What are you reading and plan to read next?

I really liked Semiosis. Of all modern sf books I've read recently, it's the one that managed to get me to think most about its central "what if?".

I can highly recommend Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. Also Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers.

Among the classics, I can still recall scenes from Nemesis by Isaac Asimov. This book got into my hands randomly, its a bit slow, but I enjoyed it very much.

I don't think the following list can be classified as classic scifi, but I feel that some of them are slept on:

• Semiosis by Sue Burke
• Flood and its sequel Ark by Stephen Baxter, followed by Landfall, which is a collection of short stories set in the aftermath of Ark
• DreamSongs duology by George RR Martin (collection of short stories)
• The Tuf Voyaging by George RR Martin
• The Death of Grass by John Christopher (more apocalyptic than scifi)
• On the Beach by Nevill Schute (more apocalyptic and melancholic than scifi)
• Most books from Michael Crichton (Andromeda Strain, Eaters of the Dead, Timeline, Prey, Congo, Sphere)

Other than that, I loved the following contemporary series:

• The Expanse by James SA Corey
• The Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Silo by Hugh Howey

Do you have any specific wishes or preferences (aside from it being classic sf)? I have a lot of possible recommendations. :-)

I suggest repurposing its very general concepts into re-implementing a particular existing language you like. I did that with TLA+ here, it is all readily transferable: https://docs.tlapl.us/creating:start

I just realized the whole book is available freely on the web, that's so generous! Added to my reading list (well, I've been wanting to read it for a while but I keep forgetting about it hehe)

target could be solving advent of code?

Fiction: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Non-Fic: The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

Annihilation is the type of sci-fi horror, I enjoy and this first book in the trilogy is proving to be pretty decent. I have heard that the two subsequent books don't hold up to the first, but we'll see if I continue it, since my sc-fi/spec-fic backlog is pretty much already spilling into 2027.

I'm on my second reading of The Order Of Time and it is just as thought-provoking as the first. I have a strange relationship with Time, holding it up as one of the most dangerous factors people most often neglect when they are trying to create anything intended to last, inserting a sort of blind fragility into our systems that we cannot seem to predict with any real accuracy. Rovelli's command over the language when talking about time is poetic and emotional in a lot of ways that I find both compelling and appealing. The audiobook is read by Benedict Cumberbatch which is just as pleasant as you can imagine.

I do not have a tech book on my rotation at the moment.

Thanks to @andrewrk 's talk on the same topic I am currently obsessed with the book Data-Oriented Design by Richard Febian.

I thought it was a really interesting and refreshing concept. I say "refreshing" because a lot of advice on the internet focuses wayyy too much about framework, code architecture or structure, etc. But this concept focuses on what's most important such as memory footprint, CPU caching, etc. Personally, applying this concept has an added benefit of removing bugs by eliminating representation of illegal states.

And while reading that, I am also trying to apply the concept into a train tycoon game (like OpenTTD or A-Train series) I'm making. I don't think I'll ever finish it, but hey, I'll learn something on the way.

Below are my other backlogs:

• Linear Algebra Done Right by Sheldon Axler -- been having a nostalgia with maths lately. Weird, right?
• SICP
• Database Internals by Alex Petrov
• Beej's Guide to Network Programming
• The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Systems by Tim Wu

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Outside of computing-related books, I have also been reading some self-help books. Yes, yes, I'm aware, a lot of them aren't good, but, man, therapy is expensive. So I try to be as selective as possible while looking through some of them and be mindful of the flaw of the book I'm reading. Here are some of my backlogs:

• Running on Empty by Jonice Webb -- a decent book for those who grow up in an imperfect childhood.
• Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman -- I have been interested in this topic lately, but struggled to find a good literature about it, planning to start with this book.
• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, MD

Fiction: Just finished the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. What a ride. Great writing and a powerful allegory about the ripple effects of systems of power long after they have ostensibly become "irrelevant." Cannot recommend highly enough!

Nonfiction: What Is Intelligence by Blaise Agüera y Arcas. About the computational nature of life and intelligence. I think this might be my favorite new nonfiction book, even though I'm only a couple chapters in. I haven't even gotten to the Cybernetics chapter yet! :^D

Within the past week, "The Way of Kings" has taken over my life. It's 2 Dunes long and I'm almost finished with it

Fiction: Echopraxia by Peter Watts

Non-Fiction: Haskell Programming from First Principles

Can and do recommend both.

• Fiction: Nearly finished with Blood of Elves, Book 3 of The Witcher.
• Technical: Reading through Database Internals before writing a toy database for fun over the holidays.

I've been craving an epic fantasy to sink my teeth into after catching up with the Cosmere. The Wheel of Time is there, but I've been saving it for some reason. The Silo book series could be fun, too, though not fantasy.

I've been reading https://wanderinginn.com/ for years. Still makes me pick it up quite often.

This year I've been reading mostly comics / graphic novels. Main interest in non-fiction or graphic adaptations. Some that I enjoyed:

• capital (piketty)
• sapiens
• sands of sarasvati
• parable of the sower / parable of the talents
• the age of selfishness
• moby dick
• to kill a mockingbird
• primates
• einstein
• feynman
• arab of the future
• hakim's odyssey
• 1177 BC
• aristotle
• imitation game
• eternaut
• hidden life of trees
• the road
• the goal

And non-graphic:

• canticle for leibowitz
• martian contingency
• ministry for the future
• silo (wool/shift/dust)

Reading through a pretty terrible fantasy series from Altered Carbon's author, Richard Morgan. Next probably I'll read more of the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik where I stopped after the second book a couple of months ago.

Just yesterday finished John McManus' Island Infernos, his 2nd book in a trilogy about the US Army in the Pacific during WW2.

Planning on starting on Harald Jähner's Vertigo about the Weimar Republic. I enjoyed his book about the aftermath of WW2 in Germany a lot.

For now, I'm reading those books:

• Godel, Escher & Bach
• The Mind Illustrated
• Nicomachean Ethics

I'm planning to reread: Crafting Interpreters + Modern Compiler Implementation in ML. Also, it's on my reading list, The Origins of Efficiency.

I'm currently reading Sarah Bakewell's At The Existentialist Café, which is an introduction and history of existentialist philosophy. I'm not particularly enamored with existentialism, but I recently read Bakewell's Humanly Possible (a history of humanism - both in the intertwining senses of the humanities, of humanitarianism, and of secular humanism) and liked her writing so much that I decided to read her other books too.

Interspersed between Humanly Possible and At The Existentialist Café, I read Mikkel Boris' Forstyrret: En nekrolog over internettet (Interrupted: An eulogy of the internet), which was basically a Danish-language polemic about enshittification, written as an unapologetically personal observation of the author's (a millennial-generation PR worker in the tech industry) experience of growing up with the web and seeing it be turned into, well, shit.

Next on my list is a Danish translation of Haruki Murakami's The City and its Uncertain Walls.

I think I might have mentioned this before, but last year I discovered that I'd inadvertently stopped reading literature in my native Danish entirely - not as any conscious decision; it just sort of happened. While I was recovering from surgery and had a head full of morphine I couldn't read anything more demanding than comic books so I stocked up on a little selection ... and subsequently realized that a collected edition of Valhalla was the most I'd read in Danish for over ten years. I've since made the decision to let every second book I read be in Danish ... which opened up a small world of literature I'd been living right in the middle of and just kept passing by. The downside is that I now read a lot of books I can't recommend to Internet friends and strangers because they can't read them!

Not sure if this counts as a book, but the Elixir web framework Phoenix has docs available as an epub document so I've been reading that. Lately I'm trying to go back to writing software and right now I have some ideas for web apps, and I've never really worked with MVC style framework.

I also plan to read The BEAM book and maybe implement it? We'll see if I'll have time since recently I started a new non-tech job and I don't have a lot of free time on my hands.

Our work book club has just started David Farley's Modern Software Engineering. I'm a little behind so I've not caught up to the introduction that everyone else has, so it's currently just open in a tab for when I get some quiet work time to read through it and I don't have an opinion yet.

For fun, I'm re-reading the Honor Harrington series by David Weber. They are very easy to read and the overall plot is quite enjoyable, although there are some writing tics that I can't quite get along with (everybody's voice is described as a "soprano" or "tenor" or whatever), and some of Weber's politics come through a bit more than I'd like. Might go back to some Discworld afterwards, or I've got a big stack of Inspector Morse I've been meaning to get through for a while.