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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-24-2013, 01:15 AM
Merry Christmas, everyone.
With the holidays and new year approaching, I've been looking back on this past year, and I realized... I read a lot of books. Piles of them. But there were only a few that stood out to me this past year, so I wanted to ask the forum...
What was the best book you read this past year?
Read my work on Return of Kings here.
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-24-2013, 01:55 AM
Read 10 this year. Best by far Lonesome Dove. Currently reading Atlas Shrugged but wont finish it till next tear. Best non fiction was Mastery by Robert Greene.
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-24-2013, 09:30 AM
My brain freezes when I try and answer these questions. But with the help of my Amazon purchasing history for 2013 I should be able to answer it.
It seems I ordered 168 books from Amazon this year.
Here are the books that stood out:
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UNDISPUTED TRUTH - MIKE TYSON
The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office
Fisman, Ray
Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry
Robertson, David
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life
Adams, Scott
The Everything Store
Stone, Brad
The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia
Suits, Bernard
Who Owns The Future?
Lanier, Jaron
Logical Properties: Identity, Existence, Predication, Necessity, Truth
McGinn, Colin
Basic Structures of Reality: Essays in Meta-Physics
McGinn, Colin
Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning
Mcginn, Colin
Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes?
Boyle, David
Truth by Analysis: Games, Names, and Philosophy
McGinn, Colin
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
Dennett, Daniel C
Kamikaze Economics: A Story of Modern Japan
Rands
Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries
Robert Harris
A Companion to Marx's Capital: Volume 2
Harvey, David
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As I look over the Amazon list. I could mention more - but right now these seem to be the books thast most jumped out at me.
I had a great year with philosophy. The Colin McGinn books (and the Daniel Dennett book) are the most interesting books on philosophy I have ever read. I am still sludging through some works on Marx. Slow but seady progress. And often makes for the most intense and difficult reading experience I have ever had.
But for me - the most enjoyable book of the year was Mike Tyson's autobiography. But another strong contender was 'Kamikaze Economics: A Story Of Modern Japan' which was a really interesting look at the culture and workings of the Japanese economy (which seems reminiscent of the Soviet Union). That book was a real favourite for me since it was a surprise package. And for me there is nothing more fun that stumbling across a great book.
Anyway - it is hard to look back since I am really excited about the books I have lined up for order in January. I always seem to be more exicted about the books I am about to read. Than I am about the ones I have read. It is just such a fascinating and compulsive journey.
Here is the list of books I am going to get in January and February:
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Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Economics I Learned from Online Dating
Paul Oyer
On the Wealth of Nations
P. J. O'Rourke
The Theory of Business Enterprise
Thorstein Veblen
Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
Andro Linklater
The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth Has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many, and Endangered the Planet
Richard Douthwaite
Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works
A.G. Lafley, Roger L. Martin
The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World
Ron Paul (Foreword), Mark Spitznagel (Author)
Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
Natasha Dow Schüll
What Everybody Really Wants to Know About Money
Frances Hutchinson
Monetarism Under Thatcher: Lessons for the Future
Gordon T. Pepper
The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run or Ruin an Economy
Tim Harford
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-24-2013, 10:54 AM
Forgot to mention the Arnie autobiography.
And a book called 'The Zurich Axioms' which was an excellent investment book. The advice in there is different to most of the other advice I have seen.
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-24-2013, 11:39 AM
Godfather and the War of Art are on my reading list for 2014
Hard to choose a favourite book from this year (especially since I know for a fact that I'm forgetting several titles), but Hunter S Thompson or George Orwell probably produced it.
Next year I'll be keeping track of what I'm reading and even reviewing books I've read. I have about 40 or so lined up that I'd like to read next year, and a whole heap more to add to that list if I get the chance. Reading has definitely regained its status as an important part of my life again. I'm amazed that I forgot how great it was
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-24-2013, 01:27 PM
Antifragile by Nassim Taleb.
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-24-2013, 01:47 PM
I honestly don't think it is anything to be proud of. I don't actually think reading makes you smarter. I only do it because it is enjoyable. I only mention the large number of books I read so that I can tell you that in my experience the 'benefits of reading' are probably overrated.
Most of the really smart people I know rarely read a book. Just one of those things, I guess.
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-24-2013, 01:53 PM
Also - I probably read about 100 books this year.
Alot of books I buy turn out to be a dissapointment. So I put them to one side - to try and finish at some later date.
And other books are great. But I am not quite in the mood for tackling them just yet. This often happens with philosophy books.
So - on average I seem to start and actually finish about 100 books a year. So alot of the books I buy still sit around waiting to be finished/started.
It is quite neat since it means I can walk round my house - and it is like a bookshop in terms of books that I want to pick up and read but haven't had a chance to do so yet.
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-24-2013, 03:34 PM
Fiction
Self help for males
"You either build or destroy,where you come from?"
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-24-2013, 04:04 PM
I know you guys are not fans of science fiction. But I just finished Childhood's End a few days ago. And I must say it is a superb piece of literature. I usually read about 25-35 books a year 80% of those being old sci-fi. Anyway should check it out despite it's sci fi genre. I have found that it has a lot of powerful messages regarding hedonism and post-scarcity economics.
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-24-2013, 04:41 PM
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem.
Kind of a mystery, but not exactly. A car service is the front for a detective agency which is the front for some low level mafia activities.
The narrator has Tourette's. His tics come out in the writing. Often very funny. Touching in a weird way.
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-24-2013, 05:07 PM
@samsamsam - totally agree that 'the day you stop learning is the day you start dying'.
At the end of each day - I feel it is a wasted day if I haven't added something of use to my pool of knowledge. It could be finishing a book, buying a new one, reading a good and well written article, discovering an interesting new magic trick (I am a magician), discovering a new writer or blogger who is worth looking into - or something like that.
My brain actually has a dull ache if I have gone an entire day without coming across something of genuine interest. On a busy day - it can even just be the mental stimulation of reading some good posts here on the forum.
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-24-2013, 05:39 PM
I read 'Kitchen Confidential' about 12 years ago. Really brilliant book. Can't praise it enough.
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-24-2013, 08:16 PM
The best non-fiction book would have to be the one I just finished: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. The entire saga of Hitler and the Nazis compiled into one huge book was captivating and had an incredible amount of detail. Possibly the longest book I've ever read.
Another good book I read this year was Emotional Vampires by Albert Berstein. I first saw it recommended on therawness website. That book gave me insight and caused me to re-evaluate various character traits and how to deal with them.
Best fiction book purely for entertainment value was The Average American Marriage by Chad Kultgen. I read The Average American Male back in ’07 when it first came out and this is the sequel. The dreary descriptions of marriage and how the narrator describes his day to day life are hilarious if not depressing. It really made me think what a marriage is worth and whether banging a hot young intern might be worth risking it all.
Other books I read this year:
The Inferno by Dante, John Ciardi translation
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, David Wyllie translation
Meditations on Violence by Rory Miller
Men on Strike by Helen Smith
I Wear the Black Hat by Chuck Klosterman
The Revolution Was Televised by Alan Sepinwall
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-24-2013, 08:49 PM
I really picked up reading the last few months. It's hard to pick a favorite, but here are a few that stood out:
-The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
-The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
-The Lincoln Deception by David O. Stewart
-Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
I think the Brothers Karamazov has to take the cake though. It was a long and powerful (no pun intended) book. It really gave me new perspectives on Christianity, good vs. evil etc.
The Mike Tyson autobiography seems interesting, I'll have to check it out.
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-24-2013, 11:35 PM
Good thread.
Got around to reading Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came To Rule The World.
Very insightful book. Kind of unfortunate that bankers aren't often discussed as inspirational individual men. Some of them have extraordinary personal stories.
Here is an interesting
excerpt from the book about the rags to riches story of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-25-2013, 10:09 AM
The 48 Laws of Power. Worldview totally changed by reading that book.
If that was only one great book on Roosh's "10 Books Every Man Should Read" the other nine must be very promising indeed.
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-25-2013, 02:00 PM
Thinking about it some more - the new Scott Adams book was a really good one from this year as well.
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Best Book You Read This Year?
12-25-2013, 02:10 PM
This sounds like nonchalant musings of an underappreciated pseudo scholar. But to be fair you would have to define the term "smart".