The City and the Stars

"A Canticle For Leibowitz" "The Sparrow" "Lord of Light" "The Immortal" "Hyperion" "The Last Question" "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" "Stranger in a Strange Land" "The City and the Stars" "Childhood's End" "Anathem" "Eifelheim" "A Case of Conscience" "VALIS" trilogy "The Book of Strange New Things" "Behold The Man" "The God Engines" "Book of the New Sun" "The Parable of the Sower" "The Dosadi Experiment" "Grass" "Project Pope" "Calculating God" "Factoring Humanity" "Jesus on Mars" "Surface Detail

Not really contemporary but the non-cerebral book that got me reading for reading sake without a specific purpose or objective was a second hand paperback 'The City and the Stars' by Arthur C. Clarke. I remember only reading for a few minutes a day on the train, but it pretty much felt like watching a TV mini series where each train ride was a short episode. I think that book in particular was the turning point for me, from only reading technical books and having no interests outside non-fiction, to realising I was just looking through fiction books that I didn't actually enjoy.

Out of 32 books I read this year I recommend: Somehow tech/startup related: - Spelunky, Derek Yu: book about creating the game of Spelunky + notes on game design - Disrupted, Dan Lyons: book about "old" guy working in startup - Hatching Twitter, Nick Bilton: book about Twitter Non-startupy books: - A Wild Sheep Chase, Haruki Murakami: modern Japanese novel - The Hills of Chianti, Piero Antinori: story about wine company and notes on wine making, wine marketing and other stuff from one of the most notable wine company from Italy (700 years old, owned by one family whole history) - The City and the Stars, Arthur C. Clark: scifi classic