The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series

Of the books I've read this year, the fiction ones that stand out to me would be: 1. The entire Sprawl Trilogy by Gibson, and the entire Bridge Trilogy, also by Gibson. The former I'd read before (multiple times) while the latter I had not read all the way through until now. Neuromancer I've read probably 7 or 8 times total in my life by now. I'm not as crazy about Gibson's later stuff, but the Sprawl and Bridge books are great. 2. The rest of the HHGTTG "trilogy" besides the first book. I'd read the first book a couple of years ago but never got around to reading the rest until this year. Note that when I say "the rest" I'm excluding that one book that was written by another author after Douglas Adams' passing. I may still read it one day, but I'm not in any hurry to do so. In terms of non-fiction: Real-World Reasoning: Toward Scalable, Uncertain Spatiotemporal, Contextual and Causal Inference by Ben Goertzel, Nil Geisweiller, and Lucio Coelho is the stand-out of the lot. How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker and How Can the Human Mind Occur in the Physical Universe? by John R Anderson are also worthy of a mention.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide series was formative for my absurdist sense of humour and outlook on life. What a strange, hilarious, sad, and beautiful world we find ourselves in.

Asimov's two big universes, found in the Robots series and the Foundation series, (which turned out to be the same when he revisited them in the 70's and 80's) are simply wonderful. By far my favorite sci-fi, and among the most enduring works in the genre. I read them both every two or three years, and sometimes grab one off the shelf when I just want something to read. The early Foundation is sort of a future history version of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" (I seem to recall that was intentional, actually). Asimov's autobiographies and the posthumous book of his correspondence are all fantastic and insightful. I learned a lot from them, and my admiration for the man increased even more upon reading them. Dune is also astoundingly good, though after the first three, the quality goes downhill (slowly, but surely). Definitely lots to think about.…