Ask HN: Best books you've read in 2015

I'm cheating a little on the date, but The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin stands out. It was translated into english late last year, and received the Hugo this year for best story. It's wonderful sci-fi written on a grand scale, and made all the more interesting and refreshing to me by coming from outside the Western perspective. It's one of a trilogy: The Dark Forest english translation is out, and Death's End is coming beginning of next year.

Also enjoyed Seveneves by Stephenson, and H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. The former is likely known to the HN crowd; the latter draws comparisons to T.H. White's classic The Goshawk.

Among non-fiction books, I enjoyed The Little Prover by Friedman and Eastlund. It was exactly what I expected, a gentle introduction into inductive proofs in the idiom established by The Little Schemer.

I read The Martian, Snow Crash, and Ready Player One over the course of a month or two. All three of those books have their flaws but I enjoy the style and page turning nature of them a lot.

Watchmen (Alan Moore)

Origins of Form (Christopher Williams)

Starship & The Canoe (Kenneth Brower)

The Size of Lumber (Nicholson Baker)

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Shunryu Suzuki)

Deschooling Society (Ivan Illich)

Moby Dick (Herman Melville)

Bolo'Bolo (P.M.)

Le Ton beau de Marot (Douglas Hofstadter)

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (James Lovelock)

Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation (Umberto Eco)

Neuromancer (William Gibson)

The Intelligent Investor (Benjamin Graham)

Don Quixote (Miguel Cervantes)

The books I've enjoyed reading most this year are ones I ought to have read in high school some 15 years ago, but just never did because I didn't enjoy reading and never made the effort: The Great Gatsby, As I Lay Dying, and am currently reading Cry, The Beloved Country

Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead > http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13588356-daring-greatly

Tremendous insight into our own inner critic and interaction with people. Got turned onto to this book after hearing the author interviewed by Tim Ferriss, highly recommend> http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/08/28/brene-brown-on-vulner...

Red Rising and Golden Son by Pierce Brown (fiction)

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Rising-The-Trilogy-Book-ebook/dp/B...

"So You've Been Publicly Shamed", by Jon Ronson, and "The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction", by Pat Shipman, are my two best reads this year (that were published in 2015). The first is a great analysis of the phenomenon (usually Twitter-based) of shame-storms, and the second is about the far, far older phenomenon of one invasive species driving a closely related one to extinction. Both very well done.

Two books by a French author called Jacques Benoist-Méchin. They work as a pair and they tell the stories of Kemal Atatürk (the founder of modern Turkey) and Ibn Saud (the founder of modern Saudi Arabia). I've found the perspective it brought to the modern geopolitics of the region invaluable.

PS: Benoist-Méchin was a French far-right journalist, writer and was openly sympathetic with Nazi Germany. Not that I condone that (I don't) but the books are excellent nonetheless.

The Shepherd's Crown by Terry Pratchett. His last work. Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson (I'd recommend this to families with young children) CSS Secrets: Better Solutions to Everyday Web Design Problems by Lea Verou. I'm not really a front in person so this was an interesting look into CSS3 Penetration Testing: A Hands-On Introduction to Hacking Georgia Weidman I'm starting next on Rework, as I've heard a lot about it.

1.- Sandman

2.- Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry

3.- The Advertised Mind: Groundbreaking Insights into How Our Brains Respond to Advertising

4.- The Hidden Persuaders - "A brisk, authoritative and frightening report on how manufacturers, fundraisers and politicians are attempting to turn the American mind into a kind of catatonic dough that will buy, give or vote at their command--The New Yorker

The Martian by Andy Weir (Fiction)

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Future-Science-Shape-Destiny-e...

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins

The Process of Education by Jerome Bruner

There's probably a small amount of passive income to be made from slurping all the book recommendation threads and creating a nice simple web page with a bunch of Amazon (.com and .co.uk) referral links.

You could mention how often the book has been mentioned on HN.

Continuos Delivery by Jez Humble and Dave Farley

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0321601912

Return of a King (William Dalrymple 2013) - A book about the Anglo-Afghan wars of the 19th century. To paraphrase Mark Twain: History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes

Being Mortal (Atul Gawande, 2014) - Powerful book about old age and confronting the mortality of our loved ones

The Dark Forest (Cixin Liu, 2014) - Wonderful science fiction from China

The Peripheral (William Gibson, 2015) - Bleak, near future science fiction.

The Water Knife (Paolo Bacigalupi, 2015) - More bleak, near future science fiction.

I've just binge-read all the Martin Cruz Smith Arkady Renko novels - Gorky Park etc. Really well written, great plots and very droll in places.

Tales of a Dying Earth by Jack Vance

That was a very good book.

I hadn't even heard of Jack Vance until recently, but it seems like he's been an influence on many modern authors.

Wool by Hugh Howey (fiction)

Superintelligence - Nick Bostrom

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I have 3 x Audible credits. Can anyone recommend anything that maybe better as an audio book?

Much enjoyed Sherry Turkle's Alone Together

Beloved by Toni Morisson. Such beautiful prose.

Made to Stick