Ask HN: What was the best book you read in 2021?

  • Fiction:

    Attack Surface - Cory Doctorow

    Non-Fiction:

    Engineering General Intelligence Vol 2 - Ben Goertzel

    Honorable Mention - Fiction

    Daemon - Daniel Suarez

    Freedom - Daniel Suarez

    Billy Summers - Stephen King

    Elsewhere - Dean Koontz

    Honorable Mention - Non-Fiction:

    We See It All - Jon Fasman

    Integrating Rules and Connectionism for Robust Commonsense Reasoning - Ron Sun

    Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks - James A. Anderson

    The Soar Cognitive Architecture - John Laird

  • "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes

  • Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang

  • I finished reading the last book in Iain M. Banks The Culture series. Not perfect but the series overall turned out to be my favorite fiction across any medium.

    Similar to a written version of Star Trek.

  • Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

  • Be Here Now by Ram Daas.

  • Haven't finished it but reading: The Charisma Machine

    About the One Laptop Per Child computers

    Fiction I enjoyed reading:

    - Sourdough/24hr library

    - Nick Webb legacy fleet series

    - Long way to a small angry planet

  • The Heart of Buddha's Teachings by Thich Nhat Han This is one of the life changing book!

  • How Emotions Are Made - Lisa Feldman Barrett

  • Augustus: A Novel, by John Edward Williams

  • A Man and His Symbols by Jung and others.

  • Nim in Action

  • These Truths (Jill Lepore)