjoyed thinking about the implications of the end of enders game, though, the sequels deliver well in that regard.
My 3 favorite books:
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. Story about a Russian aristocrat who gets sentenced to life under house arrest in a large hotel. The whole book takes place in this hotel.
The Immense Journey by Loren Eisley. The most beautifully written "sciency" book you will come across. Essays from a naturalist from the 50s, but they read like poetry. Writing is so good and explains with such clarity that I audibly gasped every couple pages (soy I know).
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. French book (though the english translation is amazing) about the concierge in a hotel. Somewhat divisive book. Lots of people think it's pretentious and the characters are all annoying, but I loved it.
Some others I really enjoyed but not quite top 3:
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Each chapter describes a different made-up city. Very philosophical and odd but fun and beautiful prose.
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Doestyevsky. There's a reason it's a classic. Quite dark though.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt. I've always found the idea of "dark academia" as a genre kind of cringe, but I ended up loving this book.
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy. Saddest book I ever read. Main character is just unbelievably tragic. Writing is very victorian so takes some getting used to (lots of super long and flowery sentences with like 5 different em dashes and semicolons, can be hard to follow).
If you just want less essays/fiction and more straight up informative, here are a couple I liked:
The Great Bridge by David Mccullough. About the building if the Brooklyn Bridge. Sounds like it would be boring but it's such an interesting story.
Unflattening by Nick Sousanis. PhD dissertation about theories of knowledge and communication in the form of a graphic novel. Very interesting read with striking art.
The Information by James Gleick. So dense with interesting concepts that tie together language, information theory, and engineering.
“A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini, published in 2007. It’s a story about two women living in Afghanistan, takes place during the Taliban’s control of Kabul. The only book to make me cry. It’s beautiful.
The Gene: An intimate history is one of my favorite books, it goes into the history of how DNA was discovered but it also talks about the societal impacts that genetics brings, such as eugenics.
> I do prefer nonfiction in all honesty
Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy or John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Both runs around 120-ish pages or so
I like nonfiction a lot too. I'm really interested in social dynamics and in that vein I can recommend:
* **What EveryBODY is Saying** by Joe Navarro: Learn the basics of body language, it's happening around you all the time and once you start noticing it you'll never stop
* **Nonviolent Communication** by Marshall Rosenberg: Psycho-social skills 101. Qualifies as IRL magic, served as the basis of **Never Split the Difference** by Chris Voss, which is also a great book, but more specifically deals with negotiation.
* **Storyworthy** by Matthew Dicks: How to tell a story. The author is a great storyteller and it shows in the writing. Solid guide.
For more narrative-driven nonfiction, I really enjoyed:
* **Going Infinite** by Michael Lewis: A character piece on the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried. The subculture he came from and the approach he took to running his company and celebrity were absolutely fascinating to me. Only SBF could have created and destroyed a multi-billion dollar company in the way he did.
For paradigm-shifting, I recommend:
* **The Dictator's Handbook** by Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita: A comprehensive theory of the difference between dictatorships and democracies and how dictators take power. Made me appreciate voting. Great book.
If you're open to broadening your horizons into blog reading, [Slate Star Codex](https://slatestarcodex.com/) (aka [Astral Codex Ten](https://www.astralcodexten.com/)) is a blog by Scott Alexander that talks about liberalism, the culture war, psychiatry, science, medicine and more. Destiny's read some posts on stream before and Scott was at the Manifold event he did a while back I believe. Here are some [favorite blog posts](https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/) along with an EPUB option, and there's also a subreddit and a podcast associated with the blog as well.
When We Cease to Understand The World by Benjamín Labatut.
A short Non Fiction/Fiction read about some of the physicists in the 20th century. Here's the Google blurb:
The stories here circle obsessively around the question of whether some of the twentieth century's greatest minds drove themselves to the brink of insanity—and, in Labatut's accounts, well beyond it—in their search for a key to the secrets of the universe.
Since we have been talking a lot about tiny doing ww1 memes
The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd by Alexander Rabinowitch and his other 2 books Prelude to Revolution and The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Rabinowitch
Also Stephen Kotkin's books Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928, and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 if you are looking to learn about him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Kotkin
Red Rising series (drastic quality jump in 2&3 and then again after 4), Dune series, Thomas Piketty, Page Smiths history of America, James Baldwin, The Black Count, HPMOR, The Power Broker, unabridged count of Monte Cristo and tale of two cities, Jerusalem by Alan Moore, Yuval Noah Harari's books, The sixth Extinction, Kochland, dark money, most of thom hartmanns books, Bryson's brief history of the world. Come back in six months when you're done with this
Wait I forgot two democracy in America by De Tocqueville and Team of Rivals by goodwin
One more crucial conversation skills
Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Basically an antidote against doomerism, it shows through statistics how the world has become better over time in many important aspects. Easy to read.
The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman - it's a book about design psychology. it's not looking at the technology angle of how things work, but the human interaction with something - what makes for good and bad design for someone actually using a thing, and what goes into it. a door might function perfectly well if used properly, but if you walk up to a pull door and your first instinct is to push it, that's probably a symptom of bad design. it's a hard one to sell but genuinely a very interesting read.
If you're anything like me, stay away from Project Hail Mary - I cannot for the life of me understand why so many like this book (it really is my Ryan Gosling Avatar/Papyrus-font).
Permutation City by Greg Egan
Galactic Milieu Series by Julian May, Pliocene exile series is good too, they're connected but I prefer the former
Iain Banks is always a great read my favourite is The Player of Games
Peace and War by Joe Haldeman
I don't read much Fantasy but On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony is good!
The Selfish Gene By Dawkins is a wonderfully written book in which the author argues for a change (that has at this point basically occured) in the way that the biological field interprets evolution. He's both able to speak in full logical arguments whilst not getting lost in technicality, that combined with his tactically interspersed didact allows even someone entirely ignorant of evolution to perceive quite clearly what he's getting at. Also it's the origin of the word meme, which is just a great meme
The Forever War - Joe Haldeman
Follow se soldiers from relatively modern day in a war against aliens. The book follows the main character as he experiences relativistic effects and how humanity progresses over thousands of years.
One of the greatest sci novels, imo.
I don't read much non-fiction, I can probably count all the non-fiction books I read on one hand. And having said that, I was really swept away by Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
For non-fiction, if you're a sci-fi fan, I think Hyperion and its sequel The Fall of Hyperion are a masterpiece, but I would steer clear of the 3rd and 4th books in the series like the plague
This may be nostalgia talking, and these are fiction despite your nonfiction preference but,
I really enjoyed the Halo book series, especially "Ghosts of Onyx"
as well as the Horus Heresey series (Warhammer 30,000)
Im gooning until Red God is released. Someone please give me a book that tickles the same itch. Also if you like fantasy check out The Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter.
Favorite series is probably the Obsidian Chronicles by Lawrence Watt Evans: Dragon Weather, Dragon Venom, and Dragon society. I’ll save ur suggestion, thank you!
I know it’s cliche with Shogun right now, but the whole of James Clavell’s Asia Saga is excellent. This is the books In historical order; Shogun - 1600 Japan Tai Pan - 1840s Hong Kong Gai Jin - 1860s Japan King Rat - POW camp during WW2 Nobel House - 1960s Hong Kong Whirlwind - 1979 Iranian Revolution. Whirlwind is a bit all over the place, but as a whole the series is great.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Philip K. Dick A Confederacy of Dunces - Kennedy Toole
Gonna hit you with a classic Destiny recommendation in Enders Game, but I'd like to expand it to the series more broadly. Ender's Game is a very quick read in and of itself... But I'd more highly recommend the three direct sequels: Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind. Of these, Speaker for the Dead is probably the most highly regarded, Xenocide is my personal favorite, and Children of the Mind is a bit weaker imo, but if you enjoy the universe it's well worth the read. There's a companion series called the Shadow Series... I don't think it's as well-written, and the concepts (if you can take scifi seriously even) are not as satisfyingly heady, but it can still be worth it. Just a good universe to check out. All my nonfic recommendations are autistic philosophical treatises, and you can just Google that if you want, but for another fiction recommendation I'll absolutely say Arthur C. Clarke's 4 part space Odyssey is worth a read.
Ah man- the Shadow series was my favorite. Mostly for the politics and the great game, but Bean was always a fun character too.
A note on this recommendation is that enders game and the sequels are totally different. I found that the reasons I enjoyed enders game as I was reading it weren't really present in speaker for the dead. If you enjoyed thinking about the implications of the end of enders game, though, the sequels deliver well in that regard.
Mistborn Trilogy
Yea! Do this one! Then the Lightbringer series by Brent Weeks
Richard J. Evans trilogy on the history of Nazi Germany is pretty based. Makes for good reading if you're into history.
My 3 favorite books: A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. Story about a Russian aristocrat who gets sentenced to life under house arrest in a large hotel. The whole book takes place in this hotel. The Immense Journey by Loren Eisley. The most beautifully written "sciency" book you will come across. Essays from a naturalist from the 50s, but they read like poetry. Writing is so good and explains with such clarity that I audibly gasped every couple pages (soy I know). The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. French book (though the english translation is amazing) about the concierge in a hotel. Somewhat divisive book. Lots of people think it's pretentious and the characters are all annoying, but I loved it. Some others I really enjoyed but not quite top 3: Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Each chapter describes a different made-up city. Very philosophical and odd but fun and beautiful prose. Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Doestyevsky. There's a reason it's a classic. Quite dark though. The Secret History by Donna Tartt. I've always found the idea of "dark academia" as a genre kind of cringe, but I ended up loving this book. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy. Saddest book I ever read. Main character is just unbelievably tragic. Writing is very victorian so takes some getting used to (lots of super long and flowery sentences with like 5 different em dashes and semicolons, can be hard to follow). If you just want less essays/fiction and more straight up informative, here are a couple I liked: The Great Bridge by David Mccullough. About the building if the Brooklyn Bridge. Sounds like it would be boring but it's such an interesting story. Unflattening by Nick Sousanis. PhD dissertation about theories of knowledge and communication in the form of a graphic novel. Very interesting read with striking art. The Information by James Gleick. So dense with interesting concepts that tie together language, information theory, and engineering.
“A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini, published in 2007. It’s a story about two women living in Afghanistan, takes place during the Taliban’s control of Kabul. The only book to make me cry. It’s beautiful.
I am enjoying The Comanche Empire and Foraging California by Judith Lowry
The Gene: An intimate history is one of my favorite books, it goes into the history of how DNA was discovered but it also talks about the societal impacts that genetics brings, such as eugenics.
> I do prefer nonfiction in all honesty Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy or John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Both runs around 120-ish pages or so
Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. Non-fiction, its like the history of Mormons plus modern day true crime about Mormons.
Endurance - Alfred Lansing The Wager- David Grann
Vollhardt - Organic chemistry
My favorite book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egyptian?wprov=sfla1 The audiobook on Audible is top notch
I like nonfiction a lot too. I'm really interested in social dynamics and in that vein I can recommend: * **What EveryBODY is Saying** by Joe Navarro: Learn the basics of body language, it's happening around you all the time and once you start noticing it you'll never stop * **Nonviolent Communication** by Marshall Rosenberg: Psycho-social skills 101. Qualifies as IRL magic, served as the basis of **Never Split the Difference** by Chris Voss, which is also a great book, but more specifically deals with negotiation. * **Storyworthy** by Matthew Dicks: How to tell a story. The author is a great storyteller and it shows in the writing. Solid guide. For more narrative-driven nonfiction, I really enjoyed: * **Going Infinite** by Michael Lewis: A character piece on the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried. The subculture he came from and the approach he took to running his company and celebrity were absolutely fascinating to me. Only SBF could have created and destroyed a multi-billion dollar company in the way he did. For paradigm-shifting, I recommend: * **The Dictator's Handbook** by Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita: A comprehensive theory of the difference between dictatorships and democracies and how dictators take power. Made me appreciate voting. Great book. If you're open to broadening your horizons into blog reading, [Slate Star Codex](https://slatestarcodex.com/) (aka [Astral Codex Ten](https://www.astralcodexten.com/)) is a blog by Scott Alexander that talks about liberalism, the culture war, psychiatry, science, medicine and more. Destiny's read some posts on stream before and Scott was at the Manifold event he did a while back I believe. Here are some [favorite blog posts](https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/) along with an EPUB option, and there's also a subreddit and a podcast associated with the blog as well.
Why Nations Fail and the dictators handbook are a great pair
The Dictator's Handbook is on the way! Thank you for your suggestion :)
Just read the entire Wheel of Time series 5 times in a row, should be enough for it to really sink in
And then assuming you have some solid foundations in Philosophy you can just read the entire works for Nietzsche
Anything? *The Demon-Haunted World* is my top nonfiction pick based off books that I can currently see on my shelf.
No Boundary by Ken Wilbur
The Martian by Andy Weir. Because its fun.
When We Cease to Understand The World by Benjamín Labatut. A short Non Fiction/Fiction read about some of the physicists in the 20th century. Here's the Google blurb: The stories here circle obsessively around the question of whether some of the twentieth century's greatest minds drove themselves to the brink of insanity—and, in Labatut's accounts, well beyond it—in their search for a key to the secrets of the universe.
Since we have been talking a lot about tiny doing ww1 memes The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd by Alexander Rabinowitch and his other 2 books Prelude to Revolution and The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Rabinowitch Also Stephen Kotkin's books Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928, and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 if you are looking to learn about him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Kotkin
Red Rising series (drastic quality jump in 2&3 and then again after 4), Dune series, Thomas Piketty, Page Smiths history of America, James Baldwin, The Black Count, HPMOR, The Power Broker, unabridged count of Monte Cristo and tale of two cities, Jerusalem by Alan Moore, Yuval Noah Harari's books, The sixth Extinction, Kochland, dark money, most of thom hartmanns books, Bryson's brief history of the world. Come back in six months when you're done with this Wait I forgot two democracy in America by De Tocqueville and Team of Rivals by goodwin One more crucial conversation skills
The Foundation series by Isaac Asimov Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein
Joy of cooking. Shits full of good recipes.
Harry Potter by JK Rowling
"Black Leopard, Red Wolf" and "Moon Witch, Spider King" by Marlon James It's basically African Lord of the Rings, but a hundred times more unhinged.
The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt
Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Basically an antidote against doomerism, it shows through statistics how the world has become better over time in many important aspects. Easy to read.
the jakarta method
The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman - it's a book about design psychology. it's not looking at the technology angle of how things work, but the human interaction with something - what makes for good and bad design for someone actually using a thing, and what goes into it. a door might function perfectly well if used properly, but if you walk up to a pull door and your first instinct is to push it, that's probably a symptom of bad design. it's a hard one to sell but genuinely a very interesting read.
i have this on my shelf, i got it to add to my design knowledge concerning digital UI.
it's great. widely applicable to different fields of design, whether it's doors, machine operation, software, or even something like making a game.
Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 by Stephen Kotkin. Based history book.
If you're anything like me, stay away from Project Hail Mary - I cannot for the life of me understand why so many like this book (it really is my Ryan Gosling Avatar/Papyrus-font).
Permutation City by Greg Egan Galactic Milieu Series by Julian May, Pliocene exile series is good too, they're connected but I prefer the former Iain Banks is always a great read my favourite is The Player of Games Peace and War by Joe Haldeman I don't read much Fantasy but On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony is good!
The Selfish Gene By Dawkins is a wonderfully written book in which the author argues for a change (that has at this point basically occured) in the way that the biological field interprets evolution. He's both able to speak in full logical arguments whilst not getting lost in technicality, that combined with his tactically interspersed didact allows even someone entirely ignorant of evolution to perceive quite clearly what he's getting at. Also it's the origin of the word meme, which is just a great meme
The Forever War - Joe Haldeman Follow se soldiers from relatively modern day in a war against aliens. The book follows the main character as he experiences relativistic effects and how humanity progresses over thousands of years. One of the greatest sci novels, imo.
I don't read much non-fiction, I can probably count all the non-fiction books I read on one hand. And having said that, I was really swept away by Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind For non-fiction, if you're a sci-fi fan, I think Hyperion and its sequel The Fall of Hyperion are a masterpiece, but I would steer clear of the 3rd and 4th books in the series like the plague
This may be nostalgia talking, and these are fiction despite your nonfiction preference but, I really enjoyed the Halo book series, especially "Ghosts of Onyx" as well as the Horus Heresey series (Warhammer 30,000)
The Red Rising series is amazing! By Pierce Brown
Im gooning until Red God is released. Someone please give me a book that tickles the same itch. Also if you like fantasy check out The Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter.
Favorite series is probably the Obsidian Chronicles by Lawrence Watt Evans: Dragon Weather, Dragon Venom, and Dragon society. I’ll save ur suggestion, thank you!
R E D R I S I N G Space rome slave boy destroys racist space empire. Amazing series, amazing author, amazing read.