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

"How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie

The first one is Dune : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44767458-dune. It needs no introduction to HN, I think. Best Sci-fi book I have read so far.

It would hav been amazing had the entire book held to that pace, but I personally felt it got too bogged down at times in the more philosophical bits. Still a great book on balance, and deserves great credit for its exploration of the metaverse.

A protip for Snow Crash is that you can just skip ahead 5-10 pages whenever there's an info dump about Babylonian grammar or the history of herpes simplex.

I enjoyed Snowcrash

I enjoyed various sections of Cryptonomicon’s prose, it was just sooooo boring in the end.

Cryptonomicon was my reintroduction to Neal Stevenson as an adult and it got me hooked.

it seems to strengthen my belief that Sapiens is a valuable book.

The Three-Body Problem certainly takes a _while_ to get going. I gave up the first time reading it on my phone. But I kept hearing others sing its praises.

I am working my way through The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin and so far it's a page turner.

...then you didn't read it. Try again, it's a brilliant reflection of human nature and really digs into the dystopia / utopia thing.

I also read the dispossessed this year. So, so good. I was shocked at how nuanced the book’s politics were too.

Probably "The Goal".

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir By far the best sci-fi book I have read in a long time

The Hail Mary Project was a great read

The sequels are extraordinary, and perhaps among the best sci-fi ever written.

Blood Meridian

Highly recommend Left Hand of Darkness if you haven’t read it yet